“I actually have to think about my decisions now, and it’s great.”

– Stephen McGregor, Sunday, July 26th.

“You missed scrap!! … That’s really important to me all of a sudden.”

– Charles McGregor, Sunday, July 26th.

“It looks like a normal shooting game, but it’s way more addictive.”

– Unnamed 3rd Grade Student, Wednesday, July 29th.

It’s funny how tiny features can change everything. We spent the last week working on the progression system in Fingeance. This covers all the stuff that makes you feel more powerful as the game moves along. It also covers all the decisions people make as they build their very own Dolphin-hunting death machine. We’ve always said that Fingeance will emphasize decisions and teamwork as much as it emphasizes traditional shoot-em-up skills like pattern-recognition and twitch reflexes. Now, at last, we get to deliver on that promise.

Last week, Charles started something extraordinary. Stephen and I were blown away by how handsome the new Shop is. Okay sure, it looks a little bit basic. No flowing, bubbling backgrounds like some of our other scenes. But trust me, it feels handsome. It’s loaded with animations and feels truly responsive and functional. Better still, it organizes information brilliantly. Contrast it against the old shop (top image from this post), which tried to present everything all at once.

“Alright,” you might be thinking, “this is going a little over the top. Who gets this excited about menus?” Before this week, I would have agreed with you. But now, I’ve seen the light.

The Golden Highway to Player Engagement

The shop menu lets us present players with fascinating choices. If you’ve ever spent agonizing moments wondering what to purchase in Faster Than Light [Trailer] [Steam], you know what I’m talking about. If not, let me explain.

In every strategy game, from Starcraft to The Sims, some strategies work better than others. Of course, everyone has fun in their own way, but when it comes to achieving goals, it doesn’t matter whether you’re moving up the competitive ladder or wooing the sexy neighbor: some strategies get you there faster. Unfortunately, the bulk of games don’t differ much from session to session. If you want to win a game as Dota 2‘s Ancient Apparition, say, you can just look it up. I myself can’t stay away from HotsLogs, which tells me exactly how to play each hero from Heroes of the Storm. I can’t count the number of my League of Legends games that have started with a flame war because someone picked an unpopular, or “off-meta,” champion.

All this information leads some gamers into a rote, color-by-numbers, respect-authority way of playing. In games with static attributes – where the same strategies are always (or almost always) available, the fastest way to “get good” is to study high-ranking players and copy what they do. Way back, when I was first trying to explain what would, one day, set Fingeance apart, I mentioned that Attachment – the feeling that you’ve invested in a character and that he/she is uniquely your own – was one of our foremost goals. I don’t know about you, but I feel far, far less attached to what I’m doing if I’m just following orders. If I’m creatively tuning each piece of my strategy, I feel far more personally involved. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

So then, how do we fix things? We might simply tell players “don’t look up guides and you’ll have more fun.” But why do that when we have a much, much better option? In the Fingeance shop, we capitalize on one of the greatest strengths of the Roguelike genre: randomized availability. Each time you play, different Cannons, Gadgets, and Augments will be presented to you. Forget guides. If you were to visit the game shop right now, you could see 2,162,160 different combinations of gear ready for purchase. Who has time to write over two million guides for a video game? There’s no way around it: building a strong team in Fingeance will require the use of your very own brain.

But Does it Work?

So far, things are looking good. Refer to the quotes at the top of the page. On Sunday the 26th, we spent hours just messing around, oohing and aahing (and later rolling on the floor laughing) at all the cool and weird (and hilariously game-breaking) ships we could build. On Wednesday the 29th, we showed our game to kids from Minnetonka Academy. They had a ball with it. The real treat, though, was listening to their excitement at the beginning of each new level – right after they’d bought new stuff from the shop. Eventually, they realized that survival depended on teamwork, and they began discussing which items the whole team should acquire.

Their favorite strategy? Mass Laser Deploy.

And that ain’t half bad.