Phew!

As we said last week, we’ve finished up a HUGE push. It was pretty intense; we spent a lot of time working on new content for the game. We worked on new enemies, bosses, and environments (like the Kelp Forest). I wanted to take this time to reflect on the experience, talk about what we are doing now, and what is to come.

Push for More Content

The main reason why we were doing this push was to add a ton of content to the game. For the last year, we have really only been polishing up gameplay mechanics and 3 levels (really 2, but I digress). We have reached a point where we needed to figure out what an entire playthrough of our game would look like, how that would feel, and how players actually progress as you play through the game.

So we geared up for a huge push for content in a month’s time; working 14 hour days, almost every day. It was grueling, challenging work, but it was still a blast to work on. Seeing all of the new environments come together, the new bosses taking shape, and the new enemies introduced during this huge push was a humongous morale booster.

I am extremely proud to say that we succeeded reaching our goal. It is now possible to play a full campaign from start to finish (That is SO great to say). It isn’t by any means balanced or final, but it is playable.

But where do we go from here?

Loading…

The most immediate area that I have been working on personally is adding in a loading screen. It really is starting to show that we need some sort of indicator saying, “Hey, the game didn’t freeze, it is just loading right now!” as many times while we play test the game people wonder if the game crashed.

It is still in its early stages of development but this new loading screen should do a few things:

1. Tell the player the game didn’t crash.
2. Make going from one part of the game to another part a lot more seamless.
3. Give you a status update on your progress in the campaign.

I am pretty excited about adding this in because what I have so far already make the game feel more cohesive and smooth rather than a jarring transition between one part to another (and you know how much I love transitions!).

Here are some designs to the loading screen that we are trying out, which do you think is the best so far? Leave a comment below or message us on Twitter or Facebook!

Shopping in Progress

The longer term area that we have been working on is the shopping experience. We previously mentioned how much of a pain it was before we revamped the design before, but it still is a place that players are the most confused and least engaged. Don’t get us wrong; this redesign is WAY better than the last design, but it still isn’t fulfilling what we want the experience to be. We are figuring out what the best way to present the shop and we are even looking at the three different categories of Cannons, Gadgets, and Augments that are being presented. So there is a lot of work in front of us on that end of the spectrum that we are going to be tackling for the next couple of weeks.

Catching Our Breath

We have been easing up on the pedal bit this past week after this push to look at where we need to go next and also to catch our breath. We worked hard these past weeks and we do need a bit of a rest. One way that we are doing that is we are going to be participating in the Global Game Jam 2016 this weekend! Global Game Jam is an event where you make a game within 48 hours based around a theme (or not, you don’t have to follow it). We are going to be at the GameCraft Jam site here in Minnesota so if you are going we hope to see you there! Working on other projects helps reinvigorate our drive to making Fingeance. If you want more information about what the Global Game Jam is check out their website!

This is actually only our second time participating in the event. You can check out our last game we made What Do Oujia Do Now?