Happy New Year – 2026

Hello anybody!

To the point: what the heck is going on with SQYD.studio? Good question. Here’s are some answers:

BACKFIRE – A Worthy Detour

We decided that it would be a good idea to port Joel’s first indy title BACKFIRE for a Steam release sometime before the summer. We thought it would only take a month or two but it took closer to four.

We wanted to learn more about what it takes to launch on Steam. How to plug into Steamworks APIs, how to patch and support a game with a live player base, how to build for Steamdeck, etc.

So that all happened, and we learned all that stuff! Heck, we are still learning all that stuff. BACKFIRE has been live on Steam since Aug 30th, 2025. The launch may have been a little buggy (oops), but we’ve got the major issues sorted out now.

Now for the elephant in the room: returning BACKFIRE to Android/play store. Bad news. This isn’t happening anytime soon, as much as I want to do it. We are having trouble building for Android with the latest version of Unity. I think I’ve found the source of the issue, but it’s not going to be easy to solve. If I’m right, it’s due to some unsupported/deprecated android libraries in the plugin BACKFIRE uses to save/load gamedata. This can be fixed but it’s not a simple fix, and I don’t want to spend a lot of time on a hacky patch that is difficult to support going forward. Eventually I want to entirely replace the plugin* with my own code.

Which segues into my next point well:

SQYD Tools – Everything I’ve Learned So Far

I’ve been teaching myself gamedev (and software development more generally) for about five years now (admittedly I’ve been writing code as a hobby on and off since high-school). I think I’m finally starting to see what kinds of structure I like to work with in my Unity projects. This has been slowly developing into a set of general use tools that I plan to use in all my Unity projects going forward. These include tools for:

A launcher/bootstraper that can validate external services (e.g. the Steamworks API, possible mod support maybe?**
Cleanly loading, unloading, and setting up scenes
Getting player input (through Unity’s input system) and attaching it to “controllers” in the game world
Saving/Loading game data
Linking menus to game data
Organizing menus/UI in a way that plays nice with Unity’s event system
Support for split screen multiplayer through Unity’s Input Manager
Standardized settings- audio, gfx, and controller profiles with rebindable keys

I’ve been calling these my SQYD Tools- and one of my goals for the first bit of 2026 is to polish them up and import them into both BACKFIRE and the WOFG! Demo. This will hopefully help us support BACKFIRE more easily and, hopefully, solve our Android build issues. Also help us as we continue to work on WOFG!

Speaking of which:

Goblins! – Our One True Love

DON’T PANIC. We are still working on Watch Out for Goblins!. We are pushing our planned 2025 release date way down the road into late 2026.

After releasing our demo way back in the day (October 2024, if you can believe it) we felt that the concept was proven, but the character controller was too unstable for many players to really engage with it. Continuing in a way that met our vision would mean making massive reworks to the character controller.

Anyway, that’s what we’ve been doing (aside form the above mentioned BACKFIRE break). It’s a fine line to create a 3D character that feels like it has good control, without loosing the floppy charm of the active rag doll. It’s been slow going, and at times discouraging, but we recently took a major exciting step, which is what the next blog will be about. Whenever I get around to writing it.

Anyway, thanks for following along and thanks for reading. I’ll try to keep you posted more frequently in 2026. Good luck everyone.

* Which has other issues too. For some reason it uses the system to write JSON and Unity’s JSON utility to read them. It’s a crazy solution and it’s a good reminder to scrutinize your plugins before you use them in your project.

** I’ve looked into what it would take to let people export unity asset bundles that can be loaded by our games at runtime. Seems possible, but complex. I love games with mods. It’s something I’m looking into, but no promises.