Last week, we showed you some of the bosses you’ll be fighting in Fingeance, but what about the regular enemies? The smaller grunts may be weaker than their larger counterparts, but there is strength in numbers. We’ve created many new enemies over our recent push to pack each level with fresh challenges.

Ghasts

You’ll find the persistent Ghast in the Deep Sea Cave. Ghasts constantly follow the nearest player. This behavior doesn’t sound very interesting for normal enemies, until you come across a large group of them!

Area of effect gadgets, such as the Bomb Launcher, are very useful to take these enemies out quickly. Quick movement is key to avoiding their contact explosions. A player with a strong emphasis on debuffing could slow Ghasts down as well, making them easy fodder for your team.

Crab

The mechanical Crab makes its first appearance in the Coral Reef. If you’ve ever seen the Sony E3 press conference in 2006, you may be familiar with this kind of enemy. The Crab constantly peppers the screen with large bullets from its two claws, but its belly is left open to assault. Staying true to its character, it takes massive damage when you attack its weak point. If you can slip between each Crab’s firing pattern, you can make short work of these contemptible crustaceans.

Doom Jellies

Doom Jellies, corrupted by the Kelp Forest, are toxic in more ways than one. If a ship comes into contact with one of these dangerous creatures, the Doom Jelly will explode in an acidic cloud, slowing and damaging anything – friend or foe – that moves through it. Worse yet, Doom Jellies also release toxins when killed.

Crafty players can, on occasion, use these explosions to their advantage. Sometimes, when there’s a flotilla of oncoming guppy darters and you position the toxic explosion just right…

 Laser Grunt

The massive Laser Grunts carry giant cannons on their stomachs, and are some of the first responders if you manage to reach the Dolphin City. After a short charge up period, the laser cannon fires, dealing deadly damage to anyone caught in the blast. If you can defeat these enemies before they fire their cannon, they won’t be much of a threat. Otherwise, you can try to lead them into a less threatening position before they fire. Their lasers cut off access of the field significantly, so they need to be dealt with quickly!

As you can see, regular enemies can be a big threat when they coordinate. Have any battle stories to share? Let us know what you think in the comments here on our blog, by tweeting at us on our Twitter, or leaving a comment on our Facebook page.

One of the most intense encounters in the game of Fingeance are the boss battles. The Dolphin Empire has trained, manufactured, and bioengineered these big baddies to prevent your team from reaching the heart of the their territory. You and your crack team of fishes will need all the help you can get to defeat them. Luckily, the Escape Industries development team is on your side. Here’s a breakdown of a few of the boss fights you’ll encounter.

The Jellyfish Queen

We’ve talked about her a bit before, but the queen of the jellyfish is no slouch. Armed to the tentacles in jelly servants, this regal rival won’t allow you to shoot her easily. The trick is to avoid her minions as long as possible, and focus her rather weak body. Solo ships are going to have to alternate between shooting the boss and the subordinates, but in a team it’s helpful to have a ship or two on cleanup duty. Make sure not to get overwhelmed either: the Jellyfish Queen’s minions will continue to chase you until they run into your hull, then explode in a freezing blast, making you an easier target for the queen’s bullets. A tankier teammate may consider this a good thing, and can use their increased durability to clear through them quickly (though you lose out on the scrap they would drop).

Devastator Sub

Partly responsible for the mutated and corrupted Kelp Forest, this monstrous machine is piloted by a ruthless dolphin. This boss has been equipped with a huge assortment of ammunition, and needs to be dealt with carefully to ensure your ship’s survival throughout the fight. A tank is very powerful here: the sub fires several different types of bullets, but many are fairly weak damage wise. A damage sponge can create safety zones for squishier teammate to hide behind. A tank however will not protect you from some of the more deadly attacks. The Devastator Sub can fire toxic missiles that leave clouds of eroding gas, slowing and constantly damaging ships foolish enough to pilot through them. When low on health, the sub will fire a giant laser, truly devastating everything in its path.

You don’t want to be in front of this.

Look for the glowing windows! That’s when the sub is charging the laser.

Darkbomb

This is a big bad bomb boss found in the depths of the Deep Sea Cave. This boss fight is somewhat of a test of endurance: regular damage output won’t affect this boss at all. Instead, buttons have been placed around the battlefield. Firing at them moves the tumbler around the giant bomb, and when it reaches the very top, a giant laser will fire at the bomb, damaging it for a third of its total health. Your goal in this fight is to activate that laser by firing at the buttons and moving the tumblers into the top position. The Darkbomb has a few tricks though: it fires bullets timed with its clicks, and can summon other enemies to prevent you from finishing it off. Be quick though! The Darkbomb has a timer (indicated by the red ring around it) and when it ends, it will continue to fire burning and exploding bullets until it is destroy or you are!

Hopefully you can use these tips to give you a fighting edge against the boss encounters found in Fingeance. If you have any tips to fight the Fingeance foes, you can comment about them here on our blog, tweet at us on out Twitter, or comment on our Facebook page.

This weekend we each participated in the Global Game Jam, where we created a game in 48 hours based around a theme; this year’s theme was “Ritual”. Our Jam Site we were part of was GameCraft at the University of Minnesota with Glitch Gaming. It was pretty intense but a lot of fun. Instead of all of us working on one game we each were on separate projects! So this week, we are going to be talking about each game we worked on.

Save Jimmy | Stephen McGregor

In this virtual reality game, you are a guardian angel. You’ve been given the goal of protecting an 8 year old named Jimmy. Jimmy is a curious (and very unlucky) fellow. He tends to run into dangerous things while on his mundane walk to the school bus. It’s up to you to protect Jimmy from the hazards he encounters on his trip.

…Or at least, that was the goal of the game we had initially proposed when the game jam’s theme was given. Turns out being a guardian angel that can blow up buildings is way more fun, so we kinda focused more or that aspect of the game instead. There’s one harmful thing in the game right now.

If you’d like to play it, you’ll need a Gear VR headset and a Samsung Galaxy S6. Credit to Ghaith, Thong, Sara, Neil, Jeramie, and Mark for working with me to finish! Couldn’t have done it without them.

You can check out the game here: http://globalgamejam.org/2016/games/save-jimmy-vr

Rocket to God | Lane Davis

In Rocket to God, you fill the role of a disgruntled worshipper, tired of being shunned by the big man upstairs. Your prayers have been unanswered, so it’s time to take things directly to the highest authority: God himself.

Rocket to God is a two-to-eight-player rocket-launching physics game. In each round, you start out by placing an interactive object (be it a boost, a balloon, a UFO, or a brick wall) somewhere in the sky. Then, players launch their rockets, attempting to steer, bounce, and blast their way into the Heavenly Kingdom above. If you’ve ever seen Ultimate Chicken Horse, you’ll feel right at home.

Our team — the Spicy Food Squad — took almost three hours to decide on an idea for our game. In the end, we finally hit on a name and concept that kept us laughing all weekend long. Huge thanks to David and Ashlee for keeping things light during the long weekend and for all the wonderful art. Thanks to longtime Fingeance QA-tester Michael for adding so much humor to the game. And thanks to Cody for steering the ship and giving us the idea that started it all.

You can check out the game here: http://globalgamejam.org/2016/games/rocket-god

Neon Ritual | Charles McGregor

Neon Ritual is 2D sidescrolling multiplayer platformer. The goal is to race around the map to various altars and perform a ritual to obtain an orb. But be careful, other players can shoot you down and steal your orb. First to 3 orbs wins!

Unlike Lane and Stephen, this one I made on my own. It was really intense making all of the assets, doing all of the programming, coming up with the design… but I feel like it was worth it! I am really proud of what I was able to accomplish within 48 hours and I think that it turned out great. It is definitely better with more people playing as it can get hectic really quick with everyone battling to gain the remaining orbs.

I plan on polishing this game up a lot in my free time and hopefully publish this someday. I think it has a lot of potential and I really like the concept. I will be periodically posting up my progress on Neon Ritual over at the Tribe Games Blog.

You can check out the game here: http://globalgamejam.org/2016/games/neon-ritual

Play/Test – Game Jam Edition

This Friday we will be head to Glitch Gaming Play/Test, but this week it is focused on the games made at the Global Game Jam. So if you are in the area you can come and play all of our games as well as others made at GameCraft. If you can’t make it be sure to check out the website and play all of the games available: http://globalgamejam.org/2016/jam-sites/gamecraft-2016/games

Let us know what you think of all of our games by leaving a comment below or drop us a message on Twitter or Facebook!

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?

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.

Last week, we talked about the visual features we’re adding to the game for the high level parts of Fingeance. In order to increase the amount of levels players can go through (we can’t stress enough how much players have been asking for this!), we’ve been working hard to bring high level content to the game. We’ve been doing more than just adding backgrounds though: we’ve also been creating new parts for players to upgrade.

Level Up Your Parts

High level parts have been a bit tricky to develop. They need to feel more powerful than the early game parts, but still need the distinct weaknesses and strengths defined by their predecessors. If you’ve played our recent Alpha Demo, you may have seen some of these upgrades already. Upgraded versions of starting cannons (like the Adept Cannon to Finn’s Starter Cannon) were designed to increase the potential of that part without just adding more numbers to it. In many cases, the high level parts have increased reward on their ideal use patterns.

For example, Bubbles’s Showstopper can deal about twice as much damage as other starting parts, but it’s hampered by its low range. Bubbles wants to get up close to enemies to hit enemies with all five bullets to maximize her damage output. The Heartstopper, Showstopper’s Tier 3 upgrade, ups the reward upon hitting all 5 shots: Heartstopper heals the user by a percentage of his or her missing health. Players can use that additional healing to build a berserker styled ship. It’s also nice to be able to top off your health when playing a more evasive ship.

The high level part Heartstopper heals each time the player connects all 5 shots. It also deals more damage, of course.

Gadgets work the same way: high level gadgets gain increased utility and better reward on their advantages. Last week we showed you the Phantom Gear as one example. That particular part increases the utility of the Ghost Gear by adding utility (in this case damage) while active. This gives the upgrade more uses than just the defensive cases players would use it for in the past.

High Level Enemies

Parts aren’t the only things being upgraded for high level areas: we’ve also been working on more difficult enemies. These enemies don’t just have more health and damage either. High level enemies will have new attack patterns for players to have to play around with. This includes bosses! We’ll have more to show here in the coming weeks.

Excited for these new changes? We’d love to see your feedback. You can comment here on our blog (we update weekly!), as well as 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?

Fingeance is a game about teamwork. Or at least, that’s what we’d like to say. The teamwork aspect of our game hasn’t been emphasized as much as we’d like. So, we’re working to change that.

Teamwork Revisited

So what have we done to fix it? First, we’re looking at remaking the starting parts of some of the characters to better accentuate the teamwork aspect of Fingeance right from the beginning. We’ve got a few parts currently in the game that are very teamwork oriented, but they’re not available until later levels, and even then you may not get access to the parts. Having starter parts have more of a cooperative tinge should help players get in a team mindset when they enter the shop for the first time. These new teamwork parts still match the kinds of gameplay we want each character’s ship to have. For example, Finn, the angry leader of the group, has the gadget Rally Cry, which when activated increases the rate of fire of every ship’s cannon. Finn can use this gadget to organize a strong offensive when he sees a point of weakness in enemy patterns (or he can just use it when he’s mad, we won’t judge).

Secondly, we’re working on upping the teamwork strengths of some of the roles you can take in the game. We’ve already done work on tanks in the past, but soon we’ll be taking a look at the other parts of the game. This will involve creating new parts that make new possible cooperative builds. Supports are next!

We’re also working on new enemy and boss encounters that will feel a bit more like raid bosses from popular MMO’s. Not so much to the extent where you’ll be forced to have a tank on your team, but instead having separate objectives for players to coordinate around. Objectives like secondary enemies to kill (like One Tough Puffer’s turrets), or points of high bullet output (The Twins icy fire) help emphasize the kind of teamwork we’d like to see from players.

Equipping Works!

Equipping parts work finally! We’ve added the ability for players to select which gadget they’d like to replace when buying a new gadget. The shop has been updated with additional features and tweaks to maximize player usability.

Bullet Trails

Special bullets now have trails that follow along on their path to destruction. These trails can give extra clarity when shooting really fast bullets, and they just look really cool overall.

Have you felt like teamwork has been a part of your strategizing? We’d love to hear from you. You can comment and follow us here on our blog (we update weekly!), send us a tweet to our Twitter, or comment on our Facebook page.

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!