After jamming out the first 15 bosses in Fingeance, I feel like I’ve learned a few things, and I thought I’d share. The first topic is anticipation. We’ll see how the first moments of a boss fight can help players understand the battle to come. We’ll also look at how unique and crazy boss attacks…

In April, as we geared up for GlitchCon, we took time to engage in one of the great pleasures of game-making, User Experience design. Today, I present four stories of making player gadgets (special attacks) as intuitive and pleasurable as possible. Spike’s Shell Block: A Defensive Demonstration We’re starting big. This is one of the…

In the last two weeks, Fingeance has undergone a sweeping set of changes designed to promote teamwork and communication. This rebalance touches everything, but focuses on the pace of combat. From the beginning, we’ve wanted to make our game a Side-Scrolling Shoot-Em-Up with Roles, and a huge part of having “roles” is having them work…

Stephen, lovable scamp that he is, left me something before he and Charles left to frolic on the floors of GDC. I’m getting a little giddy just looking at it. He has great taste, and knows just what I like. Should we open it up? I was thinking the same thing. Oh wait! There’s a…

Since we finished our massive push, Fingeance is starting to look an awful lot like a completed game. In fact, we’ve had several playtesters ask us “Why aren’t you publishing? What features do you still need to add?” We take this as a sizable compliment, and every time we hear it, we get a little…

Salutations! As many of you know, Escape Industries set out on a mad quest recently. We were tired of endless hypotheticals about how the game might look someday. So we set out to build the dang thing. As soon as possible. In mid December, we ourselves upon a crazy challenge: make six levels in just…