SQYD.studio

Hello anyone! Happy Saturday. Seems like writers block is hitting hard this AM, so instead of a big ramble about a single topic, I’m to do a series of quick rambles about what we have been and will be up to.

WOFG!

The great goblin rework is still underway. The framework for the new character controller is in place and working well, and we have all the settings that control the goblin’s ragdoll blending based on what animation is currently playing. We only came to the idea of controlling the ragdoll settings by animation late in development of the character controller currently in the Demo. As such, it’s a bit of a scattershot (and computationally inefficient) implementation. New goblin is built with a focus on using the animator (and thus the animator’s state machine) as the primary control over the goblin’s ragdoll. We have our development time over the next week blocked out to start adding animations to the new goblin- along with re-implementing major player verbs- i.e. jumping, garbing, and attacking.

BACKFIRE

BACKFIRE is up and running in Unity 6. We’ve implemented controller support with some placeholder graphics and done some test runs through the game. There are bugs to be fixed, but none that are too alarming. For the most part the game plays well with a controller- though some of the weapons (teleport gun) will have to tweak some of the controller settings. The last bit of work for full controller support is to build out a system for remapping controls and updating button prompts on the UI as this is required for Steam deck verification. I’ve already done control rebinding for WOFG! so I’m confident I can bring a lot of that code into BACKFIRE directly. Personally, I think the game plays best with a mouse and keyboard and when we re-release in this summer PC players will be in for a good time.

Linux Development Environment

I spent a good chunk of time over the last week setting up a good Unity development environment on my new Ubuntu desktop. There were some growing pains, but I think I’ve learned enough that everything is stable and working as intended now. In addition to spending less time with Windows 11 (yuck, but that’s a rant for another day), this should let me build and test our games for Linux native runtime. It’s not a big portion of the market- but it is a growing one– and, as I’ve said before, open source software is a cool thing and it would be nice if more people embraced it. I’m just doing my part. So with any luck the next major update to WOFG! The Demo! will include a Linux build.

One Million is a Big Number

As evidenced by the overwrought nature of this entire blog, I have no idea how to do marketing. Fortunately, Joel has been more than willing to learn- and is happily managing the SQYD.studio brand on YouTube, TikTok (which, to prove I have no idea how social media works, I just learned is not spelled ‘TicToc’ while trying to find our link), and Bluesky. I’m very happy to have a creative partner who is willing to step into the fray while I hang out blogging into the void.

Anyway, over the last few days one of our TikTok posts (are they called Tiks? or Toks? there’s literally know way to know)- passed one million views. ONE MILLION- my mind is blown. Like, one million isn’t just a big number- it’s an unfathomable one. I have no concept of a million- it’s too big to hold in my head, but here’s my best attempt. Our local NHL team plays out of a stadium that sits 20K. Which means that ten NHL games worth of people saw our goblin running around- and a lot of them seemed to think it looked fun. I don’t know what else to say. Good job Joel!

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading if you did. I’ll be back next week with some more focused thoughts on a single topic (can’t guarantee it will be on topic though.) Until then, I hope you all have an excellent week.