Help me figure out my grappling beam mechanics

I’m working on a Doom Metroidvania and one of the games central mechanics is going to be a grappling beam.

The beam will have 4 pickups.

The first pickup will allow the player to shoot items such as crates and barrels. If the item is heavier than the player, the player will shoot towards it. If the object is lighter, it will fly towards the player. Once near the player it will work like the gravity gun from Half-Life 2 and allow it to be used as a shield or thrown as a projectile. If the object takes enough damage it will be destroyed.

The second power up will allow the player to use it on enemies. Again, you will fly at them. Lighter enemies will fly towards you and may be used as a shield or thrown to damage enemies you hit and the enemy you throw. In addition, attacking while flying towards an enemy will increase damage done to it (especially melee attacks).

The third pickup will allow you to attach to almost any surface and be used to move about most of the map.

Lastly the fourth pickup will double the range and severely reduce the cooldown, allowing people to zip through the game.

So here are some of my questions:

  1. How do I make it not over powered? Throwing objects and enemies seems like it opens up the possibility of being able to spam attacks while keeping a body shield. I suppose I can make a recharge time. But it seems like the body shield might be too powerful.

  2. I’m worried that once the fourth pickup is acquired that it will make the game too easy.

  3. I’m worried that with the first three pickups the player will have a lot of unintended misses that create more problems than they solve. Like trying to grab a small enemy, but miss and hit the floor, causing the player to go exactly where they don’t want to.

What suggestions do you have to improve the system as I’ve described it?

Perhaps you can distinguish between pulling the target towards you, and pulling yourself towards the target. For example by using the directional input: grapple + push away on the d-pad attempts to pull the target towards you, but grapple + push towards the target attempts to pull you towards the target.

That allows the player to try things that don’t work, like pulling the ground/wall towards themselves, in which case the grapple would just unstick and come back. And as such, might solve problem 3.

I’ve tinkered with that concept, including a possible lock in place function so you can use things as platforms, but ultimately decided it would open up too much possible jankiness and sequence breaking, as well as over complicate the experience.

I want my ability buttons to be multi-purposed, but I don’t want the player to have to fidget with the controls to get a desired outcome.

However I did want to include a grapple shove feature that allows you to push items without grabbing them first, and I DID just scrap the sprint feature on R3.

I may test that idea.

Sounds fun.

Re. (1) might this would be addressable in tuning? e.g. amount of damage ‘shield’ takes, duration to hold, cool-down, hold-time-to-activate (e.g. hold longer to initiate pick-up of ‘better’ subject).

Re. (2) isn’t the point of the increasing abilities that they’re balanced by a commensurate increase in danger?

Re. (3) I assume you’ve tinkered with a priority ordering thing? (e.g. massively prioritise enemies over environment etc)

p.s. your website isn’t being found in DNS and your GoFundMe seems to be closed. Once I post I fully expect to see all by .sig junk is waaay out of date too :wink:

Lol, that’s for a long abandoned project. Thanks for looking at it though. I really need to edit my profile.

Make some enemies/enemy types strong and overpowered. Where if they get caught by the players grapple beam, they can break away from it, or engage in a mini tug of war action, with the player character.

I think that’s only going to muddy the experience.

The player is already needing to juggle enemy priority, movement, and weapon management.

Have an enemy type that disrupts grappling sounds very flow breaking, like marauders in Doom.