SQYD.studio

Hello anyone! It’s a new year. For some reason that makes people, like me, motivated to break routines and forge new healthier habits. In the spirit of new year’s resolutions I’ve setup a new dev schedule. Antithetical to the spirit of new year’s resolutions, I’m going to stick to this schedule and I won’t let it peter out in a month or two (hopefully, I can’t know the future).

The last few years my game dev time has been spent either as unstructured exploration or blind panic to implement features for an arbitrary deadline. Both these modes of being are bad for me. When I’m following my creativity wherever it leads I can get stuck on a problem for extended periods- then drop it half-baked when the goblin in my head tells me it’s time to move on. With the threat of a deadline I can find a focus and flow that is akin to godliness- at the expense of irritability that strains my relationships and a backlog of burnout that lingers for weeks. No more! My new plan will fix all my deficits and 10x my productivity or my name isn’t Brax the Destroyer (it isn’t).

Seriously though, let me break my scheme down for ya’ll. Currently, I’ve got three days a week I can commit to game dev. I’m going to spend each day focused on one dev “theme” at a time. Each day I’ll start with a clear todo list and I’ll blitz down the items on it using the Pomodoro Technique. If and when I go astray I will gently nudge myself back on track with compassion and the knowledge that I will always sometimes be a distracted fuckwit and that’s not ever going to change. Weekly themes will shift with the needs of the project but I’m going to try to keep my dev days in buckets so if I’m ever pulled down by the crabs in one I can still make progress climbing out of the others. I want to look back at each week and think: “at least I got something done”. 

With that out of the way here are my Dev Themes going into 2025:

1. Solidify Systems

I made a lot of systems for WOFG! The Demo! There’s a save system, a system to link UI with data objects, a system to spawn and pool game objects, a system to link Unity’s Input System to player controllers and switch between them on the fly, a system for pausing and restarting the game, a system for loading in alternative scene setups for minigames, a system for rebinding controls, a system for saving settings, and more I’m sure. Most of these systems are good- some of them need a refactor. All of them could stand for some extra documentation. This is theme one: cleanup my systems, build custom editors for the most important ones, and generally make a suite of tools I can use as a base for future Unity projects.

2. New Goblin

I’ve torn down the Goblin controller. I’m rebuilding from the ground up. Two big differences this time: a) I’m a lot better at dev now than I was when I was mucking it together the first time, and b) I know everything what I need a goblin to be able to do because we now have a clear understanding of the kind of game WOFG! wants to be (and of what players want it to be). The goal is to build a goblin controller back up in a way that keeps the components differentiated from each other (there’s a lot of public functions and spaghetti logic in the current goblin controller- adding new features basically always has unintended consequences). In parallel with building a new player goblin controller I’m also building out a new goblin brain. Joel and I know we want to populate Gobland with NPC goblins that can do everything the player can do (though maybe not as well). The NPCs in the demo use a pretty hacky system of NPC Actions to fake controller input. It’s inefficient. Hopefully in a few months we will have both a new and improved GoblinController and GoblinBrain to boot.    

3. Back to Backfire

Did you know SQYD.studio has previously released a mobile game? It is called BACKFIRE. I didn’t work on it- Joel solo developed it himself. It launched as a premium (gotta pay the money) game on both IOS and Android. It was a great action arcade shoot’em up. Unfortunately Joel was unable to keep the game updated and it has now been removed from both app stores. We are going to bring it back. I’ve got it up and running in Unity 6, I’m updating it to use Unity’s Input System, and adding controller support. We are planning to bring the app back to both IOS and Android as well as a PC release though Steam sometime early-to-mid 2025. This is going pretty well. We haven’t announced anything yet (and this blog certainly isn’t an announcement- readership is quite limited), but I expect we will launch a Steam page soon. For all you BACKFIRE enthusiasts- there are at least two of you out there I’m sure- you can take this blog as a statement of intention. This isn’t a promise, don’t go crazy, but BACKFIRE will be back soon if all goes according to plan.     

I’ve already marked one week now of successful dev under rule of my newfound discipline. And what a week it was! I found marginal success across all aspects of game development. Marginal success! That means the projects are moving forward, hooray! 

As always, thanks for reading. Catch you next week for another installment of the thrilling, novel, and not-at-all rambly SQYD.studio Dev Blog.