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.