Buttonless

Plaorm: iPhone/iPod Touch

Price: $2.99

Developer: Rocketcat Games

Released: October 16, 2009

Hook Champ

What Is It?

Hook Champ is the rst in a trilogy of titles from Rocketcat Games, all of which revolve

around the concept of using a grappling hook to navigate a two-dimensional, side-scroll-

ing environment. In Hook Champ you’ll have to grapple and swing your way through a

number a dungeons using your hook, which is unleashed by a simple tap on the upper

area of the screen.

Hook Champ is all about momentum. You’ll want to time your jumps so that you get

as much forward momentum as pos-

sible from your swings, and then use

equally good judgment to decide

where to place your next hook. As

you progress you’ll unlock improve-

ments for all of your equipment

including rocket boots (useful for

launching yourself out of deadly sit-

uations), beer grappling hooks, and

even guns that can be used to blast

through certain types of obstacles.

121Hook Champ

Improving your completion times for individual levels is a big part of the strategyfaster

times allow you to get more coins, which in turn allows you to improve your equipment,

which completes the loop by helping to improve your completion times.

Hook Champ benets a lot from its humor, which reveals itself in the lile bits of dia-

logue at the beginning of each level. e banter between characters and goofy unlockable

costumes give the game a lighthearted vibe that feels like an extra-sarcastic Indiana Jones

adventure, which is helpful in infusing a bit of a unique avor into an otherwise tradition-

al-looking pixel-art game.

Sometimes levels in Hook Champ kill you with obstacles that you couldn’t have fore-

seen, but that’s why the game has been designed to accomodate multiple playthroughs

to help you progress. In some ways its high-diculty level feels like an aempt to mask

its short length, but most players will appreciate the challenge and get a solid amount of

replay value out of the levels.

Behind the Game

Kepa Auwae was fed up with mainstream gaming. He saw a developing trend in which

mainstream games were geing steadily less innovative: everything was becoming more

focused on “grinding” against enemies in repetitive bales, yet budgets continued to soar.

“We saw a future where eventually all games would be designed to basically be just joy-

less, part-time jobs,” says Auwae. “Jobs that oer 15-dollar micropayments that let you

skip content so you can get right to the achievements.”

Despite having never developed a game before, Auwae got together with two friends

he had met while on an IRC chat channel (Jeremy Orlando, a programmer, and Bran-

don Rhodes, the team’s artist) and formed Rocketcat Games, a team made up of people

who lived in three dierent places (Washington, Arizona, and Japan), and who all had

full-time jobs to worry about. It wasn’t the strongest start, but the team had raw, cynical

determination on their side.

Platformers constitute a genre that requires incredibly precise controls: players need

to be able to make tiny changes in their movements at any given moment, so access to

physical buons is vital to these games’ control schemes. at is obviously something the

iPhone is unable to provide. Kepa Auwae of Rocketcat Games recognized this, and set

about thinking of alternate ways to handle jumping in a platformer.

Auwae and his team experimented with a number of dierent options like ight,

gravity-ipping, and explosive propulsion, but seled on a grappling hook for the supe-

rior control experience it oered. “Instead of jumping and then having to control your

horizontal movement with arrow buons and your second hand, we went for a hold-to-

launch, release-to-let-go hook-mechanic,” says Auwae. “is moved the ‘jump’ controls

from tactile buons to a mixture of visual cues and rhythm.”