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!

Escape Industries has been hard at work to bring you new content, as we’ve shown for the past few weeks. One new feature we haven’t shown yet is a new shop, updated for the coming changes to Fingeance. This new shop should look fairly familiar to veterans of more recent builds, but there are some neat features we’ve added to help players easily buy the part they’re looking for.

The blueprints of each shop item have been simplified, resulting in a far cleaner appearance. The new shop also features small descriptions of each part, so players can take in and analyze their options quickly. The small and poorly-explained icons that once plagued the screen have been removed. Players new and old should find the new shop far more user-friendly.

Keen-eyed readers might note that there aren’t any cannons or gadgets in the new shop. Rightly so: we’ve drastically changed our approach to buyable items. No cannons. No gadgets. You can upgrade what you start with, but at the end of the game Gil will still have a laser turret, and Spike will still be able to get huge.

Why the change? On the positive side, we want to cut through the confusing, fiddly parts of Fingeance. Ever since we introduced Augments — passive upgrades to existing gear — these parts have been more attractive than top-shelf bait. With them in the shop, people felt it wasn’t worth the scrap to buy new Cannons or Gadgets (replacing and obsoleting their previous part). We decided to go with the flow and make as many clever, strategic Augments as we can. More practically, these enhancements are easier to understand, letting people get to the action quickly, if they desire.

Now, players will be able to buy augments that enhance your chosen character’s abilities in some way, possibly giving players new possibilities when bought. Each character has been rebuilt to support this change as well. We’ll be going over each character’s new loadouts in the upcoming weeks.

How do you feel about the new shop? We’d love to hear your feedback! You can comment here on our blog, or on our Facebook page or our Twitter.

First things first: we did it! As of 11:59pm on January 19th, we have a full-length game on our hands.

Our plan was as ludicrous as it was ambitious. It took us just under 18 months to make the previous two levels, and we challenged ourselves to make the next six in just three weeks. We ended up cutting a few corners (you won’t see new bosses previewed here for a while, for example, because we don’t have finished art), but we now have a fun, full-length Fingeance adventure to explore. If you’re in the Twin Cities area, we’ll be demoing it for the first time ever at Glitch Headquarters this Friday at 5pm. Join us!

In weeks to come, we’ll be talking about the new content, and discuss some upcoming changes to player progression. Today, we’ll be showcasing another new backdrop for your adventuring pleasure. We present…

Dolphin City

At last.

From the moment four friends were dumped, quite literally breathless, out into the far reaches of the coral reef, they’ve been waiting for this moment. Now, they watch nervously as enormous dark structures loom larger and larger in the distance.

The dolphins know why you’ve come, and they’re armed to the teeth to stop you. As you seek vengeance, you’ll find out what the empire is truly capable of.

Finding your Way in the Darkness

We won’t say much about the fish’s intentions here, beyond saying that the dolphins do not like them. In Dolphin City levels, you’ll encounter increasingly desperate waves of an army bent on stopping you at any cost. Destruction will be ubiquitous. Danger, profound.

Let’s be clear about something: dolphins in this universe are malevolent, yes, but their intelligence hasn’t changed. They’re still the smartest things in the ocean. When you fight against dolphins, expect canny creatures with a broad suite of tactics and devastating firepower. They’re highly social, and have a penchant for forcing lackeys to do their bidding. Against a dolphin formation, your greatest ally is maneuverability: often all it takes to crack an invincible army is being at the right place at the right time.

As a case in point, consider the Controller. This is a new type of enemy that hangs back and sends forth drones to terrorize your party. Against Controllers, raw aggression accomplishes little: drones are excellent at protecting their masters. Instead, you’ll need to position strategically. Abandon pummeling the front lines just long enough to sneak a shot at the eggheads giving orders. Word to the wise: the Teleporter is magic here.

Making the Dolphin City

So much of the Dolphin City just clicked. By the time we worked on this biome, we’d discovered a handful of tricks to making enemies fun without being overwhelming:

• Novel enemies reward adaptive thinking. They produce extra challenge without us needing to put more bullets on the screen.
• Aggressive enemies — ones that hunt players down — stress players, but in a good way. They might only fire three bullets, but they’re all headed right for you and you need to move!
• Interacting enemies — those that cover each-others weaknesses — change the battlefield, even in small numbers.

So, we found that smart, ferocious, and social enemies are the most fun to play against. This made us incredibly happy, since that’s Dolphin-kind in a nutshell. Making the levels in this biome went faster than any other, mainly because everything we tried here just worked. We couldn’t be more excited to playtest it this Friday.

Before I sign off, I’ve got to give a tip of the hat to Stephen. He made one of the major bosses here in a day. That’s insane. Compare to the “One Tough Puffer” boss, which I’ve sunk almost forty hours into. I can’t go into what the boss is or does, but I can begrudgingly salute Stephen for making something so fun in such a short amount of time. Bravo, sir!

Can’t wait to see what waits in the Dolphin City? Join us this Friday at 5pm, right here! Can’t make it? Feel free to comment here on our blog, or on our Facebook and Twitter.

Escape Industries has been working hard over the holidays to bring you new content (who needs sleep anyways?). This includes new enemies, bosses, parts and, most importantly, biomes. Without further ado, we bring you the next area of Finn and friends’ journey, the Kelp Forest.

The Kelp Forest sleeps just beyond the Coral Reef, and is one path you can choose to reach the heart of the Dolphin empire. Of these paths, the Kelp Forest has the advantage of being relatively uninhabited by dolphins. This was not always the case, however. Deep within the murk, you’ll pick out traces of long-abandoned dolphin buildings and machinery. Once, this must have been a mighty bastion of dolphin-kind.

So why did they abandon it?

One clue comes from the forest’s current inhabitants. Enemies in the Kelp Forest are teeming, overgrown, and wild. If there was a battle here between nature and technology, nature won. And it was a massacre.

But questions remain. How did things get this way? How were the dolphins involved, and why did they leave? As you explore, keep an eye out for answers and discover the truth.

The Kelp Forest features a plethora of new enemies, most of which are more organic than those of the Coral Reef. Floods of enemies can invade your screen quickly and aggressively. If you enter this biome, have a teammate ready to dish out area-of-effect damage, and someone able to patch up the team once the frenzy subsides.

Visually, this biome distinguishes itself by its lush and overgrown feel. The backgrounds are filled with giant kelp stalks and leaves, which we’ll use to embellish its themes of ancient mystery and wild monstrosity.

With a new biome comes a new song! Check out this preview of the Kelp Forest theme.

Charles McGregor, the composer, had this to say about the Kelp Forest theme: “For the song, I wanted a much more mellow tone throughout the track compared to the Coral Reef. To help give the lush feel to the environment I emphasized the pads chord progression on all of the instruments and made the pads have longer chords that are more drawn out.”

So, how do you feel about the Kelp Forest? You can comment here on our blog, or on our Facebook and Twitter.

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?

The backgrounds in Fingeance tended to look really bland and a tad bit misleading. There wasn’t much going on, there was no life in them and sometime people thought that the ships were flying in the air. It isn’t their fault though: there wasn’t much to go off of. In fact, I bet you didn’t know that you are navigating through a coral reef. Of course you didn’t, there’s no coral! Well, that is about to change!

Underwater Backgrounds

I have been working on sprucing up the backgrounds by adding in some life and vegetation. And that added a lot in terms of ambience and depth (let alone telling you that you are underwater and in a coral reef). Honestly, I could have stopped there as it was looking leaps better but we also wanted to update the lighting. Now, I have already stated how lighting adds so much from before, but when I finally implemented the new lighting system… That was when it was raised to another level. See for yourself.

It really is phenomenal how much of a difference the shadows make and how it helps add a new level of physicality to the game. Right now I am currently messing with a bunch of different situations as both the backgrounds and lighting are still works-in-progress. You can see that I am messing with putting the bosses in this environment to see how they look. But probably the thing that I am most excited about is how dark areas in the game will be. Night time is going to look awesome and I can’t wait until we explore that part more.

What are your opinions on the new backgrounds? Do they look too dark to you? Feel free to let us know!

Other happenings

The new backgrounds weren’t the only thing that we worked on. A lot of what we did was behind the scenes getting ready to add in some more content like bosses and enemies, so we can’t show that off just yet. But what we can say is that we now have a page over at the new Unity website: Made With Unity. Made With Unity is a great place to find new and interesting games made on the Unity game engine (like ours!). You can check it out here: http://madewith.unity.com/games/fingeance. Drop by and share the page with your friends; we really do appreciate all the support you guys have so far given us and can’t thank you enough!

Late post this week! Sorry about that. We have been hard at work on some new and interesting additions to the game this past week.

Manta Ray

If you’re a regular reader, you may have noticed that we use the same bosses again and again in our screenshots (especially that ever-photogenic Puffer…). Well no more! We won’t be revealing everything on the site, but we’ll give some peeks into what we’re working on. Our latest boss is a Manta Ray, and is tentatively named the GIANT DEATH RAY. Here’s a crash course.

• He’s a change-up boss. When he’s facing you, your survival will hinge on precise movement around his slow-moving bullets. When he’s facing away, it’s an all-out scramble to keep up with him and dodge the debris he chucks your way.
• For this boss, we devised methods that let us meddle with the game’s scroll speed (how fast you move through the level) on the fly. Prepare for rocket boosts that send you hurtling through knots of obstacles.
• Because of all the destructible objects being flung your way, you’ll need to make snap decisions on dodging vs. blasting your way to safety.

I have been creating a bunch of art concepts for the Manta Ray boss. I also have been working on a lot of polished art for the boss as well. I have some plans to include these into the game in a meaningful way but right now I am still working on making that system. I had a bunch of fun making these and think that they turned out really well. With that said, check out some cool action poses!

Background Concepts

I also have been working on adding more interesting backgrounds in our game. Right now, the background looks like a barren, rocky area devoid of life. So I have been working on some concepts to include some vegetation in the game. This will hopefully help the game feel like it is more underwater and alive than before. Check out a concept that I am testing out:

Again, right now it is in the concept stage but I am working on getting these into the game very soon. What do you think about the new backgrounds? Do you think that it is too much? Remember there is only one layer of vegetation in the concept picture, each layer will have coral and kelp scattered throughout the scene.

Rumble!

Another feature that we added in is RUMBLE! While you battle your way through countless enemies now you will feel tactile feedback when you fire a huge blast or take some damage. It really adds a lot to the way the game feels, giving you a large amount of feedback just through vibration alone. A very cool instance of this is the battle between “One Tough Puffer”: when the torrent of bubbles swarm you and your allies your controllers vibrate in response.

In other news, I know it is a bit short notice but we are going to be at GlitchHQ in Minneapolis today for PLAY/TEST. You can come check out the latest build and talk to us about the game, we love meeting up with you guys and hanging out. Be sure to swing by if you can the event is FREE!