Displaying at the Welcome Geek Event

This past week, we displayed Fingeance at Welcome Geek, hosted by Glitch Gaming in Minneapolis. We’d like to thank all of those people who gave our game a chance at the event! It was a blast watching players team up for some fishy fun, as well as a valuable learning experience. Some interesting notes from the event:

• Have you tried using the Goliath Engine other energy regenerating parts? The combination is very strong. One player was able to get a lucky draw with several energy regen augments, and kept the engine running almost constantly!
• Extreme difficulty continues to claim several submarine lives. Can it be beaten? It may help to take a look at our guide for some tips.
• People of various skill levels playing through Fingeance is always refreshing to see. From the saltiest dogs to the greenest of greenhorns, players at the event enjoyed the underwater thrill ride, often making it to the end.
• Firestarter is OP! That bad boy rips through enemies like damp butter. Woe to the team with packed to the brim with them though; movement in shmups is still important, especially without a tanky teammate.
• The art style still impresses people, which is good because we’re planning to add to it in the coming weeks! At the event, our style was compared to a classic game called Fantasy Zone.
  

  Fantasy Zone is an old school shoot ’em up on the NES and Sega Master System. Some folks at the event felt we have a similar art style!

Alpha Demo Update

In preparation for the event we have updated the newest Fingeance Alpha Demo! This update improves the performance of the game during high intensity moments (such as during boss fights). In addition, we’ve added some new content:

• Force Feedback – Feel the rumble of your Bomb Launchers explosion, or the rattle of your ship’s damaged hull
• Part Tuning – Gadgets have generally been generally buffed (in some cases significantly) to increase their overall effectiveness, while cannons are just slightly weaker
• Improved Lighting – Huge boss attacks now have fancy lighting effects, so players will know when to be wary
• Added Parts – Adaptive Armor and Reflector are additional parts purchasable in-game

We’d love to hear how you feel about these additional changes or your opinion of the event if you could make it; you can let us know in the comments here, or on our Facebook and Twitter pages.

What a productive week! Since last Wednesday, we’ve been on a roll making new parts for Fingeance. I guess showing your game off to a group of kids has that effect.

Character Select Screen

Charles has redesigned the character select menu. It took him a few days, but it turned out really nice. Check it out:

This fancy new menu comes complete with animations, telling you when you’ve changed from your current character. In addition, the new character select screen makes it easier to see what you’ll get when you pick your favorite fish. It’s quite an improvement!

Old CSS vs New CSS

Readying up is also less tricky than it was before, as we’ve implemented a smooth transition from picking your character. We also added an “everyone is ready” screen. When all players have decided who to start with, the screen fills with a border telling you it’s time to fight.

We’ve also added made it so that if one character is picked, other players cannot jump in the game as that character. This should reduce confusion in-game, though unfortunately you can’t go Team DNA with Gil’s Laser Deploy anymore.

Character Augments

Not pictured in the character select images is a recent addition to each character’s ship.

Each character now comes with their own unique augment to start out with. These augments cannot be bought in the shop. They have particularly special effect from the parts you’ll find in game too. Finn’s, for example, will cause him to enrage when his ship health dips under 30%, healing his ship health by 50% of its maximum health. As you can see, Finn is no gentleman.

Adding these augments makes character selection a little more important. These augments are unique per character, and each can help push a build in a novel direction. These augments have been tuned to support flexible playstyle, however, so don’t be opposed to grabbing that supporting gadget which Bubbles (even though she wouldn’t like it!).

Cooldowns

Lane’s been hard at work implementing several balance changes to the game, but gadget cooldowns are especially cool.

We’ve realized that – though spamming your gadgets is fun – sometimes you need a crazy powerful boost to your enemy-blasting abilities. That’s where cooldowns come in. Some gadgets now have a wait time after activating them. These gadgets have some seriously powerful effects, and when used at the right time can be a huge buff to the team.

You can keep track of any gadget’s cooldown by looking at the pulsing ring around your ship. The ring can split in up to three parts to correspond to each gadget currently attached to the ship.

So that’s that. Another menu made excellent, player roles made more diverse, and ship parts made crazier than ever. Join us next week, when we’ll no doubt have a LOT to say about making support parts and demoing in Minneapolis. We’ll be at Rally Cry | Video Games tomorrow, see you there!

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.

This past week has been rough… I have had a major set back. My computer charger died on me and I haven’t been able to work on Fingeance since last Saturday. I was able to finish up that menu system that I mentioned I was working on last week, but other than that I haven’t had the chance to really work on much in terms of art and sound.

So instead I turned my attention to the logistics of Escape Industries. I thought about how we are running the site and some possible endeavors that we could look into. I even thought about some design work in the game as I couldn’t do much else.

What about you? What are some of your opinions on how we are doing in terms of blog posts and social media updates? Do you like our current schedule of posting 3 times a week? Where else do you want to see us post on?

With all that said I sadly don’t have a lot to show you so it is going to be a short post today. Hopefully I can be up and running soon. But check out Friday and Monday for Lane and Stephen’s posts!

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!

Recently, I have been working on reworking how the menu system works in the game (yeah, I also code as well). So I thought I would take the opportunity to show what the menu actually looks like in its current iteration.

  The splash screen has a simple animation where the all the characters slide in to the frame. To be honest… this one was rushed. It was to meet the deadline for GlitchCon and we wanted to have something visually appealing for the players to see before they went in the game. I wanted to make a custom image that I would then animate… but we ran out of time.

The main menu on the other hand wasn’t rushed. I was able to design the menu and the animation a lot closer to what I wanted. I wanted to have cool splash art on the side of the menu to add more visual interest, but for now I just left the characters.

The last major menu that I worked on (for the main menu) is the character select screen. This is probably the one that is the closest to what I had envisioned in my head. I liked the idea of seeing the characters in huge portrait vs a grid of them like and Super Smash Bros. Though, I really don’t like the animation for this one; it may be simple but I just don’t like it that much.

Alright, that is all of the menus that I want to talk about in this post. Of course these aren’t final menu designs but it does help give an idea of how the game should look. What do you think? Let us know by leaving a comment!

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.

One thing that I feel doesn’t get the recognition it deserves is lighting, and up until recently I didn’t give it that either. Lighting can really effect the mood and tone of a setting, changing something from looking friendly and approachable to menacing and repulsive. Again up until recently I didn’t really give it much thought (well, that’s not entirely true… I knew it was important I just didn’t bother to learn much about it).

So I set out to make a lighting system in the game to help vary the level overtime. And boy does it add a lot to the game. Having dynamic lighting (where the light changes in real time) makes the levels feel more alive. For example, instead of having a three minute level look the same throughout the entire level maybe have the lights get progressively darker as the level goes on; or when a nuke goes off change the lighting to accommodate for that. It helps vary your scene and it isn’t that hard to accomplish (I’m saying this in regards to Unity). Grab a directional light and start messing with the values.

I approached lighting with modularity in mind. I wanted to make sure that I could accommodate any situation that we need as well as transition between two lighting conditions easily. This system has been extremely helpful in making the some of the set piece moments that occur in the game really pop. Though I will be the first to say that I have a long way to go before the lighting is on point, but it really is a proof of concept at this point.

So if you are finding your work looking bland, whether that be 3D or 2D, try messing with the lighting of the scene. If you have already set up your lighting try changing it every once in a while to see what else your scene can invoke. Try it out and let me know what your results are! So far it has been a positive one for me.

Remember to check out Stephen and Lane on Monday and Friday, respectively.

Last week, I left you with an image (as I tend to do):

These are called scrap. When some enemies are destroyed, they may leave these tiny trinkets behind. Being the creative fishes that you are, you’ve developed a way to use these scrap to your advantage. Players can collect scrap and use them outside of levels to build new parts to fight finned foes with.

Each player’s ship also gains a small amount of health when grabbing these collectibles, making them valuable even in the heat of battle. Don’t be afraid to be greedy either! Each piece of scrap is added to each player’s total scrap at the end of a level, and will heal every player alive when collected as well. I suppose you could add up each scrap you’ve collected yourself for bragging points though.

Enemies drop more scrap the more difficult to destroy they are, generally. But sometimes, these puppies (or should I say guppies! Hehe…hehe…heh…) show up:

They give you a ton of scrap. They can be in awkward positions though, so they’re not always easy to get.

Next week, we’ll talk about some of these:

Okay, they’re obviously fish, so there’s no surprise there. But what do they do in the game? Find out next Monday!