The history and inspirations of (square)

I wanted to talk a little bit about the history of (square) and how it turned into the game it is today.

The story begins back in 2019 when I participated in the GMTK Game Jam. The theme of the jam was Only One so there were lots of games about having only one bullet. My favorite of the bunch was a game called Octarena by Galakrond. While it had a frustrating system of restarting the game every time you made a single mistake, it had a really fun way it handled having a single bullet. You could shoot out your bullet and then recall back to yourself. Control of this system was required as shield enemies came in later levels that required shooting behind them and recalling the bullet to fly into them as it returned to you. I loved this mechanic and thought there was a lot of room for it expanded on.

Galakrond's Octarena

This idea stuck with me. I wondered what would happen if you couldn't hit your own projectile? It seemed like that would create a really interesting balance of trying to get the projectile to come close enough that you could shoot it but not letting it touch you.

The year was 2021 now and these mechanics still flew around in my mind. I made the first version of the game for Mini Jam 73. It was called One Armed Circle then. You can play this version right now in your browser (it is not good). A fun fact about this game is that I could not get the bouncing to work in time for the jam so I just inverted the direction the square was moving in. After the jam, I looked at the code for five minutes and realized my mistake!

One Armed Circle is a bad name for a video game

I continued working on the game. At this time the game had a free camera and this was leading to all sorts of frustration as it was very easy to be killed by the square coming flying from off screen. I actually made an indicator that pointed to the square when it was off screen, but even that didn't help much.

The other big problem with this implementation was that the camera was constantly moving to keep the square in frame, which is quite sickening.

Around this time, I played THOTH by Carlsten Games. Playing THOTH gave me the confidence to cut the free camera and limit the levels to a rectangle. The creativity in THOTH's level and its four level structure is something I took a lot of inspiration from.

THOTH is also the game that I felt gave me permission to not have a pause menu

Another game that had a large impact on (square) was qomp by Stuffed Wombat. The game's minimalism and how it took a simple idea very far were things I wanted in (square). I also really liked how the final section of the game was a thematic conclusion to the mechanics of the game and wanted something similar for (square)'s epilogue.

qomp is a very good game

And that's about it. I have some idea for more content, but it is unclear if any of that will ever be made. I appreciate everyone who's checked out (square) in the last few days. -Brennan