I love those characters, let's add them already! Kepa, how about being able to customize our hooks and rope? I would love to be able to purchase some freedom so I don't have to have a purple rope now for the dude! Lovin' the game..
Purple's a manly color. We wanted to put in color changing or even palette swapping early on in the project, but we just never got around to it. Doing it at this point would be a little clumsy, but it's a mistake we won't make in our next game. Other stuff: Those recently posted characters were mockups, just for fun. The next character we do will be the final DLC, but we might add the shopkeep in a future update as a free character. From where we're standing now, it's probably a better idea to add new levels than new characters, though. I didn't want to mess with the scoreboards to make a second one for Gunny. It was a design decision not to. I thought it would be needlessly artificial. Gunny does make a lot of appearances in the scoreboard, but I'm pleased that it's not total domination by any one character. If we do anything about character balance in the future, it will be to probably give Jake another slight buff in some manner. Ideally, I'd like to see a 50%/50% distribution of Jake and Gunny in the scoreboards. A 10% or so advantage to one of the two characters would be acceptable. However, that's just ideally. With the character quick swap and the availability of both characters to everyone, I'm pretty easygoing about this. We would change something if Hookbot was higher in the boards, because he's not available to everyone. Update 3 should have a simple time and distance indicator, but we can make it fancier if it's requested. A ghost transparency slider is a good idea, I'll see if we can cram that in to update 3. If not, probably update 4.
When you say simple time, are you talking about the absolute running time of the level? That would be nice, but if you guys could do something of the form: "absolute running time / split time" where the split time could be as simple as a +/- indication of how you are running the level at specific intervals (as I had mentioned in a previous post). Something like that would be great, because I could check the split, at say the 50% level complete mark, and if it says that I'm +XXX that I know my run won't have a chance to result in a high score, so I can restart instead of running through the rest of the level.
Some thoughts for you regarding updates- It's better to do more updates with less stuff in them than it is to do fewer updates with more stuff in them. The higher frequency of updates will keep the buzz about you alive by bringing your name up more frequently in various app sites. It will also give more chances to those sites that haven't discovered hook champ to jump on a newsbreak and get in on the reporting. If you had released the rat levels first, gunny next and then the skull levels in three separate updates, say a couple of weeks apart or less, the reaction would have been more positive in sum. There's a "diminishing returns" curve when giving extra stuff to people- people will not distinguish much between a single update that has 12 rather than 8 levels, but if you release 4, 4, 4, you are keeping people on the edge, so to speak. As much as I love the game and would like to see more updates, I think the new features you keep coming up with could serve a new full release (not update) much better- if you had a new game "HC-2", and introduced the new features there, it would receive better reviews than "it's just HC with more levels and nothing else..." That would be a better use of your time and would get you another revenue stream. I also think a "sure thing" release like HC episode 2 before a new game could get you set up better for the new adventure. There'd be more recognition from the various web sites that push games. There's no reason not to turn HC into a cash cow (pizza roll cow) since you have a good platform with which you can push out new content without having to impress everyone all over again.
Yeah, we've figured this out. A little late. Update 3 is going to be another big one, already. We can switch to a lighter update schedule after that. Future updates will have hats and some levels, but no more huge, completely from scratch major features. The funny thing is that new hats and levels are vastly preferred, anyway. They're also way, way easier to do. It's kind of an eye opener that people would prefer tiny or no updates, in exchange for a faster sequel. It's actually way easier for us to do just that. And more profitable. If we didn't even do updates, we could probably abandon the whole controversial DLC thing, too. I personally like updates, however. They're like tiny Christmases. Hatsmasses? Hatsgivings. An announcement on the next game really soon. We've actually been working on it a little bit, in secret.
We're thinking of just doing a GREEN TIME = You're beating your old time, RED TIME = You're losing by 2 seconds, WHITE TIME = You're neck and neck but slightly behind. Something like that.
Any tips for beating the second levels of the skull idol and rat idol? And what levels are best for making money
Both Skull and Rat Bronze are pretty easy if you don't mind missing out on loot. I think there's only one mandatory rocketjump use in Skull, so that leaves you with 4 more to help with stumbling points if you're playing as Jake. Rat Bronze isn't too hard if you ignore all loot; it's trying to grab coins that kills you. I personally like Silver Skull for making money.
That would work. A nice and quick indicator. You could even take it a step further and make the red and white times configurable.
You could also do a vertical line going from the top of the screen to the bottom showing the position of the ghost. This would be a good visual indicator of where you are in relation to the ghost, it would be immediately visible (no need to look away to see a mark somewhere else) and would not interfere with the swinging. I also turned off the ghost right away because it threw me off.
Zoo, nice job on Gold Bull! I just saw your score, and that will be a tough one to beat. EDIT: Zoo, sorry.
Go with Hatsgivings, by the way. And I like the big updates. More suspense building up to the release, without having to buy a whole new game. Though I guess a whole new game would build even more excitement. And it's true that a new game is less controversial than DLC (though I'm not an expert, just what I've observed and believe myself), as long as you aren't coming out with too many new sequels. However, it's also really nice to see developers updating their games; that's something I really like about the iPhone. Anyways, I think you are doing a great job. It's really nice to see the time you put into our feedback and you seem extremely knowledgeable anyways. I'm gonna go buy Hookbot now even though I haven't beat everything yet and I never buy DLC. Its truly worth it just to support you and your effort. Can't wait for the next game!
This seems like it would work better than a time overlay, actually. For a variety of reasons. Less ugly (I'm not a big fan of info overlays if I can avoid it), more effective (less distracting), less complex to make on our parts.
Thanks. Messages like this (and positive iTunes reviews) actually matter a lot to us. Especially the iTunes reviews, because they're a little inconvenient to write. We're going to try to take a balanced path with new games in general. We won't do a new game without some sort of interesting new gameplay feature. I was completely surprised that people like sequels but "updates-supported-by-DLC" is so controversial. It still seems a little backwards to me, but I think I can adjust to this. We have some very interesting ideas for updates for our next game. These ideas should let us make very beefy pure-content updates with very little effort in exchange. That way, we could do a steady stream of smaller updates, focusing mostly on content addition rather than major features. Hook Champ was our first game as amateur developers. Our next game should be pretty amazing, now that we've some learned some important lessons. We'll also have somewhat of a budget this time, due to retail sales of Hook Champ and DLC purchases (which actually ended up helping a ton, though we're still going to change how we handle it).
Hi Kepa! First of all. I love Hook Champ!! Thank you very much for this great game and the great update. It was a no-brainer-instant-buy for me as I saw that Hookbot was available for 99c! For me it was more like supporting your work and effort as a normal DLC! I am not sure if this idea was mentioned before but I would like to have some kind of a replay function of the leading openfeint players. Then I could see where I am to slow or where I missed some loot.
Yeah finally i got the golden skull using hookbot. Umm btw can anyone give me a list of hats and how to unlock them. And i have got 1st on bronze wimpy local scores but there is no pirate hat in the shop why? Any help will be apreciated.
woo! took me long enough but finally king of swing'd. as far as what level, you'll have to guess (but i'm new to the global boards.) absolutely love this game.
Damn, nice job beating that score. I was pretty pleased with it, even though I still didn't get through that corridor at the end perfectly. We must be getting close to perfect with some of these Bull Runs though. I've placed a few lame scores on a few boards as I'm trying to regain all the coins/equipment I lost when I had to wipe my iPhone clean. I've noticed you are/were first on most of the leaderboards, pretty impressive. It's enough for me to have 10 or so levels memorized, let alone the majority of them. Regarding the ghost indicator thing, would it be possible to have such a thing for the #1 global time, rather than your #1 ghost time? We really should start a separate thread with suggestions and requests for future updates.
I have a couple stupid questions about the game: 1. How many coins are gems worth? 2. Does killing bats earn you more points? 3. I managed to earn a crown last night D) but even though it's showing me as #1 on the global leaderboard, I'm only number 21 on that particular idol in OpenFeint. How does that work? 4. The only achievement I have left is 20 coins in 10 seconds, can I have a hint at least for what idol has a stage where this is possible???
