Got the scores and title screen roughed in. Things will probably slow down a bit now but hopefully I've built up a bit of momentum...

Based on playing with the fixed grapple points, I've made it harder to miss and fall. Also, the game always picks the nearest grapple point to where the robot is - it had been using the touch position. This makes it much simpler to just swipe and tap anywhere on the screen which should work better with different display sizes.

Grapple points are in! They are currently static positions - I have big plans for moving grapple points, breakable ones etc, but I thought I better take it one step at a time.

What adding these has revealed is that the game could easily get too difficult. At the moment, if you try to grab a grapple point that is out of reach, you fall. This was fine when I was just grappling to any position you touch on the screen, but becomes annoyingly tough when you have fixed points.

I want the game to be accessible and fun, so I'll need to remix the ingredients to get the balance right.

The next thing I need to decide is what the goal is...

Level Manager

Finally got some time to work on this. I've added the level manager, so now I can have huge sprawling levels without killing the CPU with trying to render loads of off-screen sprites. I ended up implementing it as a set of configurable culling grids that sit at a given depth in the world. Because the game is largely 2D, I can split the scene into discrete slices and add a culling grid for that slice.
Each cell in the grid holds a list of sprites that cover that cell. I then just find which grid cells are visible using a sort of simplified frustum cull - as far as OpenGL is concerned the game is 3D.

I also created a simple level setup tool that I can use to quickly layout a level. This is on the PC and will not be part of the final game.

Next step is to add the actual elements you can grapple...