The backgrounds in Fingeance tended to look really bland and a tad bit misleading. There wasn’t much going on, there was no life in them and sometime people thought that the ships were flying in the air. It isn’t their fault though: there wasn’t much to go off of. In fact, I bet you didn’t know that you are navigating through a coral reef. Of course you didn’t, there’s no coral! Well, that is about to change!

Underwater Backgrounds

I have been working on sprucing up the backgrounds by adding in some life and vegetation. And that added a lot in terms of ambience and depth (let alone telling you that you are underwater and in a coral reef). Honestly, I could have stopped there as it was looking leaps better but we also wanted to update the lighting. Now, I have already stated how lighting adds so much from before, but when I finally implemented the new lighting system… That was when it was raised to another level. See for yourself.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

It really is phenomenal how much of a difference the shadows make and how it helps add a new level of physicality to the game. Right now I am currently messing with a bunch of different situations as both the backgrounds and lighting are still works-in-progress. You can see that I am messing with putting the bosses in this environment to see how they look. But probably the thing that I am most excited about is how dark areas in the game will be. Night time is going to look awesome and I can’t wait until we explore that part more.

What are your opinions on the new backgrounds? Do they look too dark to you? Feel free to let us know!

Other happenings

The new backgrounds weren’t the only thing that we worked on. A lot of what we did was behind the scenes getting ready to add in some more content like bosses and enemies, so we can’t show that off just yet. But what we can say is that we now have a page over at the new Unity website: Made With Unity. Made With Unity is a great place to find new and interesting games made on the Unity game engine (like ours!). You can check it out here: http://madewith.unity.com/games/fingeance. Drop by and share the page with your friends; we really do appreciate all the support you guys have so far given us and can’t thank you enough!

Late post this week! Sorry about that. We have been hard at work on some new and interesting additions to the game this past week.

Manta Ray

If you’re a regular reader, you may have noticed that we use the same bosses again and again in our screenshots (especially that ever-photogenic Puffer…). Well no more! We won’t be revealing everything on the site, but we’ll give some peeks into what we’re working on. Our latest boss is a Manta Ray, and is tentatively named the GIANT DEATH RAY. Here’s a crash course.

• He’s a change-up boss. When he’s facing you, your survival will hinge on precise movement around his slow-moving bullets. When he’s facing away, it’s an all-out scramble to keep up with him and dodge the debris he chucks your way.
• For this boss, we devised methods that let us meddle with the game’s scroll speed (how fast you move through the level) on the fly. Prepare for rocket boosts that send you hurtling through knots of obstacles.
• Because of all the destructible objects being flung your way, you’ll need to make snap decisions on dodging vs. blasting your way to safety.

I have been creating a bunch of art concepts for the Manta Ray boss. I also have been working on a lot of polished art for the boss as well. I have some plans to include these into the game in a meaningful way but right now I am still working on making that system. I had a bunch of fun making these and think that they turned out really well. With that said, check out some cool action poses!

Background Concepts

I also have been working on adding more interesting backgrounds in our game. Right now, the background looks like a barren, rocky area devoid of life. So I have been working on some concepts to include some vegetation in the game. This will hopefully help the game feel like it is more underwater and alive than before. Check out a concept that I am testing out:

Again, right now it is in the concept stage but I am working on getting these into the game very soon. What do you think about the new backgrounds? Do you think that it is too much? Remember there is only one layer of vegetation in the concept picture, each layer will have coral and kelp scattered throughout the scene.

Rumble!

Another feature that we added in is RUMBLE! While you battle your way through countless enemies now you will feel tactile feedback when you fire a huge blast or take some damage. It really adds a lot to the way the game feels, giving you a large amount of feedback just through vibration alone. A very cool instance of this is the battle between “One Tough Puffer”: when the torrent of bubbles swarm you and your allies your controllers vibrate in response.

In other news, I know it is a bit short notice but we are going to be at GlitchHQ in Minneapolis today for PLAY/TEST. You can come check out the latest build and talk to us about the game, we love meeting up with you guys and hanging out. Be sure to swing by if you can the event is FREE!

After reworking the Shop Menu and the Character Selection screens I told myself, “No more big systems for a while…”

So naturally, I’m working on another big system.

This time I am reworking the player HUD (Heads-Up Display, for those unaware) that tells the players what is going on with their ships.

Reworked Player HUD

At a glance, it looks pretty similar to the older version aside from the slanted edge. Indeed, not much more info has been added to the HUD… at least at first glance. While it now has that stylish slant it also has the ability to use animations.

So far, I’ve created an intro animation. This will play at the start of a level, when a new player joins, or when you come from the pause or continue screen.

This, as you might imagine, is super slick when multiple players are in the game. Right now, I’m still working on the other HUD states. For instance, the HUD needs to shrink when unused.

Here’s another feature I’ve added:

The health now changes color as you get damaged. The health even begins to flash as you are near death! This is useful for reading health from your peripheral vision. When you’re busy dodging, it’s tough to take a moment and check your health. Now, you don’t have to.

In fact, this feature was suggested by the community. We are always listening to you guys and really do value your opinions and suggestions. Feel free to drop us a line in the comments below or on our various social media channels (Facebook and Twitter).

Firestarter

While I was working the new HUD, Lane got busy making new parts.

The first part, the Firestarter, turns you into a devastating long-range turret. As long as you fire the gadget, you’ll launch explosive fireballs in whichever direction you choose. The longer you use the Firestarter, the faster it will shoot. This comes with a price, however: while shooting, you’re slowed to a near-standstill.

The design goal of the Firestarter is to turn a player into an objective the team must protect. It dishes out unparalleled damage, but its immobile user can be torn apart in seconds by enemy fire. Before, we’d built parts that allow players to tank. Now, we’re making parts that reward tanking.

Teleporter

The second part is called the Teleporter. It… pretty much does what the name suggests. It lets you warp around the battlefield really fast. Or, if you hold it down for a moment, it lets you power up for bigger warps, letting you pull off some pretty impressive defensive tricks.

The goal here is to provide a fun way to boost movement speed without making characters harder to control. In this phase of design, we’re adding several enemies with zone-control attacks and exploitable weak points. As we continue, movement gets more and more valuable. We also wanted a defensive option that doesn’t require fine control of the analog stick. Lastly, teleportation is just plain fun.

Lots of new things being added to the game! Please leave us a message as we do read, listen and respond!

As I stated in an earlier post, the shop menu has been a huge problem for players. It was too complicated. Figuring out the function and relative power of each part was a nightmare. Since then… we’ve made a lot of progress.

Animating the Shop Menu

One of the problems of the old shop was that there really wasn’t a great way to animate it because of the way that I made it. To rectify that issue I moved the new shop over to our updated menu system that the other menus use. This system allows us to make really cool animations between menus. Recently on Twitter, I tweeted a preview of the new menus animations; here are all of the new animations in action.

The more I do animations, the more and more I enjoy it. But these animations aren’t the only things that are new in this version of the shop. There are now some handy things that make it easier for you to tell what each part does. We also (finally) included a purchase confirmation box, which should prevent the bulk of the user error we were seeing in the shop.

There are still some things that need to be added, like changing the color of the cost on the small buttons.

Providing More Info

To improve readability in the shop, we added two functions: “More Info” and  “Preview”.

More Info is similar to how the old shop was, where it shows you a description of what exactly that part does. Crucially, this information now only appears when you hit the “More Info” button. Before, this information was always present, leading to mind-boggling information overload (even for Fingeance veterans).

Preview, meanwhile, is an even bigger improvement. Players can now test out a part or try out their current loadout before they buy something. Even with our More Info panel, there’s only so much info that can be presented in text. Details like firing arc, firing rate, bullet range, and bullet speed are better shown than told.

We are still working a few more functions into the shop, but we hope to be done with it very soon.

Bigger Buffs

Besides the new shop, we also have been working on getting everything to work well. That includes adding in some new buffs. One of those buffs is to literally make you buff; it makes you a bigger sized ship. You may be wondering “Why on earth would I want to be bigger?” This kind of buff is for those that want to protect their team, helping players fill out their roles.

The shop has been a major problem for players for some time now. When the player is first shown the shop, a bunch of info is thrown at them: items available, item descriptions, item costs, etc. It was a very intimidating view.

This is especially true when there are more than one player playing. So much text is shown that many players just said “Nope,” and moved on to the next scene. We definitely don’t want that to happen: building a custom ship is a core part of Fingeance. We set out to make this interface approachable.

Working on the new shop

The primary issue came from the amount of info presented all at once. Looking at the shop scene for the first time was like looking at a friend’s overcrowded desktop: it’s an incomprehensible mess. I then asked the question, “What if we divided it into separate menus?” This way, we can have simple, clean default view. Other functions can be accessed with buttons. Pursuing this angle, we came up with the idea of a “main menu” that shows what you currently have equipped.

In the main menu, you can select ‘shop’ from a list of options. This way, you aren’t shown all these unfamiliar parts right away. You opt-in to looking at them. The shop view also got a huge update. For one thing, we cut down on text. The items are presented as smaller “cards” that condense relevant information into icons or keywords. If you want more info on the item, then at the press of a button you can get a full description.

You may have noticed that the shop has a new area called “Slots”. Currently, we are experimenting with the parts and loadouts that the player can make, so we are trying out this new system. We want to help players realize their ideal playstyle, so we are expanding the system to allow more options for the player to be creative with their builds. But again, we are just in the testing phase. Don’t expect to see this fully fleshed out in-game anytime soon.

Bullet Flair

In addition to working on the shop, we also started work on changes with the bullets, but how much does bullet cost? Lane has been working on making bullets visually more appealing by adding the ability for bullets to flash and updating the bullet trails.

Along with these visual changes, he has also been working on making the bullets do more interesting things beyond “move forward”. These bullet patterns aren’t in the game yet, but expect to hear more on it soon!

Blog Changes

So, you may be wondering why I am talking about things that the others have been doing. Well, that is because we are changing our blog post schedule. Writing these blogs is pretty time-consuming and we want to work on the game more, do social media more, and try out other avenues to reach out to you guys! From now on, posts will be on Wednesdays only. But that doesn’t mean that you won’t hear from the others: we will alternate every week. We may also post on other days if we feel it is appropriate (or if we are just too excited about something to hold ourselves back).

So stay tuned and remember to check back next Wednesday for more updates! Be sure to check out our other social media outlets in the meantime, Twitter & Facebook.

Animations are so nice. Boy, and I thought just lighting added a lot.

Things in Fingeance are really shaping up nicely. Thanks everyone for your feedback and input, we have added so much because of it. The last few days before our last major update we have been bug fixes and updateing. But I was finally able to move back to the art side of the game and work on making some animations for various things in the game, particularly menus.

Now this isn’t “frame-by-frame” animation, I haven’t worked on that (yet). This is key frame animation, where basically I create points in an animation and the computer fills in the gaps. For example if there was a character who I wanted to raise their hands, instead of drawing every frame of the character raising their hand I would make key frames (hence the name), like the hands by their side and their hands actually raised. The computer would fill in the gaps. I have had so much fun working on them.

The Little Things Matter

The entire time I was working all of the animations I had that in mind “The little things matter…” the things that no one consciously thinks about when viewing animations. Now, I am no animator, I haven’t really done much animation in the past but it has always interested me. I have in the past done some animation work for other games, but my greatest endeavor in it was in a PS1 game called Fighter Maker (which isn’t easy still). So I dove right in. Rather than talk about each thing that I changed, why not just show you (GIFs incoming!):

Animations Add Polish

So I won’t talk about the animation for too long, but I just wanted to mention a few things I am really proud of.

Pause Menu

The pause menu originally looked basically the way that I wanted it. In the end I really like how well it turned out with how the menu slides in and it seems like it would naturally do that.

Continue

The continue screen is probably the animation that I am most proud of. The old menu doesn’t hold a candle to the way the new one looks. Not only that but there is an option to leave the game in the new one.

Old Continue Menu

So there are the new menu animations that I added in the latest demo release. What do you think about them? You can check them out in context by going to the Fingeance landing page and trying out the demo.

Phew… We did it. We released our alpha demo of Fingeance. Thanks everyone for your support we truly do appreciate it! Thank you so much.

This past week has been pretty intense making sure that we were ready for release before this past Monday, I had to finish the alpha music. I had to finish up 4 different songs in a very short time. Now I have already talked about how hard it was to write the first song so making 4 more was a daunting task to say the least.

Remixing Old Concepts

The way that I approached 2 of the songs were to do variations on the level song that I have been working on for the past few weeks. The boss theme is a more intense version of the original song, while the main menu song is a more subdued version. Here is a sample of the main menu song:

We were planning to have the song add layers to it as you moved from the splash screen to the main menu to the character selection. But we hit a problem with getting the tracks to line up 100% of the time.

Brand New Alpha Music

The other alpha music that I made were completely new themes. The results screen track actually started out as a main menu/main theme idea. But the more and more that I added and worked on the song, the more it sounded like a results screen. So in the end I embraced that and dove fully into making a results song.

The shop song on the other hand took me the least amount of work to actually “make” the song, but the most work to come up with the idea. The idea is the song is coming through small speakers, like a radio or speakers you would find in a supermarket. The style of music is also what you would find in a supermarket, very laid back “jazzy” sounds. Check out a same to see what I mean:

That’s a breakdown of all of the alpha music in the demo it was a bit stressful to make sure that each one sounded good and fit in the same universe. Hopefully you think I pulled it off, I think I did. That being said it is still alpha music, the music isn’t final so things might change in the future, but for now the alpha music in the game seems to work.

But let me know what you think! Go check out the game hear the songs in context and leave a comment saying what you think about the songs, art, gameplay, anything really! Now we even have a page dedicated to Fingeance on the website. You can find the most up to date version of the game on that page. If you want the latest news be sure to check out our Twitter account as we will let you know when we update the builds as soon as it goes live!

Thanks again for all of the support, hope you enjoy the game!

Oh boy, this post is going to be interesting. I am going to be showing off the evolution of art that Fingeance has had over the past year. I want to preface this by saying I didn’t really know how to make comic book art/ ink art digitally beforehand and didn’t know how to use illustrator before starting work on this game. Also none of the current art is final so I could in theory do another one of these to show the final evolution of the art but I thought it would be interesting or at least entertaining to see how (bad) things were from before.

But enough talking time to show it. Oh boy…

Old Concept Art

In the beginning we weren’t too sure on what the art style was going to be I just knew that I wanted to have a cleaner style compared to what I have previously done.

So of course I drew something in that style anyway. It was just to get a sketch of what would become Finn, but it was just to get an idea of what the basic shape the main character would look like. So it was pretty rough and it didn’t look at all like a comic book style because we didn’t really have an art style yet. That being said, it doesn’t look bad graphically; this is largely because I drew it in a style that I was used to drawing in. But that changed when we said, “Comic book style sounds like it would fit the game!” This is when things went off the rails a bit.

Comic Book-ish (Not Really)

As I mentioned before, I didn’t have much of a background when it came to making comic book style art. Not only that but we wanted a western comic book style, which my concept art could arguably be more manga like so I tried to fix that. Key word there is “tried”.

I didn’t know how to ink things correctly so the art looked very uneven and there were weird splotches all over the place. Also the line work didn’t convey the sort of intensity I wanted; it looked more dopey then “edgy”. Not only that but the proportions were all out of whack, but I didn’t have much time because we were getting prepared for the Minnesota State Fair. This is really evident in the splash screen art, it looks way rushed, plus not having experience with this style of art didn’t do me any favors either.

Refinement

After I had some more time to figure out how to actually make the style of art things got a little better. I got a better result with inking; lines were smoother, no more splotches. But the style of art still didn’t look like I wanted it to. So I when to get some inspiration, so I went to go look at a video game. What? You thought I would look at comic book? No… that’s too obvious.

I started to get a better idea of what I wanted the game to look like and it really showed. Things started to have that “edgy” look, but not too “edgy”. When I figured out the style, I still didn’t use Adobe Illustrator so I painted things in and but some things had a bit of a roughness to them. But it really looked so much better than where the art was from before.

Enter Vectors

It was after Glitch Con where I finally purchased Illustrator and that changed production drastically. I was able to create art in the style that I wanted it in a MUCH shorter time because I was using such an inconvenient roundabout way to do things before. For comparison, it took me about 2 hours to have a polished piece of art (specifically the character art), now it takes me about 1 hour to make 3 pieces.

So that’s all of the major art shifts that the game took in terms of art and art styles. It has come a long way from when I first started making the art. I have learned a lot and hopeful the art comes across as handled well.

You also will get a chance to see the art in action firsthand this coming Monday! The demo will be released on the June 1^st make sure to check back then to play Fingenace with your friends!

Over the past week I have been working on a variety of things, but the biggest thing I was able to do was make some musical strides for Fingeance. As I have mentioned before in a previous post, I didn’t have much of an idea for the type of music that Fingeance should have. Trying to figure out what best fit Fingeance was tough, we wanted something that sounded like it was from the ocean or underwater. But we didn’t want the players to fall asleep while playing the game, largely due to “underwater” music is on the other end of the spectrum from “intense/battle” music. In the many soundtracks that I looked to for inspiration, the underwater level theme was a lot more relaxed compared to the other themes.

So it was tough to figure out the right balance between both sounds. But I think I figured something out, have a listen:

As you can see it is still reminiscent of the previous version that I posted, but there are some key differences. Besides the fact that I spent more time making the song sound “good” as a mix than I did with the previous one, I changed up the drums to fit more with tone of all of the other instruments. One of the biggest things that really helped keep the song diving was adding in the hi-hats. Those are probably the single most important change that I added in from last time. The other major change is adding in a chiptune melody to the song. I thought that the song was missing something and I wanted to try and blend some chiptune in the song I think that it turned out great.

Of course the song is still a work in progress, but it is getting closer and closer to what I feel the tone of the music should be. I also am going to being working on making the main theme (not just the in level song) of the game. It is a bit weird for me to work on the level theme first, but I felt like I had more ideas for that than the overarching theme. We’ll see how it all goes in the end.

And you will be able to experience both songs and more on June 1st as our demo is being released then! Remember to check back often for more updates on the demo and mark your calendars for June 1st!

This past week I have been working on some concept art that I alluded to last week, but I created some failed concept art instead…

Before I get into it I haven’t really been able to work that much on them so is some leeway there, but that being said, I still failed pretty hard.

The problem with the concept art is that it doesn’t look like what the characters originally look like. Well… They do, but not exactly. For each character there is something off about them. They don’t quite line up with the original artwork. Take Bubbles for example:

There is something off about the face that is just off. Now it could be just me, but it really is bothering me when I look at it. All of the problems with the new concept art stem from one central problem. I really haven’t drawn the characters that often. After I originally created the characters there really wasn’t any time for me to practice drawing them in different poses. The only exception to this rule is Finn, because originally there was only going to be one fish in the game so I spent a longer time making Finn than the others.

But Gil, on the other hand, has another issue on top of that. The team hasn’t loved how Gil looks like for quite sometime now. As I keep hearing from my teammates he looks like “A middle aged dad with a sniper rifle” which is definitely what I don’t want Gil to be. He is supposed to be slick but right now he looks a little dopey. I have in the past tried to update Gil to be a bit more slick but he ended up looking a bit too slick for my liking.

So back to the drawing board on this one. I need to start drawing them in more than I do now, I just have to balance it with everything else.