Up until now, of all I’ve done in my twenty-something year career, I was most proud of inventing the dynamic, physical swinging system in Spider-Man 2 . . . loved even by Zero Punctuation and NerdCubed! But now I have something new to be proud of: Energy Hook, a new game about swinging through the air, is finally done.Energy Hook is a game not only about swinging from rooftop to rooftop (not to mention crane to crane and floating island in the clouds to floating island in the clouds) but also a game about style and stunts. Chain graceful swings, run on walls, loop-the-loops, and strike midair poses to earn big multipliers and huge scores–or just to have fun. Energy Hook is made mostly by me, a one-man band, with some support from a few artists (in particular, Keegan O’Rourke and Irene Nelson) and an audio guy (Brian Luzietti), so it is a coherent vision that focuses on its visceral core gameplay with no extra fluff like combat or cut scenes.I’ve released the bulk of the Energy Hook source code and Unity project as a Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution license. Want to see how it works under the hood? Download the project here!

What the press said:

‘You’d have to be dead to the core to not be at least interested in giving that a go.’ – John Walker; Rock, Paper, Shotgun

‘Spider-Man 2 was one of my favorite games of the last generation, and the video on the Kickstarter looks amazingly fun. I’m not saying you should give him money, but I really think you should give him some money.’ – Ben Kuchera; Penny-Arcade

‘Bugger. There goes all my money.’ – Daniel Hardcastle; NerdCubed

‘I’d play that game for sure!’ – Tim Schafer; President of Double Fine

What players said:

‘It’s super satisfying to nail successive swings.’ – Chris Jurney, Supergiant Games

‘The mechanics work. Beautifully. It’s all the exhilaration I thought it would be … Keyboard-mouse is beautiful. Tight, responsive, correct default controls.’ – Vartul Srivastava

‘I enjoyed the game enough to hunt down every virtual geocache in the final level, and to keep playing for quite some time beyond that.’ – Alec Lofquist

‘Even if it is PreAlpha, it is still fun enough to play for several hours … I am really looking forward to seeing where you are going with the game!’ – H1bbe