SQYD.studio

Hello anyone! It is true. BACKFIRE is now (at long last) available on Steam. We are very proud of it. I think it shines as a game and as a PC port, but man did it ever take a minute. Let me back up for a second and set the scene.

What Happened?

Joel first released BACKFIRE on IOS and Android in early 2019. It did pretty well for a premium mobile game catering to a more “hardcore” arcade-shooter audience than you’d typically find on mobile (probably because it was serving an under-served market).

It was Joel’s first game- he did not take the gamedev chestnut of “start small” to heart- he just went for it, like he does. End product turned out great (I’m bias but it is true regardless), but it was messy under the hood. A few Unity/OS updates later and BACKFIRE has been pulled off the AppStore for technical reasons. Joel is now busy with other things and can’t patch it. Later it gets pulled off the Play Store too. Now nobody can play BACKFIRE 😦

This is a tragedy. BACKFIRE is art. People need to be able to play it. Thus, around May, we decided to take a look at what it would take to update BACKFIRE to the latest version of Unity, patch some bugs, add a few bells and whistles, and bring the game to PC on Steam (and back to the PlayStore*). We figured this would take about a month- knowing it would probably take two.

Well, it’s now about four months later. Only a little behind schedule then. BACKFIRE went live on Steam on August 30th. Check it out!

While it was hard to take time away from our goblins. Porting BACKFIRE to PC was 100% worth it. I’ve learned so much about what it take to go from a playable game to a polished release during this process. I learned about hooking into Steams APIs, about how to finagle Unity UI, how to setup build profiles, how to build for linux, so much stuff.

I feel like I understand that other chestnut that gets thrown around in game dev: “Once you’ve done 80% of the work the only thing left to do is the other 80% of the work.” Good folks, I’m happy to say BACKFIRE is 100% playable on PC through Steam. Which means we are 80% of the way there.

What Now?

Now there are bugs to fix, marketing to do, and a few lingering features to add. Outside of addressing game breaking bugs, my next push will be to get an Android build of BACKFIRE back out into the world ASAP. I estimate this will take about two weeks- so it should be done in a month. Therefore, I’ll let you all know when it launches in November XD.

Seriously though, I don’t expect building for Android will be very hard. If things go as smoothly as I hope they will I’d like to add a few more quality of life features to the PC version: namely, options to change screen resolution through the settings menu and support for rebinding controls.

We also want to listen to player feedback as more people come discover BACKFIRE. If you’ve played it and want to let us know your thoughts feel free to get in touch. You can get my email:
dev@SQYD.studio or, if you are feeling social, join the SQYD Discord server and chat with us there. Bug reports are especially helpful- but we want to hear basically anything BACKFIRE players have to say. Please get in touch.

What’s Next?

Watch Out for Goblins! calls to us. We wan to return to our silly ragdoll game with renewed passion and a much better idea what it takes to release a polished game on Steam. So expect to see us return to gobland soon.

I’ve also been doing this game dev thing, in various capacities, for fiveish years now. Honestly, I think I’m starting to get the hang of this Unity engine. I keep returning to the same patterns/architecture in every Unity project. I think I want to spend some time developing this into a set of tools that I can use in basically every Unity project I work on. Now that I have (at least some) idea what I’m doing, it seems like a good time to “sharpen the saw” and make my own game dev tools as good as they can be.

But who can really say for sure what comes next. Certainly not I**. The only way to know is by keeping an eye on this blog. I’m sure I’ll post here again someday.

Thanks for reading! If you haven’t already, go play BACKFIRE.

Bye!

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* Wait just the Play Store? Not the App Store? You cry… Yes unfortunately we, as of now, have no plans to return BACKFIRE to the App Store. The reason: we don’t own any Apple products to test it on- and can’t really afford them. It’s really as simple as that.

** Actually I do know one thing: I’m going to play a whole bunch of Silksong this weekend. I still can’t believe it’s real.