Yo dawg we heard you like time-lapse videos! Here's Jordan drawing the hookshot gun for Unstoppable. But this isn’t just any old hookshot, this one has blades that decapitate the fools who stand in your way, so it’s actually an offensive weapon instead of just being a “travel weapon” to cross chasms, spike pits, etc. For the default state of the gun we’ll probably have those blades retracted, then have them pop out when you pull the trigger (because that’s cool).
Here’s my hookshot for the original version of Unstoppable (shown at 0:23 of the trailer):
And here’s Egoraptor’s hookshot:
See, when we originally decided to add the blades, it was sort of a last minute addition before we launched that trailer. It was just like, “hey what if we put blades on this...yeah that’d be cool.” So a year goes by and I’m writing the art asset document for Ego and I totally forgot about the blades. I just wrote down “hookshot” and that it needed a pull animation (shown below). We’re big Zelda fans so he knew we would like that hookshot model. But then later I was like oh yeah, that’s supposed to have blades...
Fast forward to now, we decide to scratch his version because shoehorning the blades into it wouldn’t be ideal, and also it wouldn't really work with the pistol running animation. So I drew up a placeholder version real quick to test out the blades in-game:
Having the blades serrated like that made them look dull, they looked more like wings, but that’s probably because I’m not a very good artist.
So we put that in Jordan’s document, along with links to Hellboy’s gun for reference (just to make sure he gets it that this is supposed to be a big fat handheld weapon). And so here we are with the final version:
Sweet, right? That rope spindle was a great idea by Jordan.
Oh, and we want to name it something more unique than “hookshot.” Anybody have a suggestion?
There is no ergonomic design to the handle at all. It doesn't look like a handle that a person could hold very easily.
It doesn't matter much though because the player will never see the handle due to the top-down view of the game.
It looks really cool though.
So i'm curious what you're using to code this. I'm assuming C#/XNA for the windows vesion, then maybe C++ with SDL/OpenGL for the mac version? Am I close?
We probably won't use XNA for the Windows version since we'd have to get a new networking library for it, plus it would have higher system requirements. We want the PC/Mac versions to be done in the same language, but we haven't decided on that yet.
Why use C#XNA for windows?.. To the best of my knowledge you can use the SDL/OpenGL combination everywhere (win,lnx and mac). In fact if you are careful enough to use only the OpenGLES calls during rendering you might even be able to port onto the mobile devices pretty easily.
I said C#/XNA because this game has Xbox360 for platforms... So if you're going to use XNA for the 360, why not just use for the windows version as well?