You’re definitely right about the pause being impractical for a coop situation. There was a gameboy game called Ninja Five-0. It had a grapple thing too, but I found it a little easier to manage because everytime you jumped in the game, you would pause at the apex of your jump. The pause definitely helped make it easier to aim the grapple.

As for the pause, that’s a tough one. Initially both the potion and hook paused the game, but the problem is that pausing while aiming is a no-go in cooperative play situations, and I intend to have cooperative play support. I’ve yet to come up with a satisfactory solution for this particular design problem. One potential solution is some sort of auto-aim, but I’ve yet to try it.

The point about bosses constantly swatting you away is a good one – one of the things I’m striving to do with this game is recreate the feeling provided by boss fights like Eligor in Order of Ecclesia, where the boss itself is part of the combat environment and as such, you can utilize all the abilities you normally use to traverse the environment around you, instead of just spamming attacks and dodging projectiles.

Also, is the pause that happens when you use the grapple a permanent game feature, or is that something you’re keeping in for game testing purposes. I kinda like it since a lot of grapple systems are pretty frustrating because of the difficulty of properly aiming them.

Thanks for the consistent updates. Really enjoying your blog. A lot of this stuff like the collidable enemies are things I want to put in my game. I always thought it was a shame how Castlevania has all these huge bosses, but you can never truly interact and crawl over them because CV just swats you away.