Squally

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Latest news

• Announcements·22 Jul 2023Official

  End of Early-Access!

  After many years of development, Squally is finally leaving early-access! This is the largest patch yet, including 4 new chapters of the game, as well as major revamps to earlier chapters. However, this is not the final update! There is still a long list of polish, tuning, and an additional chapter that is being worked on. With that said, there is still many hours of content in the current release, and it can be played all the way to the credits! This is enough progress for us to be comfortable removing the early-access tag and opening up the game to a wider audience. Thanks for all of your support, and patience over the years as we've developed this game. I hope you all learn something, and thank you for your support! For those who are curious what is planned: Snow chapter is unfinished (and consequently the collectables within that chapter) Level design polish. Some levels are a bit linear, and could use more polish in general. Localization updates. A large portion of the dialogue is translated via scripts, and as a result has problems. Gameplay polish. Sound effects, music, particle effects, animations, etc. These are all things that have been somewhat neglected in favor of finishing the game. Potentially more mini-games. For those who have followed the game since the beginning know that we scrapped a few mini-games due to ineffectiveness in teaching. We may try to bring them back if we can fix them. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/33779101/4cb2227c8e453716230ee60cd284c7eed057aa12.png {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/33779101/383a410bb97874643e90070be29aee50907a3c88.png{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/33779101/0478e6ba31523a56e35ba87b30929456a4b0825f.png {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/33779101/10be44c7635f3ead3b8a4ff32bc8ea6d6817ed1d.png {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/33779101/a18cb9a39cd3ab626f37557ad6e8d285a14588ea.png
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• Announcements·20 Jun 2020Official

  Chapter 2 Released!

  After several months of development, Chapter 2 has been released! Guide Squally through the scorching desert of the Underflow Ruins! The focus of this chapter is mainly on `cmp` operations, and conditional moves. Our assumption would be that conditional moves are easier to teach than branching, but if this turns out to be untrue, I'll put out patches to change this. We've started to work on more puzzles, for example this logical OR puzzle: {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/33779101/2dd9b0df9f035d0af5ca223f406704af1ed43d62.png Upcoming plans The game's engine has become much more structurally sound, allowing for quicker development of content. This means future chapters will be released fairly quickly! We plan to release 8 chapters total, although most of the important concepts will be covered by the end of CH4. - Develop and release CH3 - Iterate on CH1/CH2 based on your feedback to improve the educational quality. - Release a better version of the deprecated mini-game Cipher. Cipher was a flop, so we'll be redesigning it to be more fun and educational. This will not be released until after CH3 probably, exact details TBD. - Address issues below. Changelogs - All CH2 content released -- enemies, puzzles, story, etc. - Engine now supports multiple layers, giving maps depth! This allows for more creative and engaging maps. - Slight CH1 revamp. Story dialogue updates, some maps redone to take advantage of new layer system. - Added real hacking tool tutorials as a separate menu on title screen - Added objective tracker to top right of screen. - Implemented out-of-combat consumable usage. - Warps between worlds added to Mages Guild / Mage Shrines - Improved tutorials/help on hackables. - Fixed crash on localization change - Fixed rare crash in Hexus help menus Known issues - A couple maps are under-developed, as well as the CH2 boss fight. In the next week or so I'll be putting out hotfixes to improve these issues. - Walking animations sometimes do not play for enemies. (Resolved, but ...
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• Announcements·21 Dec 2019Official

  First Chapter Live!

  The first chapter of story mode in Squally went live today! It's been awhile in the making. Summary of changes: - Removed mini-games menu. Mini-games have been rolled into the main game as puzzles/side content. - Content up to the first boss released. The boss fight isn't implemented yet, so early-access content ends there. The released content includes story, items, helpers/followers, various game mechanics, and of course puzzles! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/33779101/6747cc7e2bce1721903e1aeeff93eb04beb9902f.png From here on out updates will be much more frequent. All major game systems have been implemented. Apologies for the previous buggy updates. I've been attempting to apply the startup mentality of "move fast and break things", but it turns out broken games suck quite badly. Squally should be much more stable and enjoyable now. All I need to do from here is polish existing game mechanics, address any concerns players have, and release more content! Cheers, Zac {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/33779101/39f94bb47f6834f6f3e601a7d3cd52878cd325f9.png ------------ Some known issues: - Hexus cards in the inventory menu don't show any stats. - Items aren't stacking in the inventory menu yet. - Combat camera can be a little weird/jarring -- the combat system needs a good amount of polish. - Visual bug with mage portals showing up as red instead of blue (oops) - Followers lack swim animation - This game needs more music/SFX in many places
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• Announcements·7 May 2019Official

  Pointer Trace Mini-Game Live

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rs3PHyB17A We just launched a new mini-game that teaches important fundamental skills, including x86/x64 registers, pointers, segfaults, and addressing. We've only launched a few levels, and it's not super polished yet. (This is early-access after all). Sound FX are missing, there are a few minor glitches/bugs, etc. We'll be pushing out daily updates for the next week adding new levels and fixing these issues. Our next steps are: - OSX build will go live on 5/7 - Release more levels daily - Polish this mini-game and fix the known bugs* - Get our Linux build up to date, as it's lagging behind OSX/Windows - Revisit the gameplay for the Cipher mini-game. We pulled it because it was hard and honestly not very fun - Continue working on story-mode. ---------- * Some of the known bugs: - Leaving a level in Pointer Trace sometimes doesn't work. Workaround is to exit via the 'esc' menu. - Music volume/tracks can get reset when changing scenes - Deadlock when starting story-mode on some machines - Crashes on startup on some machines. ---------- This mini-game made it to #1 on r/programming! We're glad this mini-game was well recieved, and we'll continue to put out content that you all enjoy. https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bks7av/squally_new_minigame_to_teach_x86x64_registers/
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• Announcements·14 Apr 2019Official

  Hexus Puzzle Mode Released

  We know many of you are still waiting for the main story-mode, however in the mean time we've launched puzzle-mode for Hexus! We're hitting some build issues on Linux -- we'll push out the Linux version soon (along with fixes some reported crashes!) https://youtu.be/3u36colnDKs
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