Last week, a fan of ours decided to play Fingeance using only his right hand. Surprisingly, he did very well throughout the campaign (albeit on easy mode)! It immediately dawned on me how much decreasing the skill floor in Fingeance has helped with approachability and accessibility.

Apparently Fingeance is one hand friendly… #gamedev #indiedev pic.twitter.com/gIDGFoNSQW

— Escape Industries (@EscIndustries) July 29, 2016

In the past, Fingeance had somewhat of a split personality issue in terms of the skill levels we’re focusing on. We’d like the game to be a much more newbie-friendly shmup, but we also want a “shooter with depth” for advanced players. In our efforts to add that depth we crave, we sometimes added overly complex character abilities that turn off both newer and expert players. We’ve found that simplifying parts and lowering the skill floor had a dramatic effect in a user’s understanding and enjoyment of Fingeance.

Skill Floor: A Breakdown

The skill floor is a game design term used to describe the minimum level of ability a player must have in order to progress through the game and/or positively contribute to a team or competitive experience. For example, a game like Super Smash Bros. packs a low skill floor with its simple and intuitive controls as opposed to the comparatively complex Marvel vs Capcom 3. This term should not to be confused with the skill ceiling, which describes the amount of effort it takes to master a game/character/system.

For Fingeance, we aim for that elusive gold standard: a low skill floor and a high skill ceiling. Previous iterations tended to be high floor, high ceiling affairs. Oftentimes, we reach the amount of depth we’d like from the game, but with complicated and unfriendly character parts.

Keeping it Simple

Complicated parts are fun, right? You get to do a lot more with them than a simple part, which makes more interesting decisions.

Turns out, the cost of complexity in Fingeance was higher than we originally thought. See, the basic actions of Fingeance — dodging bullets and hitting enemies — has heaping helpings of complexity and depth on their own. Now, add to that powerful special abilities, and we have a game that’s quite hard to master indeed.

But here’s the problem: we were addicted to adding gadgets with weird, unique, and challenging uses. Here, take a look at a gadget we added a few months ago:

Finn’s gadget, Rally Cry, used to have two selections that you could pick from by moving in a direction. As you can see, while the menu is up, the player can’t actually move their sub. Instead, their analog stick gets mapped to the menu, freezing their movement in place.

Standing still for even a few moments to decide what buff you wanted to apply to your team made that gadget risky to use. The two choices had drastically different outcomes, making the best use case for them hard to determine. Also, newer players couldn’t figure out what Rally Cry even did, as they would press the button too fast to see the menu or would see it pop up without any obvious way to use it.

Here’s another example:

Dorsa’s Pickrocket had a similar issue. Aiming the part took a bit of time to adjust to, which is frequently time you can’t afford in a shoot-em-up. Occasionally, the part delighted a player on completion of a perfect shot. But mostly, it left the baffled or — worse — wishing they had another continue. We’ve made these parts easier to use by making them function as through one button press. No longer will players have to go through hoops to reach the skill floor!

Pumping in the Juice

For the two gadgets above, we’ve made big changes. For one thing, we’ve added lots of visual and audio flair. This gives players a better understanding of what they’ve done and how powerful the action is.

Finn’s Rally Cry replacing gadget is the Defense Formation, a powerful defensive boon that gives all players a large shield for 3 seconds when activated. This shield takes damage for them when until it reaches its health limit. To support this, we’ve pumped some serious juice into this part, making it a clearly momentous occasion. Finn players should feel good every time they use the gadget. Giving someone a boost to their defense isn’t nearly as satisfying if you can’t tell it happened!

Meanwhile, Dorsa’s Pickrocket was changed to a missile that explodes on impact, stealing the health of enemies in the blast radius. We’ve added a fancy explosion when it reaches its mark, and particles now come from enemies hit to all players healed from the life steal effect. Players just starting with Dorsa will now have a clear indicator on their effectiveness.

Playing as Finn and Dorsa feels much more satisfying with these changes, and future content will follow suit. How do you feel about the lowered skill floor? You can comment here on our blog, or reach us on our Twitter, Facebook, and IndieDB pages.

Escape Industries and Fingeance will be at The Bit Run in Richfield this Sunday, July 31st!

The Bit Run is the world’s first video game themed run/walk, and we’re honored to have Fingeance shown this year. The course is a 4K or 8K dash through Richfield Veterans Park, with video game themed challenges spread throughout the race, including fights in Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and racing through the game Runbow. There’s even a side Pokemon Go challenge for those Pokemon Masters out there! Live music will be played during the run by Ravepulse, and a post-race concert by Do A Barrel Roll.

Fingeance will have special content for runners, including a new boss and more items to buy in the shop! Join us this Sunday at The Bit Run for a fun time!

Since we first started working on Fingeance, I have had two personal goals in mind. I wanted the game to be accessible enough that you can jump in and have fun without knowing anything about the game. I also wanted to really sell the comic book aesthetic of the game, since games are really popular, and there are even gambling games online, you can visit unitedfinances.com to find more about this area. Even the very first post that I made on this blog was about the art style and the feeling I wanted to invoke. So far, we have taken some HUGE strides to making the game a lot more approachable. For instance, updating the shop… then updating it again… and updating it again. But in terms of truly selling the comic book visuals, I don’t think I have done a good job of that.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that the art itself looks great! The comic book art style is really coming across quite well. But that’s just it, the art style is what is coming across – not the aesthetic. Only the art of Fingeance is telling you this is a comic book and not much else. One of the most telling things that really got me thinking about this was when someone was trying out our game recently:

“This looks like a Saturday morning cartoon!”

… Whelp.

With that in the back of my head, I am planning on beefing up Fingeance’s comic book aesthetic!

Comic Book Cover

As the saying goes, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” but let’s not let that stop us. Fingeance’s cover could use some work. The splash screen has always been placeholder so it is not a surprise when I say that it isn’t really that comic book-y.

Well, let’s do what the page says. We’ll just hit A, and surely it’ll plunge us into an ocean of comic-inspired adventure…

Oh…

This menu stands out as an older philosophy of Fingeance. It also represents our head space when we first started. We didn’t know what we wanted in the game so I designed the menu to allow for any number of buttons rather than designing with a couple of buttons in mind. In hindsight, this approach actually seems pretty smart.

Don’t know what will be in the game? Make it flexible.

The issue? I was thinking that this should be the final menu design. This philosophy is flexible, but it leaves us with a menu devoid of personality. There’s no interesting panel layout, dynamic animations, cool interactions, or engaging art that could be explored here. It’s here that I can emphasize the comic book aesthetic by having those slick transitions and style the buttons in comic panels or even dialogue boxes.

A Different Perspective

Take this page from Marvel Knights: Spiderman:

It is dynamic, has a lot of character, and is engaging to read. It has a clear hierarchy of what is important on the page, where to start and where to go, all while maintaining its stylish panels that are integrated into the world.

This is the sort of stuff that I am looking for. This is the sort of style and interest that I want to achieve. This is the comic book aesthetic that is sorely missing in Fingeance right now.

So I am currently trying my hand designing some new menu layouts with these principles and examples in mind. Here are some fairly early designs I have come up with: some radically different, some more familiar.

Similar to my last post, this isn’t just about the main menu; this is about what this means for Fingeance. Future menus are going to be tackled with a new mindset. The pause menu, the results screen, and yes, even the shop menu all are going to be updated with this new philosophy.

Future Cutscenes

One other aspect we have been banking on in terms of selling the aesthetic is cutscenes. Not only will they help flesh out the story of the game, but they also be presented in comic book panels. Currently there are two different styles of comic book cutscenes that we are looking into: Full page comic and Pan and Zoom style.

Full page

This style brings up a panel on the screen and then brings up another panel on the screen. This will eventually fill up the screen with a bunch of panels and complete a comic book page. This is really great in terms of putting together the whole story because all of the previous panels are still on the screen so you can reference them if you want to. An example of this are the cutscenes in (the rather obscure) Monster Madness, which did something similar to what we would want:

What I would want in this approach is having the panels themselves become characters in telling the story. Shaking, interrupting, and bashing each other to help sell the action that is going on inside the story. This is a nice blend of both digital and physical comics. The downside is that the panels themselves don’t have as much detail in them because they are small portions of the screen.

Pan and Zoom

This style zooms in on one or two panels then pans over to the next panel. You may find games that zoom out to reveal the all the comic in the end. In fact, a lot of digital comics take this approach when you chose the Panel by Panel option, it zooms in on one part then moves to the next. An excellent example of this are some of the cutscenes in Gravity Rush (Remastered in this case):

It is slick, very stylish, and the attention is directed much like a movie. It uses the digital aspect of the medium very effectively. The downside is that you lose a bit of that character that make comic book panels important. It is more about the things on the panel rather than the “Comic book” itself.

Another option that I haven’t mentioned is a mix of the two, more of a motion graphic. This is seen well in Metal Gear Solid: Peacewalker

Whichever option that we choose, Full Page or Pan and Zoom or a mix of both, cutscenes will be a step in the right direction for selling that feel we are searching for.

Wrap Up

That’s a lot of stuff, so a quick recap:

• The art style of Fingeance is clear but the “Comic Book” part isn’t.
• The menus could really help sell the aesthetic.
  • Yep, the shop is going to be updated again.
• Cutscenes are also going to help sell the feel.
• There are a couple of cutscene options that we could explore to do so.

Hopefully this provided some insight as to what direction we want to head down and what we are currently thinking. If you have any suggestions or thoughts on the subject feel free to drop us a line on Twitter, Facebook, or IndieDB!

In our recent demo release, we added in a few unexpected features. There were weird new bosses, a secret difficulty level, and of course, unlockable characters. You might have come across a few already. One character is Spike, the tanky turtle who Lane’s talked about a bit, but the other’s more of a mystery. Sparky, the slippery electric eel, is unlocked if you complete the demo’s campaign on any difficulty.

Sparky’s Electric Personality

Sparky is a little eel with a big ego. She loves to be the center of attention, and her kit allows her to dazzle audiences with showy displays of skill. She specializes in dealing huge damage bursts, and avoiding enemies by zipping around them. Though Sparky has unparalleled ability to shoot and dodge her way out of difficult situations, this agility comes at a cost. With a low starting health, and no way to freeze enemies or heal herself, using Sparky demands fast reactions and skillful decision-making.

But when you get it right? Oh, it’s gonna be sweet.

Sparky’s cannon is the Shock Trooper, a swift-shooting gun with reliable long-ranged fire. The Shock trooper is really easy to use (don’t worry! The rest of Sparky’s kit is where things get interesting), but its high rate of fire means it offers a high reward for what I’ll call “switch timing,” that is, alternating to the next target right when the first one dies. Great timing — plus the use of Sparky’s movement tool, below — lets her keep pace with even the heaviest hitters like Gil.

Teleport to the Top

Sparky’s first gadget is the Teleporter, which lets her cleverly slip through whatever comes her way. Pressing the activation button down starts the process, showing a targeting reticle in the direction of the left control stick/directional keys. Releasing the button transfers her ship instantly to the reticle.

This gadget can be used to quickly position Sparky, whether that be offensively or defensively. For example, she can quickly defeat enemies on the bottom part of the screen, then immediately teleport upwards to continue her onslaught. Conversely, she might linger in the middle part of the screen, attracting a hail of bullets, only to effortlessly warp out of harm’s way.

Now, let’s consider another feature of Teleporter. While its button is held, it’s charging. As you charge up Teleporter, its maximum range increases. This offers a great reward for watching enemies closely: If you anticipate a big attack: start charging early so you can hop over whatever the foe throws at you.

Shock to the System

The Thunderbolt, Sparky’s second gadget, is where her burst specialty comes in. Pressing the activation button starts a charging process, slowing her ship down significantly. Releasing the button unleashes the charge. The longer the charge is held, the more focused the cone is and the more bullets are fired. A fully charged Thunderbolt shot fires all of the bullets in a straight line.

If you’re facing a group of weaker foes, a quick Thunderbolt shot will make short work of them. For bigger baddies, charge it up for higher efficiency, but be ready to Teleport if you get into trouble. An expert Sparky player will determine the optimal Thunderbolt to fit each situation. We’ve seen people have remarkable success combining Teleporter and Thunderbolt use. In particular ,try charging up Thunderbolts from safety, then Teleporting into position for devastating damage on an enemy’s weak point.

Sparky has been revealed! How do you feel about this new character? We’d love to hear your thoughts. You can comment here on our blog, or find us on our Twitter, Facebook and IndieDB pages.

Fingeance has seen some insane changes in the past year, to the point where our old Fingeance demo just wasn’t cutting it. The art and audio is out of date, and several design decisions we made have been tossed out or improved. We feel the game is in a better state than a year ago, and today we’re here to prove it.

Fingeance Demo 2016

Feast your eyes on the new and improved Fingeance demo! The demo will take you through the colorful warzone of the Coral Reef, and in addition to a taste of the corrupted Kelp Forest. Play as Finn, Bubbles, Gil, and Dorsa in their quest for dolphin empire destruction.

The game has gone through some immense changes since the last Fingeance Demo, so here are a few reminders on what’s new.

Updates for the New Demo

Drastic Pacing and Rebalancing Changes

In the past, Fingeance was simply too fast. Our camera scrolled so quickly that enemies generally had only 8-10 seconds to leave an impression before the players left them behind. To compensate for this swift flyby, enemies dealt massive damage, often leading confused players to die nearly instantly. To resolve this, we made players take significantly less damage and added weight to a large number of enemies, allowing their presence to slow scrolling and force encounters. With these guaranteed knock-down-drag-out fights, you’ll find that Tank and Support characters are suddenly quite valuable.

Same Old Characters, Bold New Flavor

Your favorite fish have gotten upgrades to fight the dolphin menace. In general, each character is much more specialized than in the past, providing your team with unique strengths. The new Fingeance demo features these new character ships, as featured in our articles on Bubbles, Gil, Dorsa , and, of course, Finn. Equally important, the game is more approachable than ever before. Brand new rebalanced difficulties await, promising fun for salty dogs and landlubbers alike. Starting character loadouts are also much easier to use, leading to a far more fun learning curve.

Shop Better, Be Better

Fingeance Demo, 2016 edition also has a new fast-paced shop! We’ve removed buyable cannons and gadgets, and have implemented a new augment and upgrade system. It’s easy: pick one of three perks, then spend money on direct upgrades, then repeat for each level you complete. This is, in short, a massive improvement, as voiced by every friend who’s seen it. It’s easier for newbies and deeper for experienced players.

Variety is the Spice of Life

Fingeance has been given a graphical overhaul, with a new lighting system and more biomes than ever before. You’ll have a sample of the new Kelp Forest, with new enemies to fight and new music to jam to. Characters also react to actions onscreen with 500 new lines of incidental speech-bubble dialogue that pop up during downtime.

The Fingeance demo is out now! You can download it for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Keep up to date on the latest Fingeance news here on our blog, over on our Facebook page, our Twitter, and our IndieDB page.

Hey lads and ladies! As of this posting, we are thirty hours away from setting up our station at 2D Con in scenic Bloomington, MN. After that, we’ll spend June 3rd-5th exploring the fun 2D Con has to offer and displaying all that’s new in Fingeance. Here are a few of our proudest offerings:

Character Dialogue

For the first time, we’ll take our bold new dialogue system for a spin. For months, we’ve been talking up the silly, sulky, or sassy personalities of our main characters. Now, watch them in action. Characters will react to events both splendid and catastrophic, and will pipe up with pithy quips between battles.

All-new Shop Scene

That’s right folks, the Fingeance progression that you know and tolerate has been massively upgraded. Feast your eyes on these changes:

Old Shop: Tons of information delivered all at once, very little room for descriptions.

New Shop Part 1: Pick one of three upgrades. No scrap required. These add unique powers and personality to your ship.

New Shop Part 2: Buy Statistical Upgrades. These add straightforward numerical bonuses to things like health, movespeed, and damage.

Yeah, yeah, it looks beautiful, but don’t be over-awed by Charles’ jaw-dropping stand-in art. Focus instead on the pleasure of a system that works on so many levels:

First, the new shop slashes analysis paralysis. The old shop presented a huge amount of information on one screen. In the new shop, we break that complexity into two simple choices (pick one special augment, then buy upgrades), one of which is always the same. This results in the same amount of meaningful decision-making, since previously about 50% of all buyable parts were just straight stat increases.

Second, the new shop allows team communication. Let’s say you’re in a four-player game, and you’ve just entered the shop scene. Let’s imagine you’re playing on Hard mode, and you’d like to spend a moment strategizing with your team to plan out the best set of upgrades you can take. In the old shop, this would mean reading all 24 available parts. The new shop cuts this decision space down to 12, and also removes costs, greatly reducing the analysis burden. In the old shop, most players exhibited one of two behaviors: either they spent minutes carefully tuning their own build (something the old shop was pretty good at) or they decided it was all too overwhelming, chose random gear, and bolted out of the shop at top speed. We believe the new shop will be more broadly user friendly and will promote a lot more cross-talk and interaction between players.

Third, the new shop improves readability. This is comparatively minor, but it’s nice for observers to be able to tell — with one glance at a player’s upgrade path — what kind of build they’re going for.

Fourth, the new shop controls weirdness. In the past, we’ve had some buyable upgrades that grant stat upgrades (more health, more damage, etc.) and others that add new abilities (extra explosions when you do this, freezing powers when you do that, etc.). We quickly saw that players who bought all stat upgrades were powerful but very boring, while those who bought extra abilities were wild and unpredictable, with madly fluctuating power. In some ways, this system had its charm, but the best games always happened when players were somewhere in the middle — getting better stats and also picking up a few new powers. The new ship is a strong push toward the middle, and produces more enjoyable results on average.

Fully Rebalanced Characters

Since GlitchCon, we discovered a few math bugs undercutting our game balance and making characters behave in unexpected ways. This doesn’t deserve a big spiel, but expect to see a bigger variety of characters being played (bye bye Sparky/Spike/Dorsa holy trinity). You can also expect less out-of-nowhere deaths from some enemy bullets dealing far more damage than intended.

Of course, not all is roses for the players: we’ll be offering a by-request-only peek at our newly-refurbished Extreme difficulty, soon to rock the socks off of players near you!

Reloaded Gil, Dorsa, and Others

Stephen has written at length about the new workings of Gil and Dorsa, but not about two other characters who’ve seen big shifts over the last month. I’m not at liberty to discuss who, but you’ll see if you pay us a visit at 2D Con.

But Wait! There’s More!

May has been the hottest month for Fingeance on record, and we’re just warming up. Visit us and see all-new augments, experimental enemies, new level chunks, rebalanced bosses, level and campaign results screens, and a bounty of user experience fixes. Shoutout to Hannah Murphy (who seriously needs to call her UX company Modest Murphy Consulting, it’s just too fun to say) for all her UX help.

Hope to see you all at 2D Con!

Intelligent, inquisitive, and maybe just a bit paranoid (but is it paranoia if half the ocean wants you dead?), Gil has always had a reputation as a straight-shooter. Over the last year of Fingeance design, we’ve tried to give Gil abilities that reflect this straightforward, sharpshooting persona. In building Gil’s kit, we’ve tried to keep these ideals in mind:

• Gil must have 100% accuracy and long range on most or all of his weapons. Gil is, first and foremost, a sharpshooter and back-line DPS character, and his gear has to reflect that. He should also demand good aim more than most characters.
• Gil must be capable of highly-rewarding and spectacular shots. A legendary sniper lives to line up the perfect shot. Gil’s weapons, if used to perfection, should allow some amazing moments.

We quickly determined that the simplest way to allow awesome high-skill/high-reward play was to give Gil piercing attacks: if you aim just right, you might be able to score 3-5x damage on every shot! However, we hit a stumbling block: such a character is far weaker when there are few enemies onscreen. Gil was great at fighting swarms, bad at fighting bosses.

Today, we reveal his remade loadout. We’ve given his ship a total makeover to make him the damage dealing champ he was always meant to be!

Meet the Marksman

Gil’s combat role rests on his excellent damage dealing abilities, but is especially defined by how he doles it out. His specialty is decimating all enemies with ease, even if there’s something between him and his chosen target. His unique arsenal allows him to damage enemies cowering behind larger foes, hurt large groups of enemies, and burst down single targets. The massive amount of damage potential comes at a cost, however: Gil lacks any form of damage reducing or avoiding capabilities, so he’ll have to rely on his ship’s innate dodging ability or his team to keep him alive. What’s a better form of damage reduction than a dead enemy anyways?

Gil’s cannon, the Fisherman, fires piercing bullets rapidly, dealing damage to up to two targets. The way to maximize its damage output is to position yourself to hit multiple targets at a time. Try targeting higher priority enemies behind larger targets to kill the major threats while whittling down the protector.

Gil’s Great Hunt

The first of Gil’s new gadgets is the Whale Gun, a powerful tool that fires a large and fast bullet straight in front of him. The Whale Gun can be fired multiple times, but only has four bullets. If he runs out of bullets, he can’t fire again until another ammo recharges after a period of time.

Careful not to use it all, in case you need it!

This gadget can be used to bolster Gil’s already impressive damage output by either providing a steady stream of high powered shots, or a massive damage burst. Use a rhythmic fire pattern when weaker enemies are on screen to increase his DPS, then unleash on dangerous foes to finish them more quickly. Enemies with weak points are especially effective targets for the Whale Gun.

Welcome to the Light Show

Gil’s second gadget is an enhanced Laser Deploy. It creates a drone that fires an extremely deadly laser forward after a short charge period. The laser deals damage to all enemies in front of the drone. The Laser Deploy is best used to deal damage to a large number of enemies as quickly as possible. Because of its long cooldown time and high energy cost, it’s smart to save the gadget for an opportune moment.

The deployed laser drone has about a second of delay time, but is a separate entity, so Gil can use it to deal damage while he moves to a safer space. It can also be used to deal damage to multiple areas of the screen at once, and since the Fisherman can damage multiple enemies, Gil’s range of influence is massive while the Laser Deploy is active. As you might imagine, this gadget gives Gil particular power over bosses that rely on a swarm of tiny minions. The Laser Deploy can effortlessly carve a hole in minion formations while Gil peppers the big target from afar.

Gil can grab augments over the course of a campaign that can grant him even more damage ability, more piercing ability, and even a little defensive benefit if he needs it.

Do you feel Gil is the ultimate underwater marksman? Feeling Gil-ty about doing so much damage? We’d love to hear your thoughts. You can reach us here on the comments of our blog, or find us at our Twitter and Facebook page.

Music is a topic that is long overdue here on the blog. We have hinted at it in the past when we introduced the Kelp Forest and the Deep Sea Cave, but never actually talking about where the musical inspiration truly came from.

That changes today!

For all of the music in the game I am working in FL Studio. I have been using FL Studio for just over 7 years now. I find that it best suits my workflow: it is quick and easy for me to get an idea from my head to something audible for others to hear.

Inspiring Music

I took a lot of inspiration from 3 main games:

Star Fox 64

In coming up with references to the songs that we wanted Star Fox 64 was the very first one we all agreed upon. The “Ready for Action” tone of the soundtrack is what we fixated on when we were recalling soundtracks of our yesteryears. That tone really fit what we wanted out of Fingeance.

Bomberman 64

THIS SOUNDTRACK IS SO AWESOME!…

Ok… Fanboying aside, the entire soundtrack to this game is one that we have referenced more often than any other soundtrack. The range of tone the entire soundtrack has is what we strive to have for Fingeance. From intense showdowns to happy-go-lucky tunes this soundtrack is where I go to when I am talking to the others on the team that don’t know as much musical terms as I do.

Bomberman Hero

Here is the soundtrack that you will hear the most similarities to. The instrumentation of Bomberman Hero is found ALL OVER Fingeance. Most notably the breakbeats with the intense hi hats are on all of the biome songs.

Different Tones for Different Biomes

Each biome in the game has a distinct visual appeal, Kelp Forest is overgrown with vegetation while the Deep Sea Cave is a closed in, mysterious, and dark experience. I wanted to have each of those themes reflected into the music as well.

The Kelp Forest has lush chords that drive the song with lots of low end sounds.

While the Deep Sea Cave has reverb heavy melodies with a dark percussion backing

Hopefully I was able to give you a little more insight as to where the music inspiration came from and why things sound the way they do.

If you want to learn more and get up to the minute info Follow us on Twitter or Like us on Facebook!

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.

Escape Industries and Fingeance will be at GlitchCon next week on April 29th!

If you haven’t heard of GlitchCon, go check out their website. It’s like a miniature Midwest version of PAX or IndieCon. Despite being relatively small and new, it’s pulled in startlingly high-caliber talent from across the United States. They’ve played host to designers from Blizzard and Riot, to speakers like James Portnow and Ashly Burch, and to dozens of local speakers, developers, and academics.

We’re not affiliated with GLITCH or GlitchCon, but we don’t mind waxing enthusiastic about this event. We may be a tiny bit biased: last year, Charles snapped up their Best Game Audio award for his work on Glitch in the System. Join us on April 29th in the McNamara Alumni Center at the University of Minnesota! There will be special performances by Richie Branson, Super Replay Live with Game Informer, and late night karaoke, not to mention all the local games your heart could desire. If you’ve been interested in trying out some of the new content we’ve been adding to Fingeance, GlitchCon is your next shot!

You can find out more at the GlitchCon website. Tickets are available there as well. We hope to see you there!