Hello anyone! It’s Saturday and I’ve got a streak to protect. It is time to write some words and hurl them into the void of cyberspace.
Great news! Joel and I announced the the re-launch of his premium mobile game BACKFIRE yesterday. Here’s a link to the BACKFIRE Steam page. If you want to click through and give us a wish-list that would helpful, kind, and would fill me with a profound sense of gratitude. Don’t you want me to feel gratitude?
But wait, you ask as rhetorical device- don’t you already have a game on the go. What about Watch Out for Goblins! Fear not strawman (and thank you for helping me make a point), development on WOFG! is continuing. Really we’d like to be able to devote more time to it. Which we could do if we had more cash because time is money and all that sense.
But look here, we’ve got a perfectly good (maybe great- certainly unique) arcade shooter that’s fallen into the crack behind the couch. It was marketable, sold decently well on the AppStore despite the fact that premium games aren’t know to be great performers on mobile markets*. Here’s another truth about BACKFIRE- it plays better with mouse and keyboard than it does with a touchscreen. Most people don’t know that.
So our plan is to brush the dust off Joel’s original magnum opus and give it new life. We are planning to release BACKFIRE on the AppStore, Play Store, and- perhaps most importantly Steam. We figure this will give us some good practice marketing and launching a game (practice we sorely need), all while getting a game that deserves to be played back into the hands of players. If we can make a few bucks and put them towards WOFG! then that’s good too.
So a few months ago- I blew the dust off. Nabbed the last version of the BACKFIRE repo and booted it up in Unity 6. The console went blood read with a wall of errors as long as my arm. I slogged through the errors- mostly changes to platform specific APIs for IOS and Android integrations (probably the reason BACKFIRE got pulled form mobile in the first place)- and got the game up and running pretty quickly. It’s still a great, biased as I am, Joel nailed the tense atmosphere and built a compelling game loop around it.
I had a bunch of ideas for improvements I wanted to make out of the gate: Local multiplayer? Adding bosses to Purgatory (BACKFIRE’s arcade mode)? More difficulty modes? Controller support?
Unfortunately the only one of these things that’s going to happen is controller support. The reason is the Singleton Pattern. There are a lot of strong opinions on the use of singleton pattern. Personally, I think Singletons are useful in game dev- they let you pass access global variables with ease so you can prototype faster- but in BACKFIRE everything is a Singleton. The levels, the player, input, all the bosses, the UI, basically everywhere there’s only one of something. An now there can only be one- because that’s how the pattern works. Easy variable references from anywhere has led to tight couplingwhere pretty much every component is dependent on every other component (some hyperbole- but not much). Simply put- BACKFIRE is not an easy thing to expand on.
So we aren’t going to expand on it. The BACKFIRE that gets launched on Steam is going to be basically the same BACKFIRE that you could play on mobile five years ago, at least in terms of structure and game play features. What we are adding is controller support (it already seems to be working)- and Singleton pattern actually mad this easy. I just ported in the Unity Input System and reworked the existing InputManager to get events rather than checking for inputs in the Update loop.
Our goals for the BACKFIRE re-release are fairly humble. We just want the game as it is to run as well as possible on as many platforms as possible. Working controller support is required for getting Steam Deck Verified so we are starting there (though Steam Deck has a touchscreen so the touch controls sould work there for the classic BACKFIRE experience). Stretch goals are reintegrating with IOs/Android leader boards, and (if I can swing it) we want to get a Linux native version of the game out too.
Launch date is for July 2025- with tentative plans for a Demo in the summer NextFest. We’ve given ourselves a decent amount of time and will be working on polishing BACKFIRE for re-release alongside our continuing development of WOFG! It will be exciting to see BACKFIRE back on the market. It’s a very good game.
Thanks for reading if you did. Tell all your friends to wishlist BACKFIRE on Steam, and while you are at it follow our developer account too**, if we re-launch strong maybe we can find more time for dev (it’s really what I want to do most of the time, pity I need to eat). Joel and I appreciate your support and we hope 2025 will be a very positive year for SQYD.studio.
Until next week. Happy Saturday!
*I could probably find a source for this, but I’m in a bit of a rush this morning- I’ve got to go be social this afternoon. So not doing research right now- so let’s call mobile being a bad market to sell games for money more of a feeling than a fact. I care about my feelings, and it’s my blog. That’s a fact.
** Man, I’m just realizing our developer account is really empty. I’ll have to fix that sometime. Thanks for following us anyway.
SQYD.studio 
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