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...

It's been a while since I updated this. Good news is I finally got a decent Android device - a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2.0. I wanted something fairly mid-spec and this seemed like a good choice.

The GPU is actually pretty good - I can throw around some big sprites before it starts to slow down.

I've re-written everything to use OpenGL ES 2.0 and tidied up all the code for the physics. The swinging mechanic works great with the touch screen. It feels exactly how I'd hoped it would!

Next step is to implement the level manager, I've realized that the swinging needs a BIG play area to get the most out of it, so I need a good way of managing the parallax backgrounds and culling anything that is not on screen.

Hopefully, next update will be a bit sooner...

This is a rough idea of what I have in mind for the backdrops.

Quick update - I got the telescopic arms working how I want them - they shoot out like grappling hooks and retract like the cable on a vacuum cleaner which works really well and adds some character just through the way the physics acts on them.

I've been trying to get the visual style of the game more clearly defined. I was thinking a collage type approach would work. The only problem with this is that collage tends to be made of paper and I need to have a sense of weight to the main character, so what I'm thinking now is a combination of paper collage for the farther away backgrounds and then some more metallic imagery for foreground elements and characters. I might be over thinking it and this will probably all change later.

I made a title screen to try out the style. I'm also toying with the idea of changing Robots to Robot as I don't think the game will be multi-player.