Game is still alive and here's a more useful update:
The hookshotWeirdly enough, the idea for the hookshot only came to me once I thought about the enemies being fish and the main character being a fisherman. Implementing it was quite easy, took me one afternoon thanks to Unreal's CableComponent plugin. Polishing it... that's another story.
Everyone seems to be comparing it to Overwatch's Roadhog since you can pull enemies with it, but I was thinking more of Zelda when I did this. As in Zelda it can be used to pull enemies, items and to move through the world.
My first idea, was obviously the most complicated one. Being able to swing around and do weird tricks with it even, but I soon learned that game physics usually don't always work as you think they would. Swinging mechanics is something that I gave up on very early. The hook latches on pretty much everything so there's really no reason to swing the cable if you can reach places by just pointing at it.
PHYSICS!!
Still, I wanted some freedom and the player was able to throw the hook and choose when to pull/be pulled by it by pressing the button again. There is a big problem with this approach though: there's a lot of things that the player can do in the mean time between throwing the hook and being pulled by it. For instance: jump, move around, shoot at enemies, getting shot, die, fall into a hole... and probably many things that I didn't think of but I'm sure players will.
One thing I tried to address was moving around and having the cable colliding with stuff. I got it working and I'm very proud of it but I can't find many gameplay uses for this other than puzzles. And while I want the game to have some simple puzzles, this is a game about shooting things so that's what I'm focusing. Soon I realized why most games out there don't let you do anything between throwing your hookshot and getting pulled by it.
Pretty cool but not very useful
So, now the hook works just like in Zelda/Overwatch: you point to a place and get pulled/pulls. With one difference: you can hook almost anything.
In Zelda games, you can only use your hookshot (or clawshot) on specific targets, I considered doing that at the begining but I want the player to use the hookshot in situations other than just "Ok, I need the hook to reach that place so I'm gonna use it now", which is also why it's showing up on the screen all the time. You can still hide it if you want cause... why not?
The fact that you can hook almost anything should give me enough trouble already. Won't be easy making levels that can't be easily broken without using invisible walls. Now, I can't promisse that I won't be using invisible walls, but I'll avoid them as much as I can.
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