Any time designers sit down to make a genre mash-up like Fingeance, they enter exciting new territory. There’s an inherent delight to mixing new things together and watching what emerges. Two of our genres – character brawler and roguelike (random levels, random loot) – have given us a lot to think about. Hundreds of times, we’ve gotten to ask and answer “what happens when this interacts with that.” Today, I take you inside a particularly tricky issue.

Before that, here’s the short version:

• Starter parts are now about 20% weaker than they were before.
• The Cannons and Gadgets you find in the first shop will now be a significant upgrade compared to your starter parts.
• Augments are now small permanent additions.
• Augments are now quite simple, each offering a modest boost to damage, attack speed, health, energy, etc.
• In the future, Rare Augments may appear, offering more interesting effects.
• Each character now has a special Starter Augment.
  • Each Starter Augment is tuned to be powerful at all stages of the game.
  • Starter Augments are intended to be build-around parts that encourage you to develop the character in a specific direction.
  • Each Starter Augment is intended to work with several different playstyles and late-game builds.
  • Starter Augments, like other augments, cannot be removed.

Genre Mash-Up Mayhem

Fingeance just encountered a major growing pain, and we’re making a fairly large adjustment to the way players progress. Recently, we’ve cobbled together enough content to provide three levels of gameplay. This is a major achievement: we can now at last get a feel for how playing through a full Fingeance campaign will ultimately go. For the most part, we’re happy: players grow in power, parts grow in complexity and coolness, and potent strategies develop across the entire team. However, we’ve encountered one giant problem: our characters suck. They have great personality… but, well, that’s what you say when there’s nothing else to compliment.

So, what sucks about Fingeance characters? Persistence. Until now, as you play through Fingeance, you’ve been able to remove and replace every part of your character’s ship. While Finn might start with a Cannon, two Gadgets, and an Augment, all of these take up slots. As you play, you’ll want to upgrade your power, and upgrading your power means replacing weaker parts with stronger parts. See, the trouble is that, thus far, a Fingeance character is a loadout. Once you replace everything in the loadout, the character might as well be dead. Yes, your submarine’s color indicates you’re still technically Finn, but does that mean anything? It’s like saying sure, my wife is a zombie, but I’m still married.

The Genre Discussion Heats Up

In our meeting on Wednesday, I raised this issue. The conversation went something like this, with some editing to make me look smarter:

Me: We’re in danger here. We’re building a game about characters, but we’re letting players bury them under buyable parts.

Charles: What’s the problem, exactly?

Me: Well, right now, playtests show that Bubbles loses her Bubbles-ness by about level three.

Stephen: Isn’t that Fingeance, though? People pick up parts and build on the go.

Me: Totally, but Charles has been arguing from the start that this is a Comic Book styled character-driven game!

Charles: Yeah… so what’s the problem?

Me: Doesn’t it bother you that Bubbles and Dorsa – two polar opposite personalities – might as well be the same person by midway through the game?

Stephen: So what do you propose?

We’d been here before. For a while, we’d been kicking around the idea of making our characters function like those in a MOBA game. That is, their attack (Cannon) and special abilities (Gadgets) would be locked in at the start of the campaign. They’d be able to upgrade them, but unable to put wholly new parts in their place.

The conversation continued…

Me: Well, what do you think of the Augments-only idea?

Stephen: Where you can only buy Augments? Isn’t it a little against the spirit of a Roguelike?

Me: Well, it’d be about the same as Risk of Rain, and Rogue-like is totally the first genre on its Steam page.

Stephen: I still don’t like it. It takes away from our “build your own team” premise.

Charles: So what would you say the problem is?

Me: Well, characters are just a list of parts – all of which are replaceable and most of which aren’t even unique.

Stephen: Good point.

Look at Stephen being modest. Here’s the thing: he’d actually, in a really clever way, already solved this problem. He just hadn’t told us yet. Later in the meeting, this happened:

Stephen: By the way, I’m making our starter parts weaker.

Charles: Whoa, what’s the problem?

Stephen: We want the parts in the first shop to be upgrades, right?

Me: Yeah. How is that working out?

Stephen: It’s good, but I can’t make the Starter Augments weaker. If I do, that makes the character feel too weak.

Me: Oh?

Stephen: Actually, I made the Starter Augments about four times stronger.

Me: What!?

Stephen: Yeah! A lot of the characters’ personality is in those things. If they’re strong, but the starting cannons are weak, the characters still feel distinct.

Me: Wait…

Charles: …What’s the problem now?

Me: The only problem I see is Stephen being a genius. He’s making us look bad! Think about it – in Risk of Rain and most other Roguelikes, you don’t ever lose the stuff you buy. It just stays with you and you get more and more powerful. Well… What if we do the same thing with our Augments?

Resolution at Last

And just like that, the idea took off. For the foreseeable future, we’ve decided to divide our parts into two radically different styles. Cannons and Gadgets will work as they have so far: you’ll have three slots to fill as you choose. Augments, however, will fill the role of permanent additions to your power. Since they’re permanent, we’re choosing to start each character off with a single powerful and unique Starter Augment. Here are a few we have in the works:

Battleborn – Owned by Bubbles

Bubbles grows in power as long as she stays in combat. As long as Bubbles is near at least one enemy, she’ll gain attack speed and damage reduction, capping at a 50% bonus to both after 12 seconds in combat.

While outside of combat, these bonuses fade away over 5 seconds.

Sniper Scope – Owned by Gil

20% of Gil’s shots are critical hits. These deal 3x damage and also apply On-Hit effects three times.

Spine Thrasher – Owned by Spike

When Spike is hit by a bullet, he counterattacks. He’ll always fire at least two spikes whenever he’s hit, and the more damage he takes, the more he’ll shoot back.

Spike is 30% larger than other characters.

Spike starts with +50% maximum HP.

So there’s just a little taste of what’s in store. I hope you enjoyed this look inside Escape Industries and our problem-solving process. I look forward to showing off more Augments and character-progression goodies in the near future!

Want a challenge? Grab our Demo, turn the difficulty to Extreme, and try to make it to the end of level 3. Here are some things you can expect:

Enemies shoot faster

• Some attacks are still dodgeable, but you’ll need to fit into a just-barely-submarine-sized hole to do it.
• Other (previously dodgeable) attacks become solid walls.

Game intensity is higher

• Our level-building algorithm selects higher-difficulty level sections.
• There are shorter breaks between fights.

Money is tighter

• Enemies still drop the same amount of scrap, but there’s no way you’ll kill them all. They’re just too dangerous.

If you see any of that and think “this sounds like fun!” then this guide is for you.

The Goal

To beat Extreme difficulty, you need to prepare for the challenges outlined above. To have a reasonable chance at beating Level 3, we need to find the following:

Escape Options. Our #1 enemy is solid-wall attacks. When an enemy floods the screen (or part of the screen) with laser fire, we need some way to escape. Our best option is to either destroy enemy bullets with the Close Quarters Cannon or Shockwave or to leap over them using the Teleporter. Finding and affording these (expensive) parts is our top priority.

Damage. To afford the escape options we need, we have to be able to kill and loot enemies. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to afford weapon upgrades (unless we luck out and find the aforementioned Close Quarters Cannon). We’ll need to pick a character that packs a lot of punch from the very start (see Character Selection, below).

Stress Relief. With any extra Scrap, we’ll be buying defensive parts, otherwise known as “Mistake Forgiveness.” Our character selection will also help us here.

Character Selection

You have two reasonable choices. Bubbles is best at damage (she ends up stinking rich by the end of Level 2), while Finn is best at stress relief.

Bubbles

Bubbles’s gun is the Showstopper. This thing does ludicrous damage. If you can hit with all five of the wide-spreading bullets, you’ll inflict 96 damage per second (DPS), double that of her closest competitor (Finn deals 48 DPS). The Showstopper gives Bubbles an excellent chance at reaching 175 scrap by the end of Level 1. This is our target, because it’s the price of the all-important Teleporter, which lets us avoid the toughest boss attacks in Levels 2 and 3.

Bubbles also has a nice stress-relief augment, the Bubble Blocker. This blocks the 75% of the damage from one hit you take every 8 seconds. While the blocker is ready, you can afford to be aggressive. After it pops, hang back and let it recharge.

Beyond this, though, Bubbles struggles against bosses. Her short range means that she has to dodge in and out of combat. If you have the extra scrap, pick up a Repair Nanobots augment to help keep you healed during long fights.

Finn

Finn wins the “ease of use” award. Unlike Bubbles, his cannon and gadget both reach across the full screen. Finn, therefore, has a much easier time dodging and shooting at once.

The real reason to pick Finn, though, is the Re-FINN-ge. This quirkily-named augment has a simple bottom line: it keeps you alive. When you fall below 30% health, the thing activates, keeping you invulnerable for the next 3 seconds. Better yet, during this time, you’ll heal back half your health, putting you nearly back to full. The Re-FINN-ge only triggers once per life, but it makes those lives streeeeeeeeeeeeeeeetch.

Because Finn is so naturally tough and versatile, your shopping list is pretty short. All you need to win is one good escape option.

Upgrades

Our goal is to find parts that reach our goals and cover our weaknesses as cheaply as possible. Here’s a list of the very best.

#1 – Teleporter

This is an easy first pick. We can use it to skip over boss attacks and skip past difficult sections of each level. We can hone in on weak points of bosses, maximize time spent shooting treasure chests, and swiftly scoop up scrap before it drifts away.

It’s tricky to use at first, but so worth it.

#2 – Close Quarters Cannon

Here’s a paradox: a close-ranged cannon that makes boss fights easier. What?

Pre 9/18/2015 – The old version of the CQC shoots bullets with a unique quality: they destroy enemy bullets on contact. The CQC also shoots huge bullets, making wide swaths of the battlefield safe for you and those behind you.

Pre 9/18/2015 – In fact… it makes things a little too safe. On Friday, we’re changing the CQC to use our new Cannon charge-up mechanic. Every 12 seconds, the new CQC can release a circular burst, destroying bullets and shoving away enemies in a zone around you. You can recharge the weapon faster by damaging foes.

#3 – Shockwave

The new CQC is, in fact, based on the Shockwave gadget, which creates an even larger zone of safety.

The Shockwave costs a ton of energy, however, so grab an energy-replenishing augment if you can.

#4 – Drac-U-Drain

Here’s a good one for Finn. Because he can consistently bulls-eye enemies from afar, he can safely rack up hits that the Drac-U-Drain can convert into healing.

#5 – Repair Nanobots

…And the counterpart for Bubbles. This works to sustain you even if you aren’t dishing out damage, even if it does so at a lower rate.

#6 – Seaweed Wrap

Alright, here’s the wild card. It’s expensive, but this thing is good at pretty much everything.

As you hit enemies, you’ll coat them with sticky seaweed. As you stack up the debuff, enemies will move and attack slower and slower, to a maximum reduction of 50%, lasting 6 seconds (2 seconds on bosses). As a result, thoroughly-coated enemies move and attack as though they were in hard difficulty, instead of extreme.

The investment is a steep 250 scrap, but if you can afford it, you’ll be glad you did.

#7 – Health Tank

Old reliable. This guy adds 40% to your maximum HP (and the healing you receive from scrap) for the low price of 100 scrap. Pick it up if nothing else stands out.

(Non-Boss) Gameplay Tips

Levels are far easier than bosses. During levels, our goals are as follows, in this order:

• Survive. Save your three precious Continues for the boss fights.
• Get Rich. Earn as much scrap as possible.

Never take risks to earn extra scrap. However, when you can safely shoot at enemies, aim for fragile enemies who drop a lot of scrap. Above all, target Guppy Gunners. These guys aren’t really a threat (until they reach you), and they drop a disproportionate reward.

Boss Tips

The Twins (Miniboss)

Oh, the pain.

This is Bubbles’s biggest challenge. During the first phase of the fight, these turrets flood the screen with an unending torrent of red. You’ll need to master a pattern of sneaking in, landing a few hits, then backing off and slipping through the bullet trails.

Each Twin enters its second phase at 80% health. Things get just a bit easier now, as the turret will occasionally spin. It fires a cyclone of fast-moving shots, but while it’s facing away, you have a crucial window of safety to land a few more hits.

At 55% health, each twin enters a third phase, where it will frequently pause, charge up, then unleash a blizzard of freezing fire. This is the sweet spot for Bubbles. While blizzarding, the turret is locked in place. Bubbles can find a little zone of safety and fire away.

Therefore, since the turrets become safer as they lose health, your goal should be to focus fire on a single turret, reducing overall threat as fast as possible. Once one turret is blizzarding, you can focus on either killing that turret or knocking the other below 55%.

Jellyfish Queen (Miniboss)

Once you get the pattern, this is easy pickings.

The Queen’s bullets are easy enough to dodge: just stay well away. The trick is to avoid her minions while doing so. However, there is an easier way. The Queen is capped at 30 minions, after which she won’t spawn any more. If you can get her to spawn 30, then move around until they’re clustered in a little ball, the fight will go a lot smoother.

Developer’s Note – This isn’t good gameplay, since the fight becomes quite easy after you finish the 20-second chore of rounding up her minions. Expect this to be one of the first parts of this guide to become obsolete.

Biggest Baddest Turret

This is what we prep for. With the right tools, this is a thrilling, sometimes blissful – even meditative – fight. Without the tools, though, it’s the most stressful thing Fingeance has to offer.

The Biggest Baddest Turret has two red, glowing weak points. Attacking them deals quadruple damage, so aim there when you can. As for defense, BBT has five attacks, telegraphed by the following statements:

Target Acquired – A steady outpouring of bullets. Dodge dodge dodge, and wait for it to pass.

Sweep Defense System Enabled – The BBT swivels up or down, then sweeps towards the players, shooting a dense thicket of bullets. This right here is why we need an escape option. Save it for this attack. Otherwise, you’re toast.

Diverting Power to Rear Cannons – The BBT flips, shooting fast-moving rockets out of its rear cannons. Look closely: the BBT tracks your movement very very slowly during this attack. Exploit that by hugging the top or bottom right side of the screen. You’ll be completely safe.

Requesting Ordinance Support – The BBT doesn’t do anything here. Instead, 30 missiles zoom in from the right side of the screen. The answer? More dodging. If you have it, the Laser Deploy does an admirable job of destroying the missiles as they appear.

Sweep Defense System Enabled – Thought we did this one? Below 32.5% health, the BBT will sometimes execute a swift double-sweep, swiping first one way, then the other. On Extreme difficulty, this is almost a guaranteed death the first time you see it. Be prepared, and keep shooting weak points. The fight is almost over.

One Tough Puffer

Strategy and patience are the keys to victory.

Dodging the Puffer’s attacks isn’t too tricky. Things only get tough once the boss drops below 75% health. At this point, the Puffer will summon a giant batch of turrets to shoot at you, and it will do so once every 24 seconds. To survive, you’ll need to save your escape options (and other boosts to your firepower, including gadgets) until the turrets arrive. In the first few seconds post-turrets, unleash everything you have. On Extreme difficulty, the turrets will tear you apart if you can’t kill them fast.

Thanks for Playing!

And just like that, you’re done.

I hope you enjoyed a look inside Fingeance strategy! These are just a few of the things we have in mind when designing parts and bosses… and that’s just single player! Someday we’ll take a look inside constructing a team to tackle the ocean’s darkest depths. Until that day, good luck tackling the Extreme!

Play the alpha here!

Right now, you can go try out the first major update to the Fingeance Alpha. It loads up fast, and a playthrough takes 10 minutes. We highly advise that you give it a try.

If you didn’t play our game when it first came out, let me catch you up. Fingeance is a co-op underwater shoot-em-up. Between levels, you can buy equipment and upgrade your ship. The game has a heavy emphasis on boss battles, with mechanics that emphasize teamwork and feel more like MMO raid-bosses than traditional shoot-em-up fodder.

Since our first release in May, we’ve upgraded nearly every aspect of the game. Equipment is better. Enemies are more exciting. Heck, even the menus are more fun. The game also runs faster, and without all the bugs that plagued version 0.01.

So, what’s new?

Equipment

So Much New Stuff. Tripled the number of parts in-game. Added an entire new part category called Augments. They passively make your ship awesome.
Game Changers. Greatly expanded what parts can do. They can now apply buffs and debuffs, grand passive bonuses, and unleash charged abilities.
Showmanship. Added sounds, animations, and particle effects to all Cannons and Gadgets.
Upgrade!!! Stronger equipment will appear as the game unfolds.

Levels and Bosses

Dastardly Deeds. While we reveal no new bosses in this demo, existing bosses have learned several new tricks.
Fiendish Foes. Added a menagerie new small enemies. Created several new chunks (premade battlefields knitted together to form a level).
Bewitching Battlegrounds. Greatly improved our level-building algorithm. Levels are now shorter, more exciting, and better-adapted to your chosen difficulty.

User Interface

An Honest-To-Goodness Functional Interface. We did it! You can buy equipment and choose characters now. It doesn’t feel awful. Hallelujah.
Snappiness. In addition to being functional, the UI looks worlds better. It’s all animated, and the game feels more engaging and alive.

We owe a giant debt to our commenters, our followers on Twitter, and our friends at Glitch Gaming. Their feedback has been invaluable. As just one tiny example, one commenter suggested that our HUD should change color to reflect the health of living players. We tried it out. The difference was MAGICAL. All of a sudden, players could read their HP in their peripheral vision. People can see how close they are to death without looking away from the action, and easily figure out which allies they should heal. This change, obvious in retrospect, was something we totally missed. It’s thanks to readers like you that Fingeance has come as far as it has, so thank you.

To check it out, CLICK HERE.

I was wrong.

I was so wrong.

On May 13th, I posted an article about how Stephen, Charles, and I were wrapping up work on the “Big Systems” of Fingeance. I claimed that the game had reached such maturity that we were done “making tools” and 2042 hacks. I even penned the hilariously overconfident “It’s time to stop dicking around and build it.”

Since then, our article history – as the phrase goes – has determined that was a lie.

Here is a Fingeance gameplay video created shortly after I wrote that article. What follows is a short list of its most glaring flaws, and what we’ve done to fix them.

0:09-0:12 – A Bamboozling Splash Screen

Right out of the gate, here’s one we haven’t even worked on. I have to include it, though, since it’s just too funny. Our splash screen is pretty low-effort. It recycles used assets (character portraits, game logo, and moving background). It does little to catch the eye. Most important, Charles’ art style has come a long way since those designs.

What’s Wrong With It – After we fixed the shop, this screen ascended to the lofty title of “most confusing thing in the game.” You couldn’t press “A” to continue until you clicked on the screen. People read the title and thought the game was called “Fin League.” One player – one who actually got the name – thought it was a pun on “Fingers” and “Vengeance,” because, in his words, the main characters look like fingers.

What We’ve Fixed – Almost nothing. Yep, we’re starting with a let-down. The only thing we’ve made better is that now, you can actually press “A” to play 100% of the time. Nailed it!

What We’ll Do Next – Charles has Big Plans, plans I can’t spoil yet, on what to do with the splash screen and character art. Stay tuned!

0:19-0:21 – The (Lack of) Ecstasy of Gold

Three gallant young fish espy a treasure chest floating beneath the waves. Inching closer, they open fire, and collect the glittering rewards within.

What’s Wrong With It – It’s a problem you’ll see again and again within this video, and it’s a thing that makes a lot of amateur games look like cheap plastic knock-offs. See, enemies died in Fingeance, they just popped out of existence. Worse, the treasure they dropped just blinked into existence. Without fanfare, one object was swapped with another. It was a magician’s replacement act with all of the misdirection and none of the charm. It felt, again, cheap, like something you’d see in a third-rate Newgrounds flash game circa 1999. Picking up treasure should feel wonderful and rewarding from start to finish, and we weren’t delivering that fantasy.

What We’ve Fixed – We’ve gotten halfway there. Scrap now appears with a bouncy, flashy little burst of growth. Different tiers of scrap enter differently, with the biggest denominations coming in slow, stately, heavy, and grand.

What We’ll Do Next – Enemies need to do their part. When they die, they need an appropriate rattle, shudder, flop, or kaboom, as befits their identity. Stephen has had some wonderful ideas on selling enemy death (guppies going belly up!), which we’ll be implementing soon.

0:31-0:43 – A Tiny Kindling Flame

Right at 0:33, Player 2 in the orange ship fires his “Heatwave” gadget. At 0:34, it connects with the top Twin Turret, setting it ablaze. Take a look at the picture above, taken at 0:35. Can you see the flames? If you have a very sharp eye, you can see the teensiest licks of fire around the turret’s base.

What’s Wrong With It – For the longest time, our particles didn’t resize to match the entity they were placed on. Therefore, from the tiniest plankton to the titanic endboss puffer, every enemy has the very same half-inch cloud of fire. At 0:41, you can see for yourself how silly this looks. An itsy-bitsy wreath of flame dances atop the Biggest Baddest Turret, looking thoroughly out of place.

And yes, it was at this point that I chose to write an article vouching that it was time to stop improving the game and just make content. Oops.

What We’ve Fixed – Not much to say here: we made it look not ridiculous. It’s surprisingly hard to dynamically resize particles in Unity’s particle system editor, but dang it, it had to be done.

What We’ll Do Next – Not a whole lot. We’re far happier with how particles look now. The biggest promise I’ll make is “no more grand proclamations on how ‘finished’ the game is.”

Oh, PS: At this point, you’re already seeing hints about the most embarrassing part of this video.

0:45-0:50 – A Stitch in Time

Oh dear. 0:48 is the second that kills me every time I watch this thing.

What’s Wrong With It – That’s not your computer lagging. That’s not your internet connection shutting down. That’s not AfterEffects having a meltdown. It’s certainly not Charles deciding that particular frame needed an extra second of your attention.

What you’re seeing is a shoot-em-up.

Buckling under the pressure.

Of handling 40 bullets.

Fingeance used to be terribly coded. In a genre known for screens that look like this, we need to do better.

What We’ve Fixed – So much. Two weeks ago, Charles and I dug into Unity’s wonderful Profiler tool, which pinpointed which scripts and graphical elements were bogging us down the most. As a programmer, it was my first time refactoring code for efficiency. It was grueling, frustrating, and draining. Two days later, though, we’d done it. The game runs about four times faster than it did before. Lag spikes are a thing of the past, even in the most overwhelming “bullet hell” situations.

Aside: Tip for Unity Beginners – When convenient, don’t instantiate new gameObjects at runtime! Instead, create all your bullets and particle effects during your load screen, set them to be “inactive.” When someone shoots, move an inactive bullet to the right spot and activate it. Again, DO NOT CREATE NEW BULLETS AT RUNTIME. Creating gameObjects costs a lot of CPU speed. Think of it like the movie The Island (spoilers for the movie The Island). If you need a replacement for Ewan McGregor, it’s much easier to have a clone Ewan McGregor ready to go than it is to create an entirely new Ewan McGregor. I hope that helps.

What We’ll Do Next – The graphics need a big fix. Unity reports how efficient we are by measuring “Draw Calls.” Every time your PC has to re-render a portion of the screen in our game, it costs a draw call. Right now, we’re not doing a good job. That lovely background, for example, requires your computer to re-draw the entire screen about 120 times every frame. Yeowch.

Charles has some ideas that should lighten the load on older PCs and allow everyone to run Fingeance with ease.

Less Wrong Every Day

We’ve come a ways, haven’t we? Next week, Charles will be back, discussing some of our ongoing operations. One in particular has me bursting with excitement, and I can’t wait to show it off.

Until then, may you recognize when you’re wrong, and have some fun with it.

“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.

What a week!

When I first got into gaming, nobody told me that inventory/equipment/stats/bonuses/buffs was this herculean rite-of-passage that stymies so many beginning RPG devs. Player equipment – and passive benefits thereof – were literally the first thing we ever talked about when we started making Fingeance. Several months later, we’re finally able to implement it.

To say that the creative dams broke loose this week barely does it justice. Here are a few things we’re working on:

Augmenting Player Roles

A new part category – the Augment – joins Cannons and Gadgets among parts a player can put on his or her sub. Where Cannons shoot freely and Gadgets spend energy to produce myriad effects, Augments are entirely passive. Much more than the active parts, Augments help us define player roles like “Tank,” “Support,” and “Assault.”

Here are a couple of sample (in no way balanced or confirmed) Tank augments to show what I mean. Keep in mind: this is a Shmup. Tanks work better here than in most genres, because simply absorbing a bullet helps keep your allies safe.

Updating our Progression System

Astute readers likely noticed the Stars, Slots, and Scrap ratings on the parts above. As you progress in Fingeance, you’ll be able to find or purchase Cannons, Gadgets, or Augments for your ship. The system isn’t fully fleshed out, but we have a few thoughts on where things will go:

• Scrap, which is collected from dead enemies, is used to pay for everything.
• A star-rating system will tell players the approximate power of a given part.
• Parts will take up some number of slots on your ship.
• You’ll start with a few slots. You’ll be able to purchase more slots as the game unfolds.
• You’ll be able to equip one Cannon, up to three Gadgets, and any number of Augments.

The game is, at it’s core, a roguelike. Therefore, the parts that appear will be random. Players will need to be resourceful and use what they find to cobble together a powerful team.

Simplifying the Shop

That’s a lot of complexity for a Shmup, right? To combat the feeling of overload and keep the game friendly for a party environments, we’re considering two big features.

The first one is non-controversial. The shop needs to be better. It’s a mess as-is, and adding new features to it would turn it into a downright mess. Charles has been working overtime building a cleaner, more elegant, and more beautiful shop, and I’ll leave it to him to show it off.

The second feature is where I expect pushback from hardcore players. We’re considering a “Build-It-For-Me” mode for newcomers. Players who experience this option will play a game no more complicated than your industry-standard Shmup. As they progress, the game will build them a simple, albeit powerful, ship. Hypothetically, there would be a standard “Build-It-For-Me” progression line for each selectable character, representing a variety of roles. Players eager to dig in and build their own ship may select the “Let-Me-Build-It” option at game start.

Onward and… Downward?

That’s it for today’s update on player progression. Very soon, we’ll be turning our sights back towards enemies and bosses. We’re all excited to show you what lurks deeper beneath the waves.

If you have thoughts to share, we’re always delighted to hear from you.

Greetings Friends!

Today’s article is about something we all spend a lot of time doing: dying in video games. Adding death to a game is a lot like cooking with spice: some people don’t like it, many do like it, and to some, the dish is meaningless without it. This article will look at why death is so important, how Fingeance does it, and how you can make death feel awesome (and terrible) in your own game.

Giving the Reaper his Due

Setting aside story, does any element of gaming produce more emotion than player death? We are drawn psychologically to flee from loss, and will spend the same effort to avoid a loss as to make a gain twice as large. From my own experience, no mechanic evokes a spectrum of emotion quite like the death of my avatar.  Frustration and anger, yes, but also cunning, humility, and resolve.

Death, and making it feel right, is of paramount importance to game-making. Think back to your most epic game experiences. How many of them involve the death of a hardcore character or the wipe of  your raiding party? If none, then answer this: How many experiences were made better by past failures. How many peak moments come from the flush of victory after finally eluding the grisly hand of fate?

Even setting aside emotional impact, death looms large in the gamer’s rational thinking. In many games, it is half of the great binary: win or lose. If a game is like a hurdling race, taking away death isn’t like removing the hurdles. It’s like removing the ground itself. How much do games rely on death? Try playing Starcraft with the Power Overwhelming cheat code. Try god mode in any FPS. Taking away death turns bushwhacking the jungle into mowing the lawn. As plant cliches go, it’s still a cut above watching grass grow, but we’ve still turned smashing baddies into a repetitive chore. Death is important.

The Scales of Life and Death – Death in Fingeance

Early in design, our conversations were dominated by the topic of death. For our genre, we’d decided to mash-up two very different types of games that treat death very differently. On one side, Fingeance gets its hardcore edge from Roguelikes and Shmups. In these games, death is almost always disastrous. Whether you lose a precious continue or your entire progress-so-far, death is a specter to avoid at all costs. On the absolute opposite end of the spectrum, Fingeance is meant to be an inviting party experience. In these games – New Super Mario Bros. Wii & Wii-U are fantastic examples – death is far less catastrophic. The idea of a player sitting out while their friends continue on is anathema to the party experience. Often, these games allow one player to revive the others. In any case, death is always brief, and rarely contains long-term consequences.

To fit these wildly-differing demands, we devised four rules. As you read them, keep in mind that these are intended for team play. Solo play works a little differently (you’ll use up a Continue each time you die). Onward to the rules!

Rule 1. – Death is Temporary.

Mechanic – When your ship explodes, you’ll be back to the fight in a matter of seconds. On death, a countdown timer appears on your health bar. When it hit’s zero, you’re back in the fight.

Purpose – This rule serves Fingeance’s role as a party game. No one likes to sit out. Take Super Smash Bros. for example. Stock Mode is the “pro” way to play, yet the game defaults to Time Mode every time. Why? It keeps players playing and the party going strong.

The bottom line here is simple: Flipper – your ship’s mechanic – does amazing work.

Rule 2. – Death has Lasting Consequences.

Even Flipper can only do so much.

Mechanic – Each time you die, the countdown to your revival takes a little longer. When you finish a level, this effect is wiped. This means that you’ll begin each new level with the shortest possible death-timeout duration. Each player has their own death counter, so your deaths won’t affect your friends.

Purpose – This rule emphasizes the value of skilled play and adds long-term drama to every death. We don’t want a single death to knock a player out of the game, but it should be clear that every life matters. This rule also helps us avoid a problem common to survival-based action games like Hero Siege [Trailer] [Steam]. Often, these games incentivize death, letting players use it as an easy full-heal. In Fingeance, you won’t want to do this, because every death is more punishing than the last.

Rule 3. – Players Succeed or Fail as a Team.

Mechanic – As long as any member of your team survives, you will return to life. If every member of your team is dead, you won’t. On most difficulty settings, your team can spend a Continue to keep going.

Purpose – This rule turns Fingeance into a deeply friendly and team-oriented game. When a player dies, we want that player to actively cheer on his friends. When only one player survives, we want to let that player be the hero, capable of bringing her allies back to the fight. This also means that no one player can drag down the whole team.

On the flipside, this rule means that players can fail as a group. If your team dies enough, and burns through all your continues, it’s the end of the road. The campaign ends. Better luck next time.

Rule 4. – Temporary Losses are Offset by Permanent Gains.

Mechanic – Teams can unlock new characters and parts through play. Your team doesn’t have to beat the game to unlock new stuff.

Purpose – This rule pulls a lot of weight for us. As I mentioned at the start of this article, people are loss-averse. Take, for example, the fact that less than 5% of Diablo 3 characters are hardcore. The offer of permanent rewards does a lot to encourage people to take risks.

Of course, this also does what unlocks do for every game: it lets us gate content. When you first pick up the game, it’s simple, light, and fun, but there’s mysterious LOCKED AWESOMENESS just out of reach. As you play more, the experience becomes richer and more diverse.

Heaping Helpings of Death on a Silver Platter

I hope that, by this point, you’re convinced that death – and making it interesting – is worth your concern. When putting death into your next game, consider these design shortcuts:

Make sure death serves your design goals. Why are deaths in Super Meat Boy [Trailer] [Steam] so fast? Why are deaths in Dark Souls 2 [Trailer] [Steam] so slow? In both cases, the designers have a playstyle they’re trying to promote. In Super Meat Boy, instant respawn promotes a try-fail-try-again approach that fosters incremental improvement and muscle memory. In Dark Souls 2, the long and frustrating death sequences encourage players to pursue thoughtful and cautious strategy. In Fingeance, our death rules encourage players  to be adventurous and work as a team.

Let players know death is coming. Last week, Charles and I added damage modeling to the player ships in Fingeance. Suddenly, you don’t need to look down at the UI health bar to know when you’re on the verge of death. We want to avoid the feeling that a death was “cheap” or “unfair.” That feeling seems to happen most when death sneaks up out of nowhere.

Give players multiple routes to avoid death. This is Game Design 101. If a game has only one way to win – as with Monopoly – it’s called a Solved Game. Solved games often have a short lifespan. In Tic-Tac-Toe, for example, children quickly deduce the correct solution, play perhaps once or twice more, then never play again. Consider, then, what you do to your game if you provide only one way to not lose. If, for example, the only way to survive is to dodge bullets, then the player has no choice. They must improve at that one skill to play your game. On the other hand, having multiple ways to avoid death allows strategy and choice – even in the toughest, most action-oriented game. League of Legends and other MOBAs do an excellent job of this. Sure, you may not be able to dodge enemy skill-shots, but you always could have chosen not to engage in the first place. Here are some death-avoidance strategies in Fingeance:

1. Dodging – Skills used: twitch reflex, precision control.
2. Blocking/Shielding – Skills used: twitch reflex, timing, build optimization.
3. Killing Enemies Before they Reach Maximum Threat – Skills used: time management, build optimization.
4. Predicting Enemy Attacks – Skills used: pattern recognition, memory.

Communicate what comes next. Charles has written about the importance of animations in adding polish to a game. They also help draw attention to what’s important. In Fingeance, we’re currently working on using animation to convey what happens when you die. Very likely, we’ll show the fishy pilot of your ship swimming to safety, then moments later roaring back in his shiny new ship. This, combined with the HUD reacting to player death (and lines of character dialog reacting to same) combine to communicate “hey. You died. Bummer. Now get ready for Round 2!”

Fin

That’s it for today. Thanks as ever to everyone who sent in feedback last week. Fingeance wouldn’t be the game it is today without you. If you have any comments or questions, I’d be delighted to hear what you think.

Hey all!

To all of you who tried out our Alpha, we give our sincere thanks. You gave us an incalculable gift: your time and feedback. To honor your contributions, the least we can do is to keep you updated on our progress. To that end, we just released a sizable Demo Update, and we encourage you to check it out. Here are some of the changes:

General

Awesomeness

Added bubble trails to the player ship and smoke trails to missiles.

Added spine-tingling death effects when a player dies.

Added sounds and special effects to a ton of things that didn’t have them before.

Updated Menus

Fixed a large number of bugs involving the menus.

Added delightful animations to menus. [Watch the most boring part of the game come to life! -Ed]

Increased menu speed. Get to the action faster!

Memory Fixes

Fixed a bug where scrap totals never went away, even between play sessions.

Fixed a bug where quitting the game meant that you couldn’t try again. [That’ll show ’em – Ed]

Player Characters & Parts

Dorsa

Massively improved the Ice Trident cannon. Added a powerful charge-up feature (you’ll charge the cannon any time you’re not firing) and increased overall damage.

Increased Snowballer projectile speed.

Frenzy Engine

Frenzy (which multiplies attack rate by 3.333x) is just too insane. So we left Frenzy exactly how it is and made the Frenzy Engine cost a tiny bit more energy to use.

Levels & Bosses

General

Collision damage increased from 15 to 25.

Biggest Baddest Turret

Fully remade this terror. Brace yourself!

One Tough Puffer

Bubble stream power reduced.

Fixed a bug where the boss would vanish when the game was paused. [Bosses can no longer be bored to death -Ed]

We’re always interested in more feedback. If something feels off, please let us know!

The Shock Shield.

This thrumming bulwark of porpoise-punishing power might be the marquee item for Fingeance, and we’ve all but ignored it on this site. Stephen wrote a primer on it here, but it deserves a second look.

You see, the Shock Shield isn’t the only defensive item in Fingeance. Once done, the game will be packed with them. But right now, the Shock Shield is king. Check out this stopping power:

Let’s take two lessons from that image.

First, top-difficulty Fingeance can be insane. Just look at that bullet output. For anyone steeped in shoot-em-up culture, keep in mind that the player submarine’s hitbox is the entire submarine. That means dodging attacks like this is just as hard as it looks.

Second, players can overcome this difficulty by working together. A team carrying a Shock Shield plays much differently than a team without, since the shield provides brief moments of near-total protection. So, with all that power, when would you ever not play with a Shock Shield? To find our answer, let’s look at a few facts about Fingeance enemies:

• Many enemies change behaviors as they survive, increasing their threat over time.
• Several enemies enjoy summoning minions, increasing their threat over time.
• Most bosses have some sort of Soft Enrage mechanic, increasing their threat over time.

See the subtle commonality? High-difficulty Fingeance is about threat assessment and management. When you can put down the threat fast, you’ll save your team a lot of pain down the road. The tradeoff is damage vs. safety. The Shock Shield provides a lot of safety, but no damage. When you bash a foe with the Shock Shield, you shock them (stunning them briefly), but put them no closer to their demise.

Further – and here’s where we get to the delicate balancing act of Fingeance part design – many offensive items can be used in defensive ways. The Shock Shield is merely the easiest to use.

Introducing the Bouncing Burst:

This thing is capable of massive area-of-effect mayhem. The catch? You have get up close to do it.

With this part, we’re asking for a player to put it all on the line. Sure, it can be worth it (when our demo hits, try sneaking inside the Jellyfish Queen’s body, then unleashing this baby. Ouch.), but when you’re that close to a boss, things can turn sour fast. Worse, the Bouncing Burst doesn’t seem to offer any protection. Sure, your team needs the damage, but which part do you choose?

Decision-making in Fingeance relies on the needs of your team, and also on their skill. Remember how I said the Shock Shield was only the easiest defensive item? Basically defensive training wheels? Well, check this out:

[Editor’s Note] – This shot was taken by playing one-handed for the purpose of screenshotting. The Bouncing Burst can create a pause in the bullet stream large enough to allow passage without quite as much difficulty as this image would suggest.

There’s that same boss, executing the same attack as above. Now, the burst’s brief stun effect allows the player to (just barely) sneak through without taking damage. As players climb through the higher difficulties, we expect a certain degree of scrappiness. To battle the enemy superpowers – devastating attacks and growing threat – you’ll need to maximize every part, offensively and defensively.

As we careen toward our June 1st demo, we’ll be adding polish and balance to these parts and others. We can’t wait to see how you’ll put them to use.

Make waves: The very first Fingeance Alpha Demo launches in two weeks. You can play it live, right here at EscapeIndustries.net on Monday, June 1st.

We at Escape Industries humbly consider ourselves to be leading experts on matters of undersea revenge. To best enjoy the Fingeance Alpha demo, we suggest the following:

• Controllers – Keyboard or gamepad. Anything will do. We’re big fans of USB XBox 360 controllers.
• Allies – Having played a lot of Fingeance, we believe the game is a delicacy best served in the company of good friends, warm acquaintances, or bitter (but temporarily subdued) enemies.
• Burning Hatred for Snooty Cetacians Who Think They’re Better Than You – Self-explanatory.

As for us, well, my last article mentioned that we’re finally ready to make the leap to full-creative mode. The big-huge systems of the game are done, and we’re geared up to make oceans of new weapons, levels, and foes. What better time for a test to make sure everything is in place.

Belly up, small fry, and dive in.