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Another reviewer… wants online play!

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

Thanks to Tyler from Mashin Studios for taking the time to do a thorough review of Square Off.

He rated it “Above Average” which is the Mashin Studios equivalent of 3/5. He also told me via email that if it had online play, it would probably have got “Awesome” or 4/5. This sentiment about online play seems to be a bit of a trend in the press for Square Off.

With that in mind, I’m redoubling my efforts towards an online mode for Square Off 2. If things go well, it would even be tempting to release a free update to Square Off that included some form of online play, perhaps a 4 player only death match mode… hmmmm.

Posted in Random Thoughts, Reviews, Square Off | 4 Comments »

What next for Square Off?

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

Now that DBP is done and dusted, we have to start deciding what features will make it into the final game. Obviously there’s a rather large wish list but at the same time we’re all really keen to have our first game released. We’re hoping to get it out by November and we want to have at least 9 levels (currently we have 4). I’ll leave that decision up to Adam and Scott as they’re the ones who’ll have to build them, and I believe quite a bit of blood, sweat and tears goes into each one!.

Level 1 with collision diagnostics

Other wanted/needed features that require coding efforts include:

High Score table
Progress saving and loading
Totally awesome boss fights (at least 3)
Survival Mode with ever increasing waves of aliens
The ability to revive your fallen comrades in coop mode
Some RPG style elements where you progressively build your character’s weapons and abilities

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Old Stuff: Part 1/3

Saturday, May 2nd, 2009

This is the first of three posts I will be doing looking back at some of the old game screenshots and prototypes of the past.

In July 2008 Aranda wanted ideas to create a game; I can’t remember what it was for. There was a simple handheld LCD game I owned years ago that had a naval ship shooting aerial fighters that would attack it from all corners of the screen. It was a simple, yet addictive idea, and so I went and made a screenshot of something similar.

I used sprites from Starcraft and Advance Wars to show a character manning a turret in the middle of the screen. Creatures were coming from all sides to attack, and it was your job to keep them at bay. Another man would walk around and collect various items off the ground for extra weapons, ammo, and health.

Screenshot of what the game would look like.

Aranda made a prototype to see if this would be any fun. The game consisted of a turret shooting bubbles. This test proved that this wasn’t going to hold your attention for long, so the idea was abandoned. The only fun element to the game was ‘juggling’ the bubbles by grouping them together. This spawned the next game idea, which I will be covering in the next post.