Update log
Full Squad update
The complete published notes, normalized for clean reading and source attribution.
Extracted changes
- Workshop
- Gameplay
Hello Squaddies!
Today’s Dev Blog is a little different than anything we have done before, but we wanted to introduce more of our Dev team to the community!
So, without further ado, meet Virus.exe, a Technical Game Designer on Squad!
But what is a Technical Game Designer? Well, these individuals possess a unique blend of skills: part game designer, part programmer, and entirely immersed in the inner workings of game engines.
Virus’s days are a combination of experimentation and investigation, often stepping in when others encounter a dead end in solving a technical bug. When that issue runs deeper than expected, Virus has been known to create in-editor tools to allow designers to fix the issue! As for the design side of the position, spending time working with other designers on design docs, configuring new features, and liaising between the design and engineering team for everyone to speak the same ‘language’ is how most of his days are spent!
Virus and Ceeg sat down to discuss his role and what drove him to work in the games industry. Here’s how that interview went!
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What inspired you to become a game developer, and how did you get started?
I have wanted to become a programmer since I was a kid. When I was about 12 years old, I became interested in programming and started studying it after school. Writing code fascinated me; I could swear that I could see the zeros and ones hovering in the air around me as if I were Neo from The Matrix. But getting into gamedev was not my goal initially, and you might say I got into the industry by chance.
At the end of 2015, I saw a small Russian streamer on Twitch, who was playing Squad, which had just been released in early access. I am a big fan of the Battlefield series, so I liked the look of Squad a lot, bought it, and started playing together with that streamer. Later, we became friends in real life. I was even a witness at his wedding (hi Anton and Lisa)!
A year later or so, the Squad modding kit came out. And that changed everything. Being a techie to the core, I immediately wanted to figure it out and start creating cool stuff for Squad, which by then had become my favorite game. The original mod toolkit turned out to be almost ‘vanilla’ Unreal Engine editor, so while learning how to mod Squad, I was also learning one of the most powerful game engines of our time.
Active Defense System prototype
After a while, I had built up some reputation in the modding community, and a member of the Squad QA team named Emil spotted me and asked for my help. He had an idea for a new game mode that he proposed to game designers, which they liked, but there were no resources available to develop it at the time, so he asked me to help to create a mod with this new game mode, and I gladly agreed. And to this day, I’m grateful to him for providing me this opportunity that ended up turning my life around. Some might say it was just a happy coincidence, but I consider it to be more like the hand of fate.
Some time later, when the mod was ready and we had completed some public playtests, I was invited to join the Squad development team to integrate this mod into the game. While doing this, I expressed a strong interest in how Squad
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