Thread by @spookysquid

🎂🦑✨SPOOKY SQUID GAMES IS 10 YEARS OLD TODAY!✨🦑🎂
Andrew Pilkiw and I incorporated the studio on this day way back in 2009!

SSG retrospective thread incoming!

I think this photos was year or so after but here we are from around that time. Photo is by @PaulHillierdesu who's helped us out with photography and video a bunch over the last decade.

The first Spooky Squid game actually predates incorporation.
Night of the Cephalopods was created in the 2008 Artsty Games Incubator run by @JimMunro and was an experiment with live audio narration of action gameplay.

You can still download it free here: spookysquid.com/notc/

Here's a playthrough that once had dev commentary (thanks YouTube)
NotC is easily our most successful free game, got lots of press and downloads but I don't think it's one of our best since it's more about an experimental gimmick than solid gameplay.

That said, while other games have done more with the dynamic narration idea since, I'm pretty happy I did some early work in that area (possibly first?). Also it was the project I learned GameMaker with!

So the reason we incorporated Spooky Squid Games was a prototyping grant from @OntarioCreates (then the OMDC) to work on a game called Guerrilla Gardening: Seeds of Revolution.

Here's a trailer made with that prototype

Guerrilla Gardening was a militant stealth gardening game inspired by the real life guerilla gardening movement and the games jet set radio, syndicate and metal gear solid.

It was a game about overthrowing an authoritarian dictatorship by planting over government propaganda and cheering up the populace so they'd protest.

A mock-up of how we wanted the final game to look.

We worked on the prototype part-time and shopped it around for about 2 years. The final prototype had around 45 minutes of puzzle stealth gameplay but had pretty sparse artwork compared to the mockup.

Shoutout to Guerrilla Gardening's protagonist Molly Greenthumb drawn by the talented @inkskratch with touch up and colours by me. Eric's done promo illustrations and other art for all our major releases / prototypes since.
We met working in film as Jr 3D visual effects artists

In the end we were never able to get a publisher or production grant for GG:SoR. It was an very ambitious game for a first time team. It also didn't help that Farmville came out during that time so everyone suddenly wanted it to be a casual FB game because plants.

I still think the design and world of GG:SoR is promising. The big game design challenge we never quite solved is that it had stealth and tower defence like elements, both of which involve a lot of waiting and watching.

Guerrilla Gardening has two interesting connections to our current release Russian Subway Dogs. It was inspired by a real life phenomenon taken to ludicrous extremes and it's when I first talked to @PeterChapmanEsq about doing music for a game (it just took awhile!).

Despite never being released Guerrilla Gardening probably has the most extensive online documentation of its creation including videos and blog posts all of which you can find collected here: spookysquid.com/ggsor

Ok next free game! Cephalopod's Co-op Cottage Defense a 2-player only local co-op game created in 2009 during an Artsy Games Incubator I ran. Probably my fave free game we've made.

Available for download here: spookysquid.com/cccd/

In CCCD you defend a cottage together using a hammer that can only stun and fix fences and a shotgun that can kill incoming squiddies of various types. For some reason I never recorded video of it, probably because video recording was a huge hassle at the time.

CCCD plays closest to Ancient's Protect Me Knight that came out a year later but its inspiration was actually Trauma Center New Blood's amazing co-op mode. I wanted to capture the intense back and forth communication that game encouraged.

Here's someone else's video showing Cephalopod Co-op Cottage Defences' unique weapon trading mechanic so you can see it in action. Both players would have to push the trade button at the same time to quickly switch tools.

Thanks to @HandEyeSociety CCCD was shown on its own cabinet at @tiff_net as part of Nuit Blanch in 2010. That cabinet is now the Torontoron Twin Stick and you can still play it arcade style at its current home @thehiveesports handeyesociety.com/torontron/

Fun fact @shanianickel first emailed me after playing Co-op Cottage Defence on the Torontron. Years later we hired her!

Between being local co-op only and never producing a trailer CCCD never got much international coverage compared to Night of the Cepholopods. It did have an impact locally though and it's still a fave of mine and a design I'd love to revisit.

Next free game we created (and the only free game Andrij also worked on) was The Night Balloonists our 2010 entry to GAMMA 4's One Button Games competition. A 2-4 versus balloon combat game.

Available free here: spookysquid.com/tnb/

Because it's only one button you can play it easily with 4 players even on a keyboard. Your balloons travel along an air stream as you compete for pollen. Holding lets you slowly descend while double clicking drops ink and rockets you upwards into opponents.

@jontheautomaton and @Konstantino created this awesome arcade box to play Night Balloonists on at events, it looks much better with the current paint job but I don't have photos. Here it is at a @HandEyeSociety social. Bunch a Toronto indie game folks lookin' young in that photo.

I wish I'd recorded the talk I gave at that social, all about designing party games and how we created Night Balloonists. I still have the slides but I never use proper scripts for talks so it'd be hard to re-assemble.

Ok taking a break to eat a late lunch, back in a bit with some behind the scenes They Bleed Pixels stuff! Thanks everyone who's been sharing this thread and their memories from the last decade :D

Ok back! Time to talk They Bleed Pixels, our first commercial release.
The goal was to create a platforming beat 'em up with complex 1 button combat in around 6 months for XBLIG. It took 2 years and launched on Steam instead.

We chose XBLIG at the time because it was still early days and it looked like the service might succeed. Unfortunately that also limited the early press the game received, since the platform wasn't popular yet (and wouldn't really ever be).

Here's the earliest footage of TBP, the physics were rough, the up attack had a totally different animation, backgrounds were simple and no levels were designed yet so all that stuff is temp... but the core is there!

We wanted to keep the graphics simple so that I could concentrate on smooth complex animation and we could quickly create large levels (so the player could move very fast).

Of course the backgrounds kept getting more and more detailed so that may not have worked out as planned.

A big inspiration for the combat was playing an early build of Nidhogg at a @HandEyeSociety social. I loved the way it mapped several meaningful moves to a single button based on direction, timing and context. I also wanted to apply what I'd learned from The Night Balloonists.

The controls for TBP will always be divisive (and suck on keyboard) but I do think we showed that there is an audience who are interested in alternate takes on beat'em up combat and controls.

Personally most fighting game and beat'em up special moves are impossible for me to pull off (eg quarter circle + A) I find timed button presses and directions much easier.

Here's a microtalk about TBP's controls I gave at Tokyo Indie Underground 2013:

Trailer comments for They Bleed Pixels always referenced Super Meatboy but the actual inspiration for our platforming was the much more peaceful Kyntt Stories. I love how fast it is and how it has entire sections built around wall clings and double jumps with no platforms.

Digging into the archive now and found this early test of the animation system, seeing how easily we could blend between moves.

Here's a back flip dodge move that never looked great and didn't make it in to They Bleed Pixels. Because we were planning on a short dev cycle the game design was very improvisational which is not typical for me. (gif hopefully fixed now!)

Here are the very first drawings of The Clawed Girl. I worked on the sprite first because I wanted to make sure it'd be very clear, readable and easy to animate. The detailed cartoon version of her came later.

We had this whole idea of being able to stab into and ride large monsters. In the end we decided it wouldn't be worth all the time to implement since it didn't lend itself to interesting level geometry. We'd need all these long dull flat bits.

I'm trying to find my big PSD full of They Bleed Pixels enemy concepts, here are a few that never made it in. A general idea we had was that on enemies white areas would block while red and black areas would be vulnerable.

Found the giant They Bleed Pixels concept sheet. This is still how I do most of my sprite concepts, a giant sheet with a sample background and a million copies and variations. A few familiar faces in here!

We originally wanted a few more hazard types to avoid and use on enemies in They Bleed Pixels. Acid was simple but fire would have been systemic and spread from enemy to enemy. In the end there wasn't time.

In general we've always chosen polishing existing systems and elements instead of adding "all the things" at the cost of rough implementation. Creatively it's the right call, but probably not the best from a biz perspective.

First sketch of the Clawed Girl as she'd appear in cut scenes and the final version (there were around 7 versions between these)

From the start we planned to tell the story through motion comics without a single line of dialogue.

💥Wait, who the hell are these girls?! 💥

Originally the story was going to be more complex and the Clawed Girl would be bullied by these twins when she arrived at her new school.

Some other rough sketches of the twins before they were abandoned. Sharp eyed players who made it to the end of the game may notice I snuck one of them into a group shot so they didn't entirely go to waste.

A storytelling touch I'm pretty proud of that I hoped players notice, the way the book is destroyed in each cutscene is reflected in the type of damage to the paper background in the menu UI. The game actually takes place within the cursed book!

How the book was destroyed each time also influences the dream worlds the Clawed Girl travels through. Eg. when it's buried we start underground, next level is the forest floor and then we end in the treetops. Most worlds have this upward progression.

*tea break*
I've already mentioned They Bleed Pixels platforming and combat design but haven't talked about its unique save system, where high scoring combat and collectibles fill a save meter that lets you earn and place checkpoints (almost) wherever you want.

All credit for that checkpoint system goes to @mathewkumar who suggested it during a discussion of possible power up abilities that wouldn't remove skill challenges from the game. We showed TBP both publicly and privately a LOT during development and the game benefited from it.

I think the original plan was to have some sort of transformation ability tied to skilled combat. Also the meter would be filled by pints of blood. However we realized that the amount of blood a given hit should produce to look good didn't match our play balance requirements.

No discussion of They Bleed Pixels is complete without mentioning @shaunhatton (aka DJ Finish Him)'s fantastic soundtrack! We first met him when he interviewed us for EP Daily and IIRC we decided to work together soon after at a @HandEyeSociety social. djfinishhim.bandcamp.com/album/they-ble…

Our process was generally that I'd send him backgrounds for levels, he'd send us tracks and occasionally I'd switch around which track went with which level. He also produced just an insane amount of tracks, so lots of extra stuff is only in the OST and not in the game.

Apart from the core TBP team of myself, Andrij and Shaun we also had some awesome guest creators making bonus levels and some amazing guest artist doing unlock-able illustrations... which you can download wallpaper of here! spookysquid.com/tbp/wallpaper

In the end we almost didn't make it, we limped over the finish line thanks to some last minute investment from a few established indies, who helped fast track us through Steam. It was close.

Up until the last month or so I did most of the sound fx for the They Bleed Pixels, but there were tons of missing audio including all but the first cut scene. 4 sound designers: Troy Morrissey, Adam Axeby, Ryan Henwood and Blain Kramer helped us out last minute and nailed it.

Thanks to everyone's help we did it! They Bleed Pixels was released on Steam in 2012! After this Andrij and I were able to go full time indie! 🎉

This was the launch trailer I cut together in those final weeks.

They Bleed Pixels was never a mega hit, but it has fans around the world and that's something I'm super grateful for and honestly still kind of can't believe? Like here's a fan in 2015 doing cosplay at an event in Moscow! How?!

For a while I tried to collect all the Clawed Girl fan art from They Bleed Pixels in one spot but eventually I just didn't have the time to maintain it. There's at least 2x-4x this out there in the wild I missed. spookysquid.com/tbp/fanart

I'll need to come back to They Bleed Pixels because the Crimson Update was a *THING*. But in 2012 we also produced two small games Black Church Brigandage and a little jam game called Russian Subway Dogs(!?).

Black Church Brigandage was part of the first Comics vs Games, an event at @TorontoComics I co-organized, which paired comic artists with game makers. One of the game designers dropped out last minute so I came in and created something new!

Created with comic artist @AndyBelanger (who did the pixels) and inspired by one of his comics, Black Church Brigandage is combat basketball between barbarian parents and disciples of the black church over the life the newborn antichrist (the basketball).

The match in that video is 1 vs 1 but the game is at its best played 2 vs 2. It's never been released due to requiring a minimum of 4 Xbox 360 controllers to work. Hopefully some day I'll have the time to go in and add proper keyboard and gamepad support since it's a lot of fun!

Created as part of Glorious Train Wrecks GDC Pirate Kart (piratekart.com) at a local jam called Spam Jam the original jam game version of Russian Subway Dogs has the same core gameplay loop but is honestly kind of terrible in comparison. People liked it though!

I liked it enough that I decided to keep poking at it as a side project, improving the art and adding features. Here's some never seen footage from 2014 when I was thinking it might work as a phone game (it wouldn't). It has bears but your jump is SO small

If you want to check out the original jam game version of Russian Subway Dogs it's still available. It's 30fps and has terrible game feel but it's interesting to contrast a version that took just over 2 days with a version that took just over 2 years!

glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/2965

Fun Fact: Both Black Church Brigandage and the Russian Subway Dogs jam game had music by @KingKRule who now makes excellent comics!

Ok... I have been tweeting Spooky Squid Games history for *looks at non existent watch* ... a very long time. There's still lots to cover including a ton of never before seen art but I'm calling it a night. More tomorrow when we will be a decade and one day old.

We are now a decade and one day old so continuing the thread! Going to talk about updating They Bleed Pixels post release, the Crimson Update and localization. Let's dig in!

Our first update for They Bleed Pixels was turned around pretty quickly a Halloween themed bonus level that turned the combat and player knowledge of enemy behaviours into a puzzle solving tool to collect 100 candies. It's one of my fave levels in the game.

The second update would be more significant.
Add an easy(ish) difficulty level.
A new winter themed bonus level.
Port the engine out of XNA which looked like it was on it's way out, was never able to run the game particularly fast and didn't support lower end graphic cards.

We figured six months and we could then sort out Mac and Linux and look into consoles... it didn't come out till June 2015 (though it wasn't the only thing being worked on). I've learned 6 months = "I don't know, probably years."

A big part of it was just porting the code base without changing some small part of the game by mistake. But along the way feature creep happened. We added a replay sharing function to the leaderboard.

Never go back and add a replay function after release!

Replay functions basically work by recording all the player input and then running it back in the actual game. You need to make sure that any random element is also using the same seed etc. If anything messes that up the game goes out of sync.

Of course levels in They Bleed Pixels can take even a skilled player 30+ minutes to complete. This means we needed it to stay in sync for a long time + add fast forward and compress the input recording to fit into Steam's leaderboard data storage space.

This all had to be tested so there were days where all I did was run levels and then play them back waiting for that one spot where they desynced so Andrew could track it down. At one point this was only happening on the final frame after winning.

But since I wasn't coding, most of my time was spent on the winter bonus level and easy mode as well as travelling to promote the game. I also started prepping a design doc for our next game.

Here's a photo of TBP being shown on the indie stage at Tokyo Game Show!

The Winter level was an attempt to please both hardcore players and those who found the later levels a bit too challenging. Winning it isn't too difficult but the collectibles were pretty challenging.

Also my backgrounds got even more elaborate.

Easy mode in They Bleed Pixels was created by editing down the long regular difficulty mode levels, adding more save spot blood bubbles, and removing hazards.

I now wonder if a Celeste style set of options could have also worked?

Once it was time to release the Crimson Update we had to come up with some way to promote it. I'd already done almost half a dozen trailers for the game and felt we needed something new to get noticed.... a live action trailer!

Here's the final Crimson Update trailer. @PaulHillierdesu shot the video, @d20love played the Clawed Girl, @_nadine created a Book of Claws prop and I edited and created visual effects.

In the end I still like the trailer as a video and it was fun to make, but I think I messed up by aiming it too much at existing players, especially since the goal was to bring in new ones. Fundamentally it just takes too long to get to the gameplay.

The Crimson Update ran faster on more machines, enough that we could double the blood particles shown, you could now play it on Mac and Linux, and it was more casual friendly but it took so long to create it couldn't really make back all that time spent with new sales.

I did have this prepared just in case though and we still have two seasons to theme bonus levels around. So we had a plan if it did boost sales significantly.

Spoilers for an alternate time line I guess!

The highlight of that year was definitely the They Bleed Pixels speed run at AGDQ 2015 by @squidclaw. Andrew and I skyped in and did dev commentary, it was super fun to take part in.

Oh yeah! Also shout out to @inkskratch for this great promo image he did for the Crimson Update. I learned my lesson before this, promo images should never be pixel art since you will need to resize them into dozens of configurations.

The final update to They Bleed Pixels was the Japanese localization. I've written about the process in this blog post.
spookysquid.com/blog/2016/2/19…

It actually ended up influencing how we approached stylized titles in Russian Subway Dogs, mixing in Russian words with fancy fonts.

While all this was happening we hired @shanianickel and started ramping up on Dark Hart Academy, an ill fated but ambitious project inspired by Persona and the meta structure of Dungeons of Fayte an amazing jam game by @pulsemeat and @tanyaxshort.

1-4 player would start by picking a "style" for their student, which would determine starting stats and weapons. They could also choose skin tone and hair/clothing palette

These are all based on pencil sketches by @inkskratch pixeled over and polished by myself and @shanianickel

Players would then attend classes at Dark Hart Academy a school with a mysterious past and occult undercurrents. Each class would increase different stats and you could only pick a couple a day.

You'd also get little randomized stories where you could make choices and earn extra stats/items. In the final game we wanted these to occasionally link to create larger narratives. This story/upgrade structure is all derived from Dungeons of Fayte.

At midnight mysterious portals to other worlds opened in the school. You'd pick a portal, fight and explore a procedurally generated level ending with a boss fight. Each world would be unique with its own mysteries. This one was a steampunk world ruled by a Robot Queen.

In another world you were tiny and had to fight off giant insects that had devolved from an ancient insect civilization. Pretty sure this one is all @shanianickel's work.

Some enemy concepts from the insect world.

More enemy concepts from the robo-victorian one!

Another world involved a ship that had crashed into an enormous psychedelic alien you'd explore the insides of both.

Alien enemies including infected crew.
We wanted each world to have a strong enough theme that they felt like they could each have an entire game made about them. They would have bits of backstory you could discover over multiple playthroughs.

Some amazing bosses with idle and hit animations by @shanianickel
We wanted to take these farther but scaled back so they could use the same basic logic.

Once the level was complete the players would return to school for more classes. The cycle would continue a few times before the boss fight against an ancient evil raised by a secret school cult.

(slide from one of our pitch documents)

Ok folks are here for our Sunday stream so I'm going to drop this Dark Hart Academy pitch video showing a bunch of the planned action gameplay.
Not a big surprise but we wanted to do a lot of heavily systemic stuff. Unfortunately we never got all of it working just right :(

Ok got a bit of time before the work day ends, so more info on Dark Hart Academy the game we had to shelve between They Bleed Pixels and Russian Subway Dogs!

In every level you could find a student who could either be carried to the exit and rescued or sacrificed at an alter to take on a permanent demonic form, like this cutie rat.

What altar appeared was randomized. You could also kill enemies near the altar to earn a unique weapon instead. This altar to an ice god would either give you an ice elemental form, or a special ice sword.

This one was for a pestilence god and would provide either a poisoned bone weapon or a plague mask wearing little demon form.

Only They Bleed Pixels fans know what form is granted by sacrificing at this altar.

Here's the playable Clawed Girl form casting magic! We managed to create a lot of the art needed for the games due to having 2x the artists as They Bleed Pixels... we probably needed 2x the programmers to actually implement all of it, that or a few more years of dev.

Here are all the playable characters plus demonic forms. Of course the regular humans could be customized, as I posted about earlier.

Ok got to run to the arcade to play some Pump it Up and get some exercise! Next up will be the consequences for sacrificing and saving students. Still lots of DHA stuff to share!