SquabPie - realtime multiplayer game

Community Showcases
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Hello, everyone! I’d like to show you our game - SquabPie. It’s a realtime multiplayer arena game with an isometric camera and WASD control.

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The key feature is that you can choose your devices and modify them with chips mid-game. For example, you can create a grenade that heals and speeds up your mates or a turret that fires magnetic bullets or a beam that… You get it :slight_smile:

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Game now has about 20 devices and 12 chips which can be combined with each other. Some combinations are more obvious, but other can lead to unexpected tactics:)

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Our site - http://squabpie.com/ - you can register and download a client there (Windows and Mac OS).

Done so far:

  • SquabPie is a client/server game, so we have a small AWS-based server which is capable of of 3 simultaneous games 6 players each.
  • There are two game modes: deathmatch and team vs team. Also there is a singleplayer level named workshop where you can test your assembly on bots
  • some pretty tough bots were added recently, so be careful! :slight_smile:
  • Game staticstics (hit TAB in game to see it): how much damage taken, heal/stun/fire applied, etc.

Who we are: Most of progress was made by two devs in about 1.5 years of part-time development. The third guy joined recently to improve our AI.

What’s not done:

  • There is no modelers or artists in our team, so graphics is very basic, but we’re currently working on some level improvements.
  • Tutorial/training - would be nice to have some learning curve for newcomers and we have some cool plans for it, but for now you can use Workshop mode with bots.

Our plans: Tons of them!

  • Cooperative mode
  • More advanced device constructor: player can combine basic devices and tune their parameters
  • More chip types: transform chips (when used temporarily change stats and (or) ability list), device chips (when used, device device replaces primary attack with something different)
  • More fancy and fun game modes!
  • We’re working (slowly) on a story and visual style. Hopefully, we’ll find a person who can assist us with this.

Any kind of feedback is appreciated. Other ways to contact us:

P.S. Couple of weeks ago a development blog was launched. It’s not much yet, but I have a couple of articles in development, and if you have interest in any technical details I would love to hear you theme suggestions.

2 Likes
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SquabPie was showcased on DevGAMM in Minsk last week, so we made a little photo-report :slight_smile: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.920139224706569.1073741828.920134654707026&type=3

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Hey if you don’t mind me asking, I was wondering what networking solution you guys are using for this game? (ex: Photon, Unity, TNet, or Bolt)

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Sure, we’re using new Unity UNET low level API (NetworkTransport class for example) as a transport and our custom Entity Management/Serialization protocol. It’s quite straightforward and is tailored specifically for our game, but if you’re interested in details I can write a post about it. We don’t use HLAPI because it doesn’t support client/server script separation and our game was built on a clean client/server separation idea.

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Hi everyone! Here is a quick update on what have been done:

you can get an idea of whole picture in a new trailer :):

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We also recorded a full game round in Team Mode. You can get more in-depth look at the game, what tactics can be used, some useful device builds and a few funny moments:

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We still don’t have skilled artists or modelers, but managed to develop an interesting style. Here is a prototype of a level called Space Beast’s Cave:

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It still requires lots of work on color balancing, lighting, composition and other aspects, but the idea looks promising to us. What do you think? Any feedback is appreciated :slight_smile:
I’ve learned a few GI moments in the process, so if you have any questions, I’ll gladly answer. For example, it turns out that GI baking takes a lot more time on big meshes, so I had to replace monolith platform mesh with a dozen of small primitives, though it might be a naive approach.

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One more thing :slight_smile: If anyone is curious, we’re using Jekyll for our updated site. It’s a very cool static site generator, meaning your site would not require any backend or databases, which lowers hosting requirements a lot. Moreover, it is supported by GitHub Pages, so if you can’t afford proper hosting or domain, you can leverage on github repo as a hoster.