Hope you’re having a good time playing the Fingeance Alpha Demo! If you’ve played it a few times, you’ve no doubt come across an enemy or part that applies freeze. That is an example of a debuff. A debuff in most games weaken a target’s abilities in some way, and in our game they work the same way.
Debuffs are generally not used in shmups, but the way Fingeance is designed allows for the utility debuffs provide. The potency of each debuff scales with the power of the enemy. This means that even bosses can be affected, though they’ll be affected more briefly than standard-issue enemies. Here are a couple of the ways you can mess with your foes.
Freeze
This debuff I’ve talked about before. Freeze causes a target to slow down significantly, both in movement and rate of fire. This is likely the most common debuff you’ll see in the game as while it can be a strong effect, the impacted target still has plenty of agency. Freeze is best used on fast moving targets to make them more easily shot, or fast shooting enemies to lower their potential danger.
Stun
Stun works just as you’d expect; the target is unable to do anything for the duration of the debuff. This debuff is used sparingly in the game right now (the only part that has it in the demo is the Bouncing Burst) and the durations are left deliberately short. The ability to stun is a powerful strength especially in a genre of game where movement is vital, so we’ve tried to limit its benefits to creating openings in enemy shot patterns. Super fast shooting turret won’t let you pass? Hit them with a stun!
There are also regular buffs you can use in the game (the Frenzy Engine is an example of one in the demo) but I’ll save those for another time. See you next week!
Get it now:
It’s here at last: the Fingeance Alpha Demo is ready for your enjoyment. Before you dive in, here’s a few suggestions to maximize the fun:
- Controllers – Gamepads are best for a shmup such as this. Keyboard controls are also provided, but not recommended.
Battle the evil underwater enemies as you enact your Fingeance!
- Allies – Fishy foes are less fearful with friends! Fingeance supports up to four players, so bring extra allies with you underwater.
Pick from four furious fish, each with unique cannon and gadgets at their disposal!
- Creativity – The Fingeance Alpha Demo is packaged with many varieties of weapon parts, from the simple shooters to the complex cannons. Feel free to explore different combinations of cannons and gadgets included with this build. Let us know your favorite mixes!
Buy from a huge selection of parts to customize the ship you want!
Thank you for following us this far. We’ve been bursting with anticipation to bring you this demo. Let us know what you think, and be sure to follow us on our blog and Twitter, and like us on Facebook for more Fingeance content!
Escape Industries has been working really hard to bring you fine folks the Alpha Demo of Fingeance on June 1st. I’d like to share a couple new parts we plan to have ready on that day. Keep in mind that these parts are still in progress. Unfortunately, I can’t get pictures of these parts (the art isn’t in quite yet).
Piercer
This cannon pierces through all enemies. It deals less damage than other parts, but because of that piercing aspect, it has much more potential. Getting enemies to line up horizontally will multiply your damage output significantly. This new part is simple to use, but an advanced player can use that piercing mechanism to deal great damage to crowds of enemies.
Laser Deploy
This new part deploys a powerful laser turret that creates a giant beam, destroying all but the toughest of enemies in its path. You’ll want to be somewhat stingy with the use of this gadget, as it takes a while to regenerate the energy required to set up another turret to decimate foes. This weapon is great to use in a pinch, though the turret takes a little while to charge up before it shoots.
Snowballer
This seemingly weak weapon fires a concentrated blast of snowy goodness at your enemies. The snowball explodes on contact, dealing minor damage and freezing enemies for a significant time. This new part is an example of a utility gadget, as it is best used on fast firing or quick foes to slow them down for your team (or yourself) and makes most enemies caught in the blast much less threatening.
These new parts can take a lot of time to design and make, but it’s worth it to bring you the varied gameplay we want from Fingeance. Sorry for the shorter article though! I’m just so excited to bring you all this demo I can’t stay away. See you Monday for the release!
In preparing for Fingeance’s demo release (out June 1st!), I’ve been updating older chunks and creating a new beginner level as an introduction to the game for newer players. If you’ll bear with me, I’d like to go over what a beginner level for Fingeance looks like.
Start of the level is completely devoid of enemies.
Right in the beginning, the player is dropped into an empty ocean. The players won’t see an enemy for several seconds, and will not be in danger of taking damage even if they don’t move for quite a while. This allows the players to experiment with the controls before having to deal with any consequences. A beginner can feel free to make mistakes, spam their gadget, shoot off into nothing, and be safe from any enemy retaliation.
After the introduction, players are introduced to the simplest enemies in the game, Mini-guppies, in an easy to deal with pattern. The guppies are placed in such a way to encourage movement. Players with an understanding of the game will move downwards while shooting to hit each of the first group of guppies. Beginner players (who maybe don’t fully grasp shooting) will be able to easily avoid the guppies.
A wall of guppies follows after. These guppies are a little harder to avoid, but still easy enough to deal with. It’s a more interesting enemy pattern for all players, new or old, to go through.
Bullets 101
20 seconds into the level, the players are introduced to the first shooting enemy, Guppy Gunners. Beginner players can avoid these by slipping between its shots. More advanced players will power through them.
Part way through the Guppy Gunner section is a Treasure Chest. This is meant as a reward for more advanced players by giving them extra scrap for avoiding or killing the gunners. Beginner players can avoid the Treasure Chest without having to worry though, as it is not a requirement.
Afterwards is an intro to the turrets. Some of the chunks in the game play out somewhat like an obstacle course, so this is a small taste of that for beginners. Note the Treasure Chest in an inconvenient location.
Here is a more advanced version of a turret pattern. The turrets are set up so that the level is split into three different lanes. Teams can split up and access each of the lanes, and can easily hit all of the upcoming enemies. Advanced players can slip between each lane too, if they’re up to the challenge.
Near the end of this level, right before the boss encounter, is another Treasure Chest. It’s a little difficult to grab for beginners, but it’s a nice heal for more experienced players before the boss.
The boss of this beginner level is another fairly simple encounter (compared to other boss encounters in the game) with a simple “target furthest player” attack pattern. An easily exploitable pattern for advanced players, and a manageable threat for beginners.
That’s one of the beginner levels we’ve got going for the demo release. The beginner levels (at least for the demo) work differently from chunks because we wanted more control over how players experienced it. Each level will be randomly chosen when the team starts the game.
This past week has actually been productive for me design wise, despite having to get through finals week (maybe it’s from all the procrastination I’ve been doing…). I’ve completed a few parts that I’ve been meaning to hash out for a while, and am now currently working on the level design for Fingeance. I realize that we haven’t gone over how levels will work in the game though, so I think I should elaborate before I go any further.
Level design in our game works fairly differently from other shoot ’em ups. Since a large focus is put on replayability and adaption in our design philosophies, we’ve established a level system that allows each playthrough to be unique, but not by the use of procedural generation. Levels are made out of several different small instances that last from 10-30 seconds (we call them “chunks”), with scattered minibosses and an end boss. This allows us to create experiences within the game that feel like full polished levels, but still have that random generation feel that is standard in most roguelikes. Some of the best chunks in the game have novel encounters you’ll recognize with experience, and because each session gives you different parts to play with, the encounters will still feel fresh.
With all that said, I’m working on improving the quality of some of the older chunks and levels right now. Early in the process, I looked to classic 2D platformers (Super Mario and the like) to help guide me. I would create chunks that introduced a gameplay aspect and build on it. I realized though that this strategy makes the level way too long, and slows down the pace of the game significantly. I’ve changed my strategy to creating shorter instances with more action inside, making a level more hectic but more fun too!
I’ll be sure to let you all know how the process is coming along next week. See you then!
Hey folks! It’s that time of the year where the more exciting and fun stuff (like this blog…) has to get put on the backburner for the more important and boring things (like finals…). Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to do much game design work this past week. This blog post and likely next week’s are going to be sparse.
What little work I have done has been relatively unfruitful; I’ve been working on designing some new parts for Fingeance, but for the most part the designs haven’t panned out. One successful part is the Gatling Gun: a high damage cannon that increases in fire rate the longer it has been firing. It should be familiar to players of FPS’s or the like. The faster the cannon is shooting, however, the slower your ship will move. It’s a high risk, high reward kind of weapon; control over your ship’s speed and damage with this part will give you higher damage over time than other weapons, if you can handle the slower movement speed.
A lot of my game design work this week has been devoted to making a simple cannon with a similar playstyle to the Gatling Gun. The Gatling Gun’s play pattern is based on finding ideal points to deal large amounts of damage safely, but I feel like it is a more difficult weapon to get a hold of. Novice players will likely constantly hold the fire button down, resulting in a frustrating experience with the lower movement speed. What I would like to do is develop a cannon that has that same play pattern, but in more simple package, although if you also like other type of games such as slot games, you can visit studybreaks.com to find great options to play and also make some money.
Hopefully, next week I’ll have much more exciting game design news to bring you all. Until then, may the grading curves be ever in your favor. I certainly hope they will!
This past week, I’ve been looking at the movement options we have in Fingeance currently. This blog post is gonna get pretty in depth in some of our design philosophies and understanding of our game, as well as the history of this game’s creation a little. Hopefully you get something interesting out of it.
(Quick note: Lane and I have decided to switch our blog posts around. Lane will be posting on Mondays and I will be posting on Fridays starting this week.)
Initially, player ships had three different parts that could be attached: cannons, gadgets, and hulls. Hulls contained all of a player’s movement and health, as well as had an additional action we called a “defense effect.” These effects ranged from giving the player a shield around him/her ship that protected it from bullets, to a dash that let players move around the screen more quickly. We realized that adding these additional options in the game made customization more complicated. It also made designing unique parts a harder ordeal than we would have liked. Adding in an additional action for players made it necessary for the complexity of each action to be smaller, and we didn’t like the direction that led us.
So, we decided to remove hulls as an option for customization. The stats gained from hulls were moved to cannons and gadgets. However, we were still considering leaving the “defense effect” action in the game by making it the same for all players. This would still give players more ability, but since the action would be consistent across the board, cannons and gadget complexity wouldn’t have to change. As we had difficulty making shields work in the past and liked the gameplay of a dash, we made dashes an action all players can take.
Dashes in previous iterations of the game varied a bit. There weren’t a ton in the game when we decided to remove hulls, but there were three kinds of dashes: a dodge (a dash that made you intangible to bullets when active), a dash (a regular dash with a cooldown), and hyperdash (a regular dash with no cooldown). Each of these dashes came with their own sets of problems. The dodge was satisfying to use when it worked, but was not clear when the intangibility was active and was fairly situational. The dash was clear and less situational, but wasn’t satisfying to use. The hyperdash was fun to use, but it overtook regular movement because it was so safe.
In my analysis, I looked at why we wanted to give every player a movement option, and what that would add to our game. I looked to many different sources for this, including platformers such as a Mario game. In the 2D Mario games, they have a run mechanic that lets players move faster while the button is held down. I actually implemented a run mechanic in our game to see how it would feel. After testing this run mechanic, and retesting the older dashes, we felt that giving movement options to each player’s ship was not necessary, and didn’t add much to the game. We’ve since removed them, but that doesn’t mean we can’t revisit it later to add to a gadget.
Thanks for reading this! It seems like a lot of obvious stuff, but sometimes as a creator you need to step back and look at what you’re making.
It’s been a little while since we’ve gone over parts in Fingeance, but since I’ve been working out a few designs I wanted to share some of the more finalized ones with you. Keep in mind that they may not be exactly like this in the final product.
Frenzy Engine
This gadget will increase your ship’s rate of fire dramatically while it is active. It’s a great gadget for players with strong cannons, looking to deal loads of extra damage on the team’s foes. This also has excellent synergy with cannons that can use the increased rate of fire particularly well, such as a weapon that deals increased damage on every other shot. Some of our parts can be kind of complex, but this part is really simple for newer players to grasp, which is nice as well.
Skirmisher
Neutral pattern
Forward pattern
Backward pattern
The Skirmisher is a cannon that changes firing patterns based on the player’s movement. The shooting patterns are still in flux, but currently shooting while not moving fires in a very wide cone, hitting multiple targets. Moving forward concentrates your fire to right in front of you, loading all of your damage to a small area. Going backwards fires several shots behind you, and in two wide angles in front. Mastery of this cannon will involve a strong understanding of the capabilities of each pattern. Each pattern is situational, but generally players will be encouraged to move forward to concentrate their damage on a specific group of enemies. The other patterns give players other options in case moving forward is not viable at any time.
Bomb Launcher
Example of explosion
It works just like the name implies: this gadget shoots out a bomb that on impact with an enemy will explode in a large radius. Helpful for those pesky guppies in large groups, and powerful enough to deal great burst damage to the tougher foes. Another simple gadget, but because of its high damage burst, it can’t be used very frequently. Best to save this gadget for when you really need it.
That’s it for this week! I’ve been working on Fingeance’s movement options recently, so I’ll go over what I mean by that next week.
So guppies, you love ’em, you hate ’em. They aren’t much of a threat though. Even in large groups, you can just plow through them with enough damage (or a cooperative team!). But what happens when you strap a couple of cannons on their sides?
Enter the guppy gunners. These guys move slightly faster and are a bit tougher than regular guppies. Oh, and they have big cannons installed. That’s their big hook: these guys are kinda hard to avoid if you just leave them alone because those cannons can be pretty difficult to get past. If you have someone who can block bullets, stun/slow enemies or just outright kill a guppy gunner, they’re not much of a problem. In general, it would benefit the team to deal with a guppy gunner quickly before they get close enough to be an immediate threat.
Where do these guys fit into a level of Fingeance though? They have the benefit of not being a drastic and immediate threat when they show up on screen. They also wall off progress in a minor way if not dealt with. Therefore, they’re strong when placed in an area with more imminent threats in the level. For example, if you put these guys in a level with a bunch of heat seeking missiles it would be harder to prevent them from getting close to your team, as the team would have to deal with the missiles first. Guppy gunners provide more of a challenge the longer they are in the level, as you have less space to deal with them.
Next time, I’ll discuss some more part designs I’ve been working on this week. I hope to see you there!
These little guys, called guppies, are like the goombas of the sea (yes, I’m aware that cheep cheeps are the goombas of the sea, shush): they appear in a variety of situations all over the game, but are very easy to dispose of. Don’t let their cute appearance fool you, contact with these guys will still hurt. As I stated last week, because they are so easy to defeat and avoid, they don’t provide much scrap.
Guppies like the ones pictured are supposed to be quick fodder for players new at the game to get more acquainted with the concepts of the game. Sometimes they are used as a big group for fast scrap (and healing!), and sometimes they lead players into safer areas on the screen. Or sometimes things like this happen:
How you get through a giant cluster (group? gathering? flock? school! It’s school) of guppies are one example of the kinds of challenges we want to present to a group of players in game. Do you blast your way through? Try to find a way past? It’s up to your team to figure it out.
Guppies don’t just come in one form though; next week we’ll go over some variations of guppies, and talk a bit about our design goals for these sea creatures.