Developer Mass Creation has just announced that their side scrolling action and beat ‘em up game Shing! will be launching for multiple platforms on August 28. The announcement came with a six-minute dev diary detailing how the studio made Shing! the best beat ‘em up they possibly could. There are also a few snippets of gameplay sprinkled in the video.
Shing! is dubbing itself as having the “most exciting and immersive beat ‘em up combat system ever.” Players assume the roles of ninjas, each with their own unique skills and attack moves. Nothing regarding the game’s plot or potential campaign mode has been unveiled yet, but the game’s enemies mostly consist of monstrous demons or sentient machines across a landscape that combines both ancient and futuristic aesthetics. The game offers both a Solo mode and Multiplayer mode that supports up to four players in either local or online co-op, although cross-play hasn’t been confirmed yet. We only hope something will be announced there soon considering that Shing! is releasing on a wide array of platforms.
As for the dev diary, we are given a glimpse into the mindset of Mass Creation when creating Shing! It starts off by citing the innate problems of the beat ‘em up genre, which is its shallowness and fairly repetitive gameplay. Many attempts to remedy this have been tried, such as introducing progression mechanics and implementing special moves and inputs, but this took away from the easy accessibility the genre had. What Mass Creation did for Shing! is create a simple enough control scheme based on the two analog sticks (left for movement, right for attacks) that is very intuitive, flashy, and fluid so even newcomers can enjoy it. Tons of other overhauls have been specified in the dev diary, such as how they modeled the AI to be fun and unique when fighting enemies in a crowd or alone.
The usage of 3D space has also been pointed as one of the harder aspects of a beat ‘em up to get right since it sometimes involves blocking the player’s character model, or can introduce difficulties in gameplay since it may make some models smaller or larger depending on how far they are from the screen.
Shing! will launch for the PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, PC, Mac, and Linux via Steam on August 28.
