Dorsa has been in the game since the beginning, but she’s never really had a role that fit her character well. As detailed in our character descriptions, Dorsa is a greedy, self-absorbed fish who wants to profit from the takedown of the Dolphin Empire as much as possible. However, we’ve oftentimes saddled her with a loadout more suited for a selfless support role. We’ve asked ourselves time and again: do we want this character to be a rogue or support? And then we thought, why not both?

Meet the Rogue

Dorsa has been built from the ground up to be the best of both worlds. Her toolkit revolves around manipulating both her positioning and enemy positioning to yield the most reward for her and her teammates. Her abilities are best used when enemies have been grouped together by her excellent movement slowing capabilities. For all her utility, though, she lacks damage. She delivers less firepower than any other member of the core squad, but she makes up for it by keeping her teammates fighting and her enemies at bay.

Dorsa’s cannon is the Super Sniper, a powerful gun with a slow rate of fire. Each bullet deals high damage, but every shot counts! A Dorsa player will want to make sure that she’s in a good position to hit each bullet. Missing even a few puts a devastating cramp on your damage per second.

Icy Personality

The Ice Grenade can make many enemies in the Kelp Forest vulnerable to attack.

Dorsa’s first gadget is the Ice Grenade. It fires an explosive projectile that triggers an icy field on hit, slowing all enemies within that area drastically while it’s active. In addition to dealing solid damage in the area, this gadget makes hitting enemies with the Super Sniper super simple. A mobile enemy is rendered nearly useless while frozen, and is far easier to bulls-eye with further shots.

Proper use of the Ice Grenade will vary from stage to stage. In the Kelp Forest, it’s an invaluable tool in slowing down the hordes of aggressive enemies mobbing you from all sides. In the Cave, however, use it to freeze big enemies when their weak points are exposed, elongating their window of vulnerability.

Feels Good to be a Thief

The Pickrocket rounds out Dorsa’s loadout. This versatile weapon can be aimed in any direction she chooses while holding the gadget’s activation button down, and fires a piercing rocket on button release that deals little damage to enemies hit. Dorsa and her team are healed for each enemy the rocket hits as it travels. The ideal strategy is to line enemies up to hit as many as possible for a massive healing burst for the team. Enemies can be manipulated by positioning Dorsa or an ice field from the Ice Grenade, making the Pickrocket even more effective.

Although the burst healing from the Pickrocket is strong, it has little effectiveness when it hits only one enemy, which makes healing from many boss encounters difficult. Many bosses call up minions to fight your team off, however, so if you can survive until then, you can keep your team fighting strong well after. Don’t be afraid to wait for the right angle either! The reward for hitting many enemies is worth it.
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We’ve finally feel we’ve made a loadout that feels right on Dorsa’s ship, and still provides support utility that her team would want. Do you feel we hit the mark? Tell us how you feel in the comments below, send us a tweet to our Twitter page, or comment on our Facebook page.

One of the most commonly asked questions after we demo the game at conventions and the like is, “Why is it only 3 levels! We want to play more!” That is a really humbling question to hear: it means that we are doing something right. The honest answer is that we just don’t have the content to support more levels yet. We have been polishing up and adding new features to the existing content and slowly expanding the game, but we haven’t pushed the scope of the game for a while.

But that isn’t the case anymore.

These last couple of weeks have been more focused on getting ready for the new push for content after those initial levels. We are starting to magnify the scope of the game to get a better feel of how the game is at later levels. What better way to signify this than the creating on new areas, parts, and characters!

Yes, you read right, characters!

Introducing Spike

Unlocks in Fingeance is a topic that we here at Escape Industries take seriously and we want you, the player, to feel rewarded for all of your feats in-game. One of the ways that we hope to achieve this is through characters, and Spike is our first foray into this sphere.

Spike is brute that can take a beating but can dish it right back at you. He puts his body on the line to help defend his comrades from danger. This extends to his initial loadout which emphasizes taking damage head on.

The idea behind new characters that you unlock is that they are more specialized roles and standout personalities within the game, expanding the starting loadout possibilities. We are still testing the waters with adding in new characters and how they will interact with the rest of the team. But we don’t want to spoil too many characters as we want to save some surprises when you guys finally get your hands on the game. So don’t expect a huge expose on the latest characters adding in the game anytime soon.

Expanding Parts

In the spirit of expanding the later content of the game, we’ve been creating new higher tier parts. Some of these will be completely new, but many will be direct upgrades to parts you’ve seen in the past. For example, we’ve recently added the Phantom Gear as a Tier 3 part. This gadget is the upgraded version of a past part called Ghost Gear, and while it is active it will give you’re ship ghostly properties. The ship becomes intangible to all contact (except scrap, for you greedy guppies out there) and emits a haunting trail that damages and chills enemies. 

Preliminary Biome

The other main area that we are focusing on is a new place our heroes will traverse. The next area will be a Kelp Forest. Overgrown with vegetation and algae, this area is an organic locale that our fish friends must navigate through in order to proceed.

Or at least that is the plan anyway.

Right now it is in some very preliminary stages and not really that fleshed out yet, but I wanted to leave you with a very small preview of what we have so far.

So there you have it, as you can see we are starting to slowly make our way towards the “end” of the game rather than just staying in the beginning. We hope you like what you see, and if you want, you can leave a comment below or on our Facebook page as well as tweet at us. Until next time.

Wait, is that… No… It can’t be… can it?

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

But enough talking time to show it. Oh boy…

Old Concept Art

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

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

Comic Book-ish (Not Really)

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

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

Refinement

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

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

Enter Vectors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Over the past week I have been learning new things more than I have been doing. The only thing I have to show is that I am working on some new concept art of the characters, starting with Finn. It is really important that you draw your character in multiple poses before you put in the work. That way you know how the character will look like from multiple angles. I didn’t do this in the past and I had an obscenely hard time figuring out what characters looked like. But now I am trying to fix that problem by doing that beforehand.

But really that isn’t the biggest thing that I did this past week; that I can’t show. I have been learning how to use various software, particularly Adobe products. I have access to the suite and figured that Escape Industries and my other projects could use it. So I set off to learning After Effects and a bit of Premiere. Luckily, I have access to Lynda.com so I spent a large chunk of my time over there just learning and soaking in all of the tutorials and videos they have. I still am in the process of learning these things so, again, I don’t have anything to show. But hopefully soon I should have something to show you guys as I really excited to put some things into practice!

But all of this begs the question, why do I need this skill for Escape Industries?

It’s time to dive into the characters of Fingenace! They make up an interesting bunch where everyone brings something to the table. So let’s take a look:

Finn

   Finn is a hot headed fish out for vengeance! He is the leader of the group… or at least he tries to be. He is intelligent but stubborn, blinded by his hatred towards the dolphins. When he gets fired up there is no stopping him from venting his anger!

Since Finn is such an angry fish I really wanted to push that and highlight just that. So I made is eyebrows extremely long to really sell the loud and flamboyant stature that he gives off. This decision can be seen in all of the other fish in the group as they have extremely long eyebrows or eyelashes, but none as intense as Finn’s.

Bubbles

Bubbles has one goal: to blow things up, and she plans on fulfilling that task. She is the youngest out of the group but that doesn’t stop her from exploding all that stand in her way.

Bubbles is interesting in the way that she really want to explode things. So I wanted to push that attitude that she alludes. I think that she was the most successful in terms of having a personality as she is just dripping personality from this stance.

Gil

Gil is very precise in what he does and he does it efficiently. He is a sharp shooter always thinking one step ahead of him. When the others aren’t up to par, that is when he loses his cool.

Gil was hard for me to nail down, I’m not really even sure if I am done with the look of it. When I was imaging him, I was picturing a slick and slender fish. He has given me the most trouble in terms of conveying his personality. Through is body language.

Dorsa

While Dorsa wants revenge for what the dolphins did to them, she also would love to benefit from all of this… Financially. She wants all of the money and scrap that these dolphins have for herself. It isn’t every day that you come across an opportunity as rich as this.

Dorsa is very intelligent and thinks highly of herself. I tried to pose her in a position that accentuated that fact. Other than that she really was an enigma when I was designing her, but in the end I think that it turned out well.

So that is an overview of each character and some insight as to why I designed them the way that I did. Things are still in the air but I think this is about what they are going to look like in the end. What do you think? Let me know in the comments and hope to see you next week!

In other news, we went to Glitch Con last weekend! It was great seeing all of you and being able to interact and show the game off was a blast! But I am sure Lane will be talking more about that on Friday.

Remember check out Stephen on Mondays and Lane on Fridays, while I take on Wednesdays.

(In case your wondering why this wasn’t on Wednesday, yesterday was April Fool’s… no one would have taken it seriously, it’s the internet!)