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!