Shing! Development Diary Brings Release Date For Beat-Em-Up Game

Developers working on Shing! at Mass Creation Games hope to retain the easy to pick up and learn aspects of beat-em-up games whilst ensuring players will be able to come back time and time again without growing bored.

With the recent release of a development diary video, we now know we can expect to play this side-scrolling ninja vs. demon beat-em-up on Aug. 28. It will be available on PC, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch.

Shing!

The Shing! development video shows just how much passion the team has for not only their game, but for the beat-em-up genre as a whole.

“One of the biggest draws of beat-em-ups is how they let you defeat crowds of enemies, like a 90s action movie hero,” said Michal Azarewicz, who works in marketing and PR at Mass Creation. “But to make it possible, your enemies had to be really slow and passive. This puts players in full control, which isn’t very exciting.”

The developers hope to bring more excitement to these enemies by giving each enemy multiple ways they can attack players, and giving them the desire to win instead of waiting to be used as a punching bag. On top of this, enemies will each fill a specific role on the battlefield in order to work together most effectively.

With the added complexity of modern games, an intuitive control scheme was extremely important to Shing!‘s developers. With no pre-set combos to remember, players are able to mix-and-match any moves they want. Mass Creation Games hopes this allows newcomers to have fun from the very start.

There are a number of other quality of life improvements the team is hoping Shing! brings to the beat-em-up genre.

“From the very beginning, beat-em-ups tried to emulate a three dimensional space using only two dimensions,” said Azarewicz. “This was just a hardware limitation. But somehow, most attempts to make a fully 3D beat-em-up feel clunky and less visceral. How do we avoid that?”

The team feared characters appearing closer to the screen would obscure characters farther away, so they ensure characters in Shing! maintain their apparent size no matter where they are on screen. They also didn’t want players to have to worry about attacking in a 360 degree radius, so all attacks will go directly left or right. To remove the frustration that barely missing an enemy can cause, players will “snap” toward enemies they are trying to attack.

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