Hey there; had some issues with the Rift where Rift owners had to play in VR whether they wanted to or not. They can now play in regular mode or VR mode as they see fit. (There might be a "Your headset isn't supported" message; ignore it.) And the separation of church and state means that the Rift runs with forward rendering (which allows antialiasing) whereas it runs in deferred rendering for everyone else (which uses fxaa instead) ... Bottom line, some performance improvement when you're not using a Rift. Enjoy!

Hey there; had some issues with the Rift where Rift owners had to play in VR whether they wanted to or not. They can now play in regular mode or VR mode as they see fit. (There might be a "Your headset isn't supported" message; ignore it.) And the separation of church and state means that the Rift runs with forward rendering (which allows antialiasing) whereas it runs in deferred rendering for everyone else (which uses fxaa instead) ... Bottom line, some performance improvement when you're not using a Rift. Enjoy!

Yes, it's here! It's done! I am super-proud to have finally finished this thing. But are these things ever *really* done? In particular, already had this bug report: unlike the DK2, the Rift CV1 does not have a power button. Which means when Energy Hook boots up, it detects your Rift, and plays in that mode whether you want it to or not. (Meanwhile, you might be wondering while all you're seeing is black on your display.) Right now, the only way to play *without* VR is to unplug your Rift. I'm looking into a solution and hope to have one to you soon.

Yes, it's here! It's done! I am super-proud to have finally finished this thing. But are these things ever *really* done? In particular, already had this bug report: unlike the DK2, the Rift CV1 does not have a power button. Which means when Energy Hook boots up, it detects your Rift, and plays in that mode whether you want it to or not. (Meanwhile, you might be wondering while all you're seeing is black on your display.) Right now, the only way to play *without* VR is to unplug your Rift. I'm looking into a solution and hope to have one to you soon.

For all of you who try to stay away from the Early Access titles, waiting for the game to be actually done, you can finally purchase that wishlist item you've been waiting for. Energy Hook is moving out of Early Access on July 5th. (There will be a launch sale, of course!) I am super-proud of Energy Hook; it's the best game I've worked on (and I include Spider-Man 2 and Die By The Sword in that list!) - a coherent vision that focuses on its visceral core gameplay with no extra fluff like combat or cut scenes. It is my magnum opus. I can't believe I've been working on this game since 2012. It's been a long and winding road, launching my unorthodox kickstarter, releasing early builds to my kickstarter backers, putting the game in early access, supporting four platforms, VR, and the Steam controller. And it's finally done. Just six days before you can have the final build on your machine. Thanks to all of you who have been following the game over the years, for your feedback and patience. You rock! -Jamie

For all of you who try to stay away from the Early Access titles, waiting for the game to be actually done, you can finally purchase that wishlist item you've been waiting for. Energy Hook is moving out of Early Access on July 5th. (There will be a launch sale, of course!) I am super-proud of Energy Hook; it's the best game I've worked on (and I include Spider-Man 2 and Die By The Sword in that list!) - a coherent vision that focuses on its visceral core gameplay with no extra fluff like combat or cut scenes. It is my magnum opus. I can't believe I've been working on this game since 2012. It's been a long and winding road, launching my unorthodox kickstarter, releasing early builds to my kickstarter backers, putting the game in early access, supporting four platforms, VR, and the Steam controller. And it's finally done. Just six days before you can have the final build on your machine. Thanks to all of you who have been following the game over the years, for your feedback and patience. You rock! -Jamie

Okay! After some testing and fixing a handful of bugs, I think "Solstice" is ready for prime time. It is on the default branch for everyone to enjoy. Enjoy, and happy holidays! And for those of you who care what I fixed:

• Game freezes when holding the swing button down when you bailed doing a trick. (And, in theory, all the other assertion related freezes.)
• The last trick in a trick attack wasn't cashing in.
• Gave the wrong message when cancelling a trick attack.
• Sometimes would report a negative number of seconds when winning a race. (!!)
• After you fell to your doom during a race you'd restart on the activation disc and have to play it again.

Okay! After some testing and fixing a handful of bugs, I think "Solstice" is ready for prime time. It is on the default branch for everyone to enjoy. Enjoy, and happy holidays! And for those of you who care what I fixed:

• Game freezes when holding the swing button down when you bailed doing a trick. (And, in theory, all the other assertion related freezes.)
• The last trick in a trick attack wasn't cashing in.
• Gave the wrong message when cancelling a trick attack.
• Sometimes would report a negative number of seconds when winning a race. (!!)
• After you fell to your doom during a race you'd restart on the activation disc and have to play it again.

Happy winter solstice everybody! And how better to enjoy your pagan holiday, and suffer through the long dark, than to play the Content Complete build of Energy Hook!? Now on the 'comingsoon' branch. That's right! Content compete! That means all the levels, challenges, and big systems are in there. The style system overhaul is done. Misty City is fixed and available. You can easily replay your last challenge. It's subtle, but I got some IK going on her arms instead of the canned animations. Now when she jumps up and swings her arms don't look wrong. (And she holds on to that hook on the energy hook with her left hand. So that's what it's for.) What I really want to hear about now are exploits! Can you get lots of points for doing something lame? Let me know. Now, it's not quite feature complete, but the only big thing left to do is finish up the leaderboards in the front end, and get friends-list leaderboards going. And no promises but I'm going to try to get a control remapping thing in there. And then there's a handful of little things I'll try to get to. It'll be like sweeping up dead leaves. Here's a more comprehensive list of what I've done in the past month:

• Added simplified satellite dish to New Atlantis
• Paced trick tutorials differently
• Better 'clean swing' detection
• Fixed exceptions
• Audio for style UI
• Made misty city available
• Show ranking as well as score in HUD leaderboards
• Put text on challenge portals to tell you what they are
• Fixed some tutorial message control display
• IK on arms
• Be more robust to missing database entries when unlocking backer rewards
• Respawn off disc when you eat it during a challenge
• "Cancel Challenge" and "Go To Last Challenge" in pause menu
• Animating trick UI
• Camera adjustments: less up-and-down bobbing.
• Shorter respawn times
• End of trick attack cashes in your last chain and displays your correct final score
• Adjusted scoring and detection for loop-the-loop
• Penalizes you for tricking on the same structure twice in a chain
• Balanced trick scores
• Lower gravity when doing poses
• Penalizes you for missing race hoops instead of making you go back
• Larger race hoops

Happy winter solstice everybody! And how better to enjoy your pagan holiday, and suffer through the long dark, than to play the Content Complete build of Energy Hook!? Now on the 'comingsoon' branch. That's right! Content compete! That means all the levels, challenges, and big systems are in there. The style system overhaul is done. Misty City is fixed and available. You can easily replay your last challenge. It's subtle, but I got some IK going on her arms instead of the canned animations. Now when she jumps up and swings her arms don't look wrong. (And she holds on to that hook on the energy hook with her left hand. So that's what it's for.) What I really want to hear about now are exploits! Can you get lots of points for doing something lame? Let me know. Now, it's not quite feature complete, but the only big thing left to do is finish up the leaderboards in the front end, and get friends-list leaderboards going. And no promises but I'm going to try to get a control remapping thing in there. And then there's a handful of little things I'll try to get to. It'll be like sweeping up dead leaves. Here's a more comprehensive list of what I've done in the past month:

• Added simplified satellite dish to New Atlantis
• Paced trick tutorials differently
• Better 'clean swing' detection
• Fixed exceptions
• Audio for style UI
• Made misty city available
• Show ranking as well as score in HUD leaderboards
• Put text on challenge portals to tell you what they are
• Fixed some tutorial message control display
• IK on arms
• Be more robust to missing database entries when unlocking backer rewards
• Respawn off disc when you eat it during a challenge
• "Cancel Challenge" and "Go To Last Challenge" in pause menu
• Animating trick UI
• Camera adjustments: less up-and-down bobbing.
• Shorter respawn times
• End of trick attack cashes in your last chain and displays your correct final score
• Adjusted scoring and detection for loop-the-loop
• Penalizes you for tricking on the same structure twice in a chain
• Balanced trick scores
• Lower gravity when doing poses
• Penalizes you for missing race hoops instead of making you go back
• Larger race hoops

It's a funny coincidence that revision 720 is also the revision where I got in some better names for doing tricks. So do a "720 leg grab double backflip" to celebrate! There are some changes in how score is calculated that go along with that. But the main reason I'm putting this up is to fix some of the glaring bugs that @PurkisM reported - I fixed the borked wallrun challenge on Future Island, and made it so you couldn't skate along the ground and walls in your swan pose. I also changed the in-game leaderboards to show your position instead of the top. Because that's what you care about the most, yeah?

It's a funny coincidence that revision 720 is also the revision where I got in some better names for doing tricks. So do a "720 leg grab double backflip" to celebrate! There are some changes in how score is calculated that go along with that. But the main reason I'm putting this up is to fix some of the glaring bugs that @PurkisM reported - I fixed the borked wallrun challenge on Future Island, and made it so you couldn't skate along the ground and walls in your swan pose. I also changed the in-game leaderboards to show your position instead of the top. Because that's what you care about the most, yeah?

Being kind of scattered and fighting on multiple fronts lately. I've made some changes that dramatically improve the experience for newbies and am partway through my overhaul of the style system... which brought with it some UI polish as well. The things that might surprise you the most are the gamepad buttons are moved around: wall-running is on the right shoulder button, and the aerial poses are on X,Y, and B now. You can also click the right stick/steam controller track pad to jump. This lets you play with your right thumb controlling the camera most of the time, and you only need to let go to do poses. Another surprise: it automatically fires your jump jets after a swing. This is like the 'standard mode' of Spider-Man 2 - great for newbies and gaining altitude, not so good for speed down a straightaway - it defaults to on, you can turn it off in the pause menu. I'm still collecting results from the movement survey - it's not too late to take it. It's not really version 666 but thanks to a problem with my automated build system that's what it's calling itself. This is only up for Windows & Linux - poor OSX has to wait... Without further ado, the obligatory bullet list!

• Instead of doing a little jump when you initiate a swing, you can swing from a standing position.
• Increased starting jump height
• Increased trick scoring
• Aerial poses instead of aerial tricks - hold them for more points
• Style points in your face
• More glowy translucent hud
• Antialias front end
• Auto-jump
• Fixed some issues with pause menu and front end with gamepad
• Can use the gamepad or mouse button to navigate past title screen
• Moved buttons around
• More forgiving about making you eat it when landing fast

Being kind of scattered and fighting on multiple fronts lately. I've made some changes that dramatically improve the experience for newbies and am partway through my overhaul of the style system... which brought with it some UI polish as well. The things that might surprise you the most are the gamepad buttons are moved around: wall-running is on the right shoulder button, and the aerial poses are on X,Y, and B now. You can also click the right stick/steam controller track pad to jump. This lets you play with your right thumb controlling the camera most of the time, and you only need to let go to do poses. Another surprise: it automatically fires your jump jets after a swing. This is like the 'standard mode' of Spider-Man 2 - great for newbies and gaining altitude, not so good for speed down a straightaway - it defaults to on, you can turn it off in the pause menu. I'm still collecting results from the movement survey - it's not too late to take it. It's not really version 666 but thanks to a problem with my automated build system that's what it's calling itself. This is only up for Windows & Linux - poor OSX has to wait... Without further ado, the obligatory bullet list!

• Instead of doing a little jump when you initiate a swing, you can swing from a standing position.
• Increased starting jump height
• Increased trick scoring
• Aerial poses instead of aerial tricks - hold them for more points
• Style points in your face
• More glowy translucent hud
• Antialias front end
• Auto-jump
• Fixed some issues with pause menu and front end with gamepad
• Can use the gamepad or mouse button to navigate past title screen
• Moved buttons around
• More forgiving about making you eat it when landing fast

Just got my hands on my Steam Controller a few days ago and after a little head banging managed to get it working to my satisfaction in game. It takes some getting used to, but I think it's the best way to play Energy Hook now - expressive analog movement on the left stick and rapid looking around on the right track pad. I've added left shoulder wall-running and track-pad-clicking jump jets so your thumb only has to leave the track-pad for tricks. It's important to remember that you should use Big Picture Mode when using your Steam Controller - otherwise it will go into mouse-and-keyboard emulation mode when playing and be rubbish. Also, you can adjust the responsiveness of the track pad with the Camera Sensitivity slider in the pause menu. Speaking of sliders, I added a field-of-view slider. On the one hand, this is important, because some people sit right next to their monitors and some people sit ten feet away, and the people sitting close need a wider FOV than the ones sitting far away for it to look right-ish. On the other hand, I worry that players will set the FOV as wide as possible because, "Hey! I can see more!" not realizing that makes the game look less cinematic/dramatic (and lowers framerate to boot). But I guess I'll just have to trust you! And here are a few other things that made it into this build:

• You can turn the follow cam off completely - this is nearly unplayable with a dual stick gamepad but with mouse or the Steam Controller can give you more control. That's in the pause menu.
• You may have noticed the new achievement icons! Achievements need a little tuning still but almost there!
• New music track by Brian Luzietti! - and now the music shuffles instead of playing the same song over and over on a given level.
• Game detects whether you're playing with gamepad or mouse+kb and tutorializes appropriately.
• There was too much friction on walls, sometimes sucking the life out of your jumps. I believe it's now as low as I can make it without writing my own physics engine.
• Larger more readable menu text.
• Motion blur tweaks.

Just got my hands on my Steam Controller a few days ago and after a little head banging managed to get it working to my satisfaction in game. It takes some getting used to, but I think it's the best way to play Energy Hook now - expressive analog movement on the left stick and rapid looking around on the right track pad. I've added left shoulder wall-running and track-pad-clicking jump jets so your thumb only has to leave the track-pad for tricks. It's important to remember that you should use Big Picture Mode when using your Steam Controller - otherwise it will go into mouse-and-keyboard emulation mode when playing and be rubbish. Also, you can adjust the responsiveness of the track pad with the Camera Sensitivity slider in the pause menu. Speaking of sliders, I added a field-of-view slider. On the one hand, this is important, because some people sit right next to their monitors and some people sit ten feet away, and the people sitting close need a wider FOV than the ones sitting far away for it to look right-ish. On the other hand, I worry that players will set the FOV as wide as possible because, "Hey! I can see more!" not realizing that makes the game look less cinematic/dramatic (and lowers framerate to boot). But I guess I'll just have to trust you! And here are a few other things that made it into this build:

• You can turn the follow cam off completely - this is nearly unplayable with a dual stick gamepad but with mouse or the Steam Controller can give you more control. That's in the pause menu.
• You may have noticed the new achievement icons! Achievements need a little tuning still but almost there!
• New music track by Brian Luzietti! - and now the music shuffles instead of playing the same song over and over on a given level.
• Game detects whether you're playing with gamepad or mouse+kb and tutorializes appropriately.
• There was too much friction on walls, sometimes sucking the life out of your jumps. I believe it's now as low as I can make it without writing my own physics engine.
• Larger more readable menu text.
• Motion blur tweaks.

Hey everyone - I am probably going to keep tweaking Energy Hook's movement parameters until the day before the game is officially released. Please help me make sure I'm not doing that in a vacuum by taking this survey. Thanks!

Hey everyone - I am probably going to keep tweaking Energy Hook's movement parameters until the day before the game is officially released. Please help me make sure I'm not doing that in a vacuum by taking this survey. Thanks!

The Run! Update is now available to everyone. Check it out!

The Run! Update is now available to everyone. Check it out!

To quote @vidgames_bible: "Holy crap this update did wonders... Framerate, performance, game looks better...The new build is awesome." Like I've said before, the way I see it, running on walls is to Energy Hook as grinding a rail is to Tony Hawk - I imagine players mixing the swinging and wall-running and I play with the wall-run button held down a lot of the time much as I used to hold the grind button in TH. But I've noticed most of my players and youtubers weren't doing that. So, this update: easier wall running, more walls to run on, race challenges that *require* wall running, and I've made running on the ground better too. You don't drive like a truck so much anymore. Also, Unity 5: Better framerate! More solid physics! Fewer crashes! Different lighting model! I think y'all are going to like this one. Sorry, Windows is the only one up now; Linux and OSX coming next. And I've done some other stuff too:

• Swinging over water is safer and easier (props to @gamegrin and others)
• Fixed it so a second controller (such as a steering wheel) doesn't mess it up (props to @bluecat16475 & hardsoftco)
• Put in new energy hook detach sound effect
• All challenges can be cancelled now (props to MDF)
• Increased geocache collection radius (props to Buffalo_Ruthless) and added sound
• Made sure jump-jet effect turns off after you land (props to Buffalo_Ruthless)
• Backer rewards for my Kickstarter supporters
• Stopped cutting your line when you're too close to a structure
• Increase the vertical boost when you let go of a line
• Fixed the order of the race-the-island hoops
• Fixed the hoops in the New Atlantis jumping-and-boosting race
• Fixed bug where you could swing on light columns
• Fixed problems activating challenges

It's been a while since I've posted an announcement. Sorry for going dark! Working on the Steam, Playstation Vita, and Playstation 4 versions at the same time has an obvious effect: it slows me down. Looking at my handy schedule it looks like my next update will be done mid-October, and will mostly involve better running, both on the ground and on walls. The way I see it, running on walls is to Energy Hook as grinding a rail is to Tony Hawk - I imagine players mixing the swinging and wall-running and I often play with the wallrun button held down most of the time much as I used to hold the grind button in TH. But I've noticed most of my players and youtubers aren't doing that. So, next update: easier wallrunning, more walls to wallrun on, race challenges that *require* wallrunning, and ... hey, while I'm at it, I'm making running on the ground better too. You won't drive like a truck so much anymore. Also, because of the Playstation versions, I've been dragged kicking-and-screaming into supporting Unity 5. On the bright side, this means better framerate! More solid physics! And hopefully less crashing. (Those crash bugs are them, not me, I swear.) See you in mid-October with the goodies!

I wanted to get an update out fairly quickly that improves the swinging animation and the way Delilah orients while on the line and thrusting with her jetpack. I also tweaked the way finding a point to swing from works - it defaults to being more generous about finding a point, and it's less likely to suck you face-first into a wall now. :)