After 6 years of development, SQUAREISH is finally complete!

6 years for this? What? What makes SQUAREISH so special, for it to take this long?

Yep. Six years went into the development of the game.

To give you a little bit of context, I should also note that SQUAREISH is my first released game ever, the first game I developed, the first-ever project I created in the Unity game engine, and the project I created the first time I ever opened a game engine to start developing a game.

Back at the end of 2017, I started getting more and more interested in indie game development. I started watching dev-logs and informative videos about game development on YouTube, dreaming about games I wish I could develop, and planning what could become my first-developed solo game.

After some months of consuming game development tutorials without ever applying a single notion learned in them, I finally downloaded the Unity game engine and created my first Unity project.

I had little to no coding experience, no experience with the engine, and no experience in developing a game at all, but I wanted to create my game.

I started from what every game developer I had the pleasure to discover on YouTube and social media usually starts with: a platformer game.

I created a movement system, a jump system, some placeholder sprites, and assembled a level to move around in.

It worked! I could move my own square character around my little world.

It felt great.

But still, it was not very interesting, not even to me, the creator of that world.

I figured I would need to make something different than the countless amazing platformer projects from indie developers out there, something more unique, with some unusual characteristics, a new concept, a little twist. Why not force the little square-ish character to squish down before it could jump?

And thus, SQUAREISH was born.

Now, 6 years later, after getting on and off the project, after dealing with other stuff happening in my life, after becoming uninterested in the project and then interested in it once again, only to lose interest some days later, and after starting countless numerous other game projects without finishing a single one of them, SQUAREISH is finally complete.

Is it a perfect game? Not at all. Is it good? Not even that. But how could it be a perfect or good game? It is my first-ever game project after all.

The countless other game projects I started all were useful to me in learning more and more things about game development, about programming, about the Unity game engine, about art, sounds, level design, game design, and lots of other stuff.

But these other things I learned during those 6 years were never applied to the SQUAREISH project.

This is because if I were to apply everything I learned to a project like this, I would have to delete it and start from scratch, rewriting all the code, remaking all the assets, rewriting music, changing sounds, game menus, levels, animations... everything.

Instead, I kept everything as I made it.

This game is the product of my inexperience with game development, and I would like it to remain as pure as it can be.

I still had to fix various bugs and make the game playable, of course, but the structure of the game, the code, the assets, the organization of files, the art, the sounds, animations, mechanics... everything, was always the same, and it is BAD. But it must remain like so.

Despite all of this, SQUAREISH managed to teach me things no other projects managed to.

It taught me how to release a game, how to stick and finish a project, and most importantly, what I should NOT do when making games, which is exactly what I did when making this game.

But if SQUAREISH is really a bad game, then why am I releasing it to the world? 

Because I needed to.

I needed to release SQUAREISH for me, for completing a years long project I am deeply attached to. I needed to release it because completing a project is one of the greatest accomplishments for the indie game developer I aspire to be. 

It is great to finally be able to say "I released a game", to refer to something as "my game", to finally understand what goes through the release of something like this to the world.

I am also releasing it because other people might find what I find to be a bad game, an okay game instead. They might even like the game, who am I to deny others from playing it? (I am actually the creator of the game, but still, I think the question makes some sense).

Given all of this, I can't say I actually enjoyed the development of SQUAREISH, but it has been part of my life for so long I got attached to it, too much for letting it stay with the other projects I'll never release.

I don't really feel good about leaving things half done: I had to commit to my project's completion even though I knew it was bad from the start. 

And after all I'm proud of it.

I don't think I can actually thank SQUAREISH enough for what it did for me, what it taught me, and what it has been and always will be for me: a bad game I am in love with.

And also, I don't think I can thank you enough either, for reading through all of these lines of nonsense ❤︎.

- Valdis Gunn