Work on Fingeance started in July 2014. Twice, we’ve scrapped everything and started fresh. We’ve built and built, gone through planning, prototyping, implementation, and sweet, sweet content production. Even with all that behind us, surprises still lie ahead. Today, as we look out on Summer 2015, we see something scary and exhilarating and new. We see what I’ve come to call the Slog.

Slog is, admittedly, an ugly term¹. It holds value as a concept, though, because every game project I’ve ever worked on has experienced it in some form. Here’s the thing: acceleration is fun. What do we do for excitement? We gun it. We put pedal to the metal. Once we reach that maximum velocity, though, the thrill fades. Going from 0 to 90? Dynamite. Cruising at 90? Barely even notice.

¹ – I’m sure Charles will have a word with me about the SEO value of this very word.

The Fear of The Slog

Programmers, and game designers to a large extent, thrill at the prospect of exponential gains. To make work faster, we jump at the opportunity to make tools. Sometimes, we even make tools that will let us make other tools. At some point, though, you have your hammer, your nails, your bandsaw, your sandpaper, and your wood chisel all ready to go.

It’s time to stop dicking around and build it.

In two weeks, we’ll shift from exponential to linear. In two weeks, we’ll be (more or less) done making tools. In two weeks, we will, in earnest, put everything we’ve made to use. Week after week will be much the same: build two bosses. Build five new parts. Make another level. It goes on. The Slog.

I’ve written previously about some of the work that goes into this last burst of preparation. In the next two weeks, these things will be on our minds:

• Can we pull together a list of bosses to work from over the next three months?
• How will we spare time to communicate coming additions?
  • How much should we reveal?
  • Can we showcase our game in-motion?
• Will we finish the dang story!?
• Will Escape Industries survive The Slog???
  • Tune in next time…
    • …and again several times throughout the summer…
      • To find out.

Escape Industries is a small studio. Three of us, working odd hours around jobs and school, are attempting an ambitious project. For this reason, we spend a lot of time on two things. First, making tools to increase our productivity. Second, using design tricks to cram replayability into every nook and cranny. This article looks at one place where those two motives overlap: boss design.

Boss Design 101: Doing a Lot with a Little

Let’s get one thing out of the way: shoot-em-up bosses are dumb. Here’s the mind of a typical level boss:

1. Use attack A.
2. Use attack B.
3. Use attack C.
4. Goto 1 (repeat to infinity).

Now, I’m being a bit unfair here. Most games keep bosses a bit fresh by changing their attacks as they lose health or by randomizing their attack order. By and large, though, no decision-making goes into the attacks. They simply happen, and can be predicted.

Seems like a flaw, right? Don’t most game-makers tout the believability and cunning of their artificial intelligence? As it turns out, makers of games with high-performing AI have a very different set of motivations from shoot-em-up designers. For us, this boss idiocy is a central and saving feature. Our genre is, after all, famous for its insane difficulty¹. Can you imagine playing against bosses that were both super-strong and super smart? In a shoot-em-up, you’ll need to overcome wildly-overpowered monsters, yes, but once you figure them out, they’ll never trick you. Rather than finding a balance between brain and brawn, most developers go entirely one way: lots of bullets; no smarts.

¹ –  For the uninitiated. Yes, you have to dodge all the bullets.

Boss Design 102: Doing Even More

Fingeance boss design differs just a bit. Our game has two extra considerations:

• It’s a party game. We’ve gone on record that this is a team-friendly game. Anyone can pick up the controller without being a drag on their team.
• It’s a roguelike. Everything is designed for short play sessions with oodles of replayability.

For those reasons, the difficulty in our toughest bosses can’t just come from a screen full of bullets. For newbies, bullet hell is intimidating. For veterans, it’s predictable. In Fingeance, we aim to have the bulk of boss difficulty come from their variety.

This past week, I’ve had a few days to work on our new boss creation system, which I’ve dubbed The Freshmaker². It gives us a framework to give bosses lists of behaviors, then add those behaviors to a queue. Each behavior has three components: a trigger, which adds it to the queue; an action, like shooting a cannon, which it performs when it reaches the top of the queue; and an end-trigger, which causes the boss to move to the next behavior in the queue.

² – The queue system reminds me of the way Mentos are stacked in a tube.

This system, which is still very new, should provide two benefits. First, we’ll be able to create a stable of pre-fabricated behaviors that we can experiment with on a new boss. That way, if we come up with some novel concept – say a boss that uses his breath to fling you into laser traps – we can scrape together a boss in minutes, using 90% recycled parts. The second major benefit is that our triggers are going to be quite flexible. Much of the time, behaviors will be queued at certain time intervals or when a boss falls below a certain amount of health. However, we’ll also be able to add triggers that react to player actions.

This last bit – boss reactions to player actions – has me excited. I look forward to building bosses that identify and react to various styles of play. Our goal is to make a game that rewards strategy and teamwork alongside traditional twitch gameplay, and I’d love it if this new boss structure helped make that a reality.

Last week, I started covering the broad-strokes design goals for Fingeance. One of those goals is to build a MMO-like level of attachment, glory, and drama in the fastest time possible. To get there, we’ll be building in three elements:

• Stakes – Win big. Lose big.
• Cohesion – Teamwork is paramount. Everyone pulls together.
• Attachment – Your character means something and is hard to replace.

The last article discussed Stakes, and how we’ll raise them by adding in Roguelike elements like unlockables and optional permadeath. Today, we’ll take on Cohesion. This topic is a little more slippery than last week’s. It turns out that raising stakes is a pretty one-dimensional problem: make the highs higher and the lows lower. Unifying players, however, requires steady care and analysis of every part of our game. Getting people to work together and feel good about it is tough. As a designer, you’re pulled in two directions: making the game approachable for new players, but tough enough to be enjoyable for veterans.

This is paramount: new players must be able to contribute to the team. We’ve seen enough games where poor players actually drag the team down (MOBAs, I’m looking at you) that we know how emotionally draining it can be. As a frequent 0-8 Ziggs mid, I know that whatever team I’m on will suffer for about 50 minutes just because I decided to log in that day. They’ll let me know about it, too. With Fingeance, we don’t want to inflict that on anyone. In a perfect social game, even the most inveterate player should want her kid brother to hop in.

On the other hand, players resent feeling babied. As players mature, they’ll want to be able to stretch their limbs and show off the skills they’ve acquired. Yes everyone is an asset, but if you’re good, you should be able to be a shining hero for the team.

The Othello Principle

These principles together might be called “low skill floor, high skill ceiling” or “easy to learn, hard to master.” Violating one or both can lead to pitfalls, even in the most polished games.

Early after its release, Diablo III suffered this. At its highest difficulty, Diablo’s monsters gained 110% additional hit points per additional player added to the game. This meant that, playing with a friend, you killed monsters slower than you would by yourself. To make the game more multiplayer-friendly, they reduced that number first to 70%, then to 50%.

Throughout its impressive tenure, World of Warcraft also suffered. Don’t get me wrong: the behemoth is still alive and well, but partying-up at low levels has never been efficient. Unlike in early Diablo III, joining forces with friends does make you more powerful. However, experience gets split among the party. Players level up faster solo than they do as a team. For that reason, grinding levels in WoW continues to be a lonely experience.

Team games with level-up mechanics, including DotA 2 and Smite, offer an acute example. Here, your lack of skill directly feeds the enemy team. Games like these often compensate by adding catch-up mechanics like earning extra gold for slaying players on a kill streak.

On the other hand, some games offer so little challenge that experienced players become bored. Despite its admirable qualities, Super Smash Brothers: Brawl‘s co-op campaign suffered a bit here. The game was clearly not meant to be played co-operatively. The player characters had very little in terms of synergy, meaning that playing co-op felt like four people each playing a single-player game that just happened to take place in the same room. Adding to this, enemies don’t scale in number or in power to match the number of players. A Smash vet can plow through the entire game solo, without needing to rely on his or her team.

Alright, hopefully that’s enough examples. Next week, I’ll discuss how Fingeance is tackling this balance. There will be a pop quiz to boot, so be ready!

On Monday, March 30th, I knew I had forgotten something. We’d spent the last two days at GlitchCon, and things had been just one pixel away from awesome. Technically, things had gone fine. Socially, well, Minneapolis devs warmed our hearts and chilled our bones (seriously, check out Moribund in that second link). Our game was chugging along, doing what it was made to do: luring people in with trademark McGregor audio, then rocking their socks with crazy weapons and giant bosses.

So what was missing? I’d like to start today with a thought I haven’t heard anywhere else. To be sure, I’m not claiming that this thought is original, but it is hard-won.

The idea is this: game makers should step away from their work for at least one week before showing it, and not for the reasons you might expect. Working up-to-the-deadline can steal away a designer’s ability to talk about their own game.

Have you ever gotten so deep into a project – so nestled into the nuts and bolts – that you lost sight of the bigger picture? Has tunnel vision ever stopped you from even explaining what the big picture is supposed to be?^[1] That was my life last weekend. Had anyone asked, I would have been able to explain exactly how we had fixed a player-spawn bug or explain why the Jellyfish Queen boss has 2400 hit points. Somehow, though, with my tight focus on balancing and bug-squashing, I could not explain why we’re so excited for Fingeance. I lost sight of what makes the game special. With that in mind, I’d like to take a moment today to set things right. What follows is the first in a series of articles answering one simple question: “Why should I care about Fingeance?”

1 – These aren’t idle rhetorical questions, by the way, I’m intensely curious about whether other people work this way.

Fingeance, the 15-Minute MMO

From the very start, Escape Industries has been intent to set itself apart. Like everyone else in game-making, we’re obsessives who can’t not make games, but we’ve placed extra pressure on ourselves to make something that isn’t just a game, but the game in its genre. As new developers, we’ll never stand toe-to-toe with established giants. The market demands instead that we build something risky, exciting, and fresh – something that gamers never knew they always wanted.

So out with it! What have we spotted that other in this crowded field have missed? Here’s the skinny:

To many, the best parts of gaming crash together in the conflux of MMO boss raids. Social cohesion. Character refinement. Masterstroke planning. Split-second skill. All are fulfilled as the boss crumples and the loot pops out. Talk to anyone in high-level World of Warcraft raiding: people spend years chasing this feeling.

We want to deliver the same feeling in fifteen minutes.

This is, of course, a tall order. If we get it right, though, we’ll have the most addicting game since Candy Crush. To deliver on that promise, we’ll need to hijack and subvert some of the basic principles of MMO play. Here are a few examples:

• Stakes – The feeling that, win-or-lose, something monumental will happen. In MMO terms, winning means long-term progression and awesome gear. Losing means a long walk back and a dissection of what went wrong.
• Cohesion – The feeling that you are an essential and irreplaceable part of a team. MMOs do this incredibly well by teaching each player to play a role, and allowing every role to offer unique contributions to the whole.
• Attachment – The feeling that what happens in-game matters because the character is a part of you. In an MMO, this is a natural result of the time you spend on your character.

Each of these concepts is big enough to deserve its own article. For now, though, we’ll use these ideas to illustrate how Fingeance will deliver a cathartic raid boss experience in 15 minutes or less.

The core concept we need to drive for is time replacement. In an MMO, players have days or weeks of game time to form a bond with their character and with their fellow players. We don’t have that luxury. Fingeance will need to pull all the tricks to establish relationships – with your character, with your allies, and with the tantalizing promise of victory – at lightning speed.

Thieving from Rogues

We’ll start by stealing elements from roguelike games. No other genre offers passionate attachment and dizzying stakes as rapidly as roguelikes. Two of our favorite games, Faster Than Light and Risk of Rain, exemplify the roguelike’s almost underhanded ability to captivate gamers and inspire playthrough after playthrough. To understand what makes these giants tick, let’s look at the elements we’ll be borrowing:

• Permadeath – When you die, your character is gone forever. Fingeance introduces this concept when you play on higher difficulties. Additionally, you’ll only lose if the whole team dies at once. Otherwise, you’ll come back.
• Unlocks – Making progress or earning achievements will let you unlock new characters and gear.
• Randomization – each time you play Fingeance, the levels and loot will be all new.

In mimicking the stakes of a top-tier boss raid, we require two elements: ante and rewards. Permadeath demands that players ante their time and effort, risking a tragic loss in the event of failure. Unlocks, on the other hand, offer a potent and permanent reward for success. Unlocking new characters, starting equipment loadout, and discoverable in-game items also allows the game to evolve as players progress.

Randomization, meanwhile, heightens the impact of the other elements. Effort-minimization strategies such as input-memorization (e.g. platformers, ex. Super Meat Boy) and cached knowledge (e.g. Chess) wither in the face of randomized circumstance.

To see the devilish power of roguelikes, consider trying out Hoplite [Android (free)] [iOS]. A playthrough is only about two minutes long, but I catch myself flinching every time my character takes a hit. Why do I have such empathy for this tiny unnamed character? Why do I care so much whether I live or die if my ante is only two minutes of time? I’d wager a large part of it springs from randomization. Because I can’t fall back on pre-planned strategies, I must remain fully mentally present, carefully guiding my soldier on his descent into hell.

If you have an android phone, try out the free version, if you are missing a phone plan to download it, check these cheap phone plan deals in Australia. Though the mute protagonist never expresses emotion, I predict you can’t help but feel a bond of urgency and purpose.

A United Will

Speaking of a bond, next week we’ll look into how Fingeance will simulate a MMO Guild’s feeling of interdependence. We’ll look at how various characters and items work together to turn four players into a raiding machine, far greater than the sum of their parts.^[2]

2 – I feel as though this is a pun we’ll be using a lot in coming days.

Extra: Notes from GlitchCon 2015

Ahhh. Welcome from the other side of GlitchCon. It was a true delight to meet several of you, to hear what made you excited about our game. We also heard what made you apprehensive about Fingeance, what confused you, and what you can do without.

I love the Minnesota gaming community. First, they’re incredibly nice. It goes with the territory. Minnesota has that reputation, and delivers. However, a lot of communities skate by on being nice. Minnesota gaming has more than that. Here, people are incredibly honest, and perhaps a pinch competitive. In two days, we learned more about what we were doing wrong than in two months of prep leading up to it. Better, people showed us – in an incredibly detailed way – how to fix it, to turn those blunders into little moments of awesome. In particular, I need to thank Matthew Gravelle of Graveck and Stephen Guy, professor at the University of Minnsota, for giving me three hours between them of insight on graphics, code, and design theory.

I love that, in this community, it seems as though those that succeed aren’t those who miser away every second of time on their own projects, but are those who are most generous.

Thanks, Glitch.

Announcement: Fingeance, our very first game, will be shown at GlitchCon! Look for us at our booth in Minnecade on Sunday (Complete Schedule).

Hi everybody!

My name is Lane Davis. I write code for Fingeance, which means that I spend my afternoons doing the following:

• Teaching fish to pilot submarines.
• Teaching dolphins to hatch sinister schemes.
• Teaching lasers to make a mess out of everything.

I’ll also be spending Fridays writing about this little game of ours. On Monday, you’ll meet Stephen McGregor, who will take you through the design of Fingeance weapons and enemies. On Wednesday, Charles McGregor will begin his dive into Fingeance art and music. For now, though, it’s my pleasure to introduce the game itself, its story, and our design philosophy. Let’s get going!

It all begins with dolphins in an operating room.

Of all the creatures, none is as ambitious as the dolphin. We’re talking about a relentless search for power. Not since the Utahraptor has any species been this sour over being second-fiddle. As our story begins, these sinister cetaceans have discovered a lost power beneath the waves. In their darkest heart of hearts, the dolphins want to seize this power, to make themselves masters of land and sea.

You might well ask yourself, ‘how?’ After all, dolphins are as well known for their blowholes as they are for their playful[1] nature. On the one hand, they’re looking at an antediluvian power source that could re-shape the world. On the other, they’ve got to re-visit the surface every 5-7 minutes, or die. How can they make their schemes into reality?

You wouldn’t be alone in asking this. For years, top dolphin scientists have been mulling this very question. As our story begins, they’ve finally found their answer: the fish.

[1] – Allegedly.

Fingeance follows the story of four goldfish named Finn, Bubbles, Gil, and Dorsa. One moment, they were happily eating plankton. The next, they’d woken up in a dolphin medical facility – dazed, confused, and lacking the ability to breathe underwater. The fish had only a moment to panic before they were dumped unceremoniously back into the sea, never to be seen again…

…Or so the dolphins thought.

How will they survive?

What happens next?

Why did losing the ability to breathe underwater conveniently bestow the ability to breathe above water, against all common sense?

Join me next week and find out.

You’ve really done it now.

You know what happens when people follow up-and-coming game developers, right?

First, there’s some novel hook. Something pulls you in to this weird startup world. Maybe it’s the story, the game mechanics, the developers themselves. Something grabs hold, and a concept that did not exist in your mind until a moment ago lays claim to a tiny portion of your gray matter real estate. Then, it gets so much worse. As weeks stretch on, updates pour out, and an exciting new game forms before your very eyes. The concept, which seemed so strange before, becomes something you actively anticipate. All this plays right into the developers’ hands.

There’s a saying about this: “Create a need, then fill it.”

So then, all this is our way of saying “watch yourself.” If you wake up two months from now craving the feel of your submarine’s flaming laser sword blazing to life as you charge into the gargantuan maw of a mecha-Anglerfish, you’ll have been well warned.