Hookscrap — Jack Murray

Hookscrap
Surprise Studios

May 2022 - April 2023
Unity 2D - (PC)

Hookscrap is a 2D space shootem-up roguelike with a twist: your only weapon is a harpoon! Players must scrap ships for parts to travel through the galaxy, chasing down the Space Police Force flagship.

Roles & Responsibilities

Tech Designer

Responsible for prototyping mechanics, items, and enemies.
Used crosstables to design difficulty curve against player progression.
Iterated movement and harpoon mechanics to create fast paced physics based combat.
Created and maintained documentation throughout the project.

Creative Director

Led team of six from pre-production to launch on Steam.
Ensured other member’s work accurately represented the project’s vision.

Pixel Artist

Drew, animated and implemented over 150 pixel art assets.
Used Shuriken, Spritemancer and Aseprite to develop unique exciting VFX

By destroying ships, the player can collect scrap to craft upgrades for their ship

Hookscrap GDD

Steam Page

Designing Hookscrap’s Harpoon

My design process always begins with constraints. I identify any limits such as control scheme, narrative, development time, and team skill. Our team had a four month prototype period so keeping our scope small was a priority. After establishing constraints, determining the game goal is always my next step. I particularly focus on player emotions and use that as a guiding focus for my mechanics.

Hookscrap’s Game Goal

“Facilitate explosive, fast-paced, physics-based action gameplay with deep long-term strategy and replayability as the player battles against the campy Space Police Force.”

After making the game goal I began prototyping to find the fun within my constraints. In this case the player’s main mechanic began as a humble tractorbeam.

Physics Based Harpoon

The next iteration introduced a physics based harpoon. It disabled enemies and allowed you to adjust the length of the cable using the scroll wheel. The hooked object could be released if the player released mouse one. This allowed the player to either pull objects in or start to swing them around, potentially releasing the object flinging it through space.

This hook was a great step in the right direction but wasn’t quite right yet.

Using objects as a ranged weapon was too difficult. Aiming towards specific targets was inconsistent at best, impossible at worst.
Swinging objects was inconsistent and took too long for the player to wind up into an effective spin.
Adjusting the length of the harpoon with scroll-wheel was awkward, especially when just trying to pull an object all the way in to scrap.

Tractorbeamscrap

We needed a way for the player to scrap ships for parts that didn’t involve crashing into them. The tractor beam served this purpose by giving the player the ability to catch lone ships and slowly pull them in to be scrapped.

The beam had a few glaring issues almost immediately:

The beam was too simple. It offered little player mastery failing the game goal of replayability.
No interactivity with the environment. You can’t have physics based gameplay with no beneficial way to interact with asteroids and other ships.

Launching Harpoon

Our last iteration changed significantly and nailed the game goals.

The harpoon now automatically retracts allowing the player to focus on combat and movement.
You can launch objects from the hook using mouse 2 allowing the player to have a consistent means of targeting ships from range.
The cable no longer acted as a rope through Unity’s physics system. Instead, we faked the weight of the cable to make it more consistent. Now the player could be sure of how long it would take to start spinning and object around themselves.
With some player feedback from sound and visual effects we facilitated the explosive gameplay we set out to make.