THE ADVENTURES OF SQUARE
History
As an imaginative kind of kid, I’d always been keen to create my own universe within a game engine I was familiar with. The idea started out when I was still playing around with Duke Nukem 3D. My ambitions were high – I wanted to make a total conversion mod completely from the ground up, using only graphic and sprite resources of my own creation. Something called “ToonDuke” began to materialise, but my interest in it waned quickly.
When I found out about ZDoom and its modding capabilities, I quickly switched to Doom modding, finding the Doom engine easier and more comfortable work with than the Duke engine. I dove in at the deep end and began work on a total conversion using my limited skills at the time. Over time, my efforts grew into (the aptly-named) “Crappy Doom”, which featured a cast of bizarre, MSPaint-esque monsters, terrible textures and laughable level design.
To this day, I don’t believe I’ve shared any of this project, and I don’t think I’m yet willing to share the fruits of my embarrassingly hyperactive 14-year-old mind. While it started out as a few (intentionally) crappy hand-pixelled graphic replacements, the project’s scope soon ballooned uncontrollably into two megawads’ worth of deliberately unpleasant and annoying maps, and I even planned to include a plot, interactions with other non-player “characters”, amongst other things, all utilising ZDoom’s capabilities. Needless to say, I didn’t get far, which was probably for the good of all. The project lay dormant for a few years.
Then, one day in mid-2011, for whatever reason, a clearer vision of the project came to mind: I could simply make it consist of only a few levels, and feature the protagonist “Square” – a creation of my sibling Ben. Square was a character who’d been created with the goal of coming up with the blandest character from a children’s show possible – Square is a square and he gets bullied by circles – and that was more or less the entire schtick. He was also easy enough to draw, so I went ahead and started drawing up new sprites for his character, along with new textures and graphics, and promptly started building maps with these resources.
I properly announced the project in September 2011, and progress on the project at that point crept along slowly but surely. Though the end goal was much clearer to me, the workload involved was still daunting and substantial – essentially I was creating a brand new game all on my own. The 1.0 demo release was (almost) entirely my own work – although I did receive some assistance from the ZDoom modding community, who helped out with private testing, some last-minute graphic and sound tweaks, before the demo went public. It received a great deal of positive feedback, a lot of comments going towards the art style, which honestly I kind of wasn’t expecting – if anything I was anticipating people being turned off by it, and I was fully ready for criticisms calling it “lazy” or “placeholder-y”.
A short time after releasing it publicly, I got a PM on the Doomworld forums from Matt “MTrop” Tropiano, who was eager to work with me on the project. Matt’s a pretty seasoned mapper in the community, and certainly one I respected, so I was very happy to take him on board. At that point I began to think that assembling a dedicated team for the rest of the project’s development would be wise (it was, once again, to become an ambitious venture – three full episodes of content!), so I got in contact with more potential mappers.
It didn’t take long for us to build up a great deal of excitement about the project. I shared my ideas, essentially becoming Creative Director for the team, while Matt took up Project Management, assembling and organising all the game files and assets, setting up a Trello board where we could keep track of progress and ideas, and even helping record and edit new sounds and voice-over lines. We all agreed very quickly on who would create which levels in the first episode, and that we’d have a release out by October 2014.
During development, as the project picked up steam and became more and more refined and independent of the Doom universe, we considering seriously branching out. I took the game to local gaming events to be playtested by other nearby game developers. I took on Jazz “queenjazz” Mickle to assist with taking the game’s exposure to new heights, introducing several gaming conventions to us, including GameCity in 2014, EGX Rezzed in 2015, and AMAZE Berlin. Right now we’re very serious about making The Adventures of Square the best game it possibly can be. I myself am incredibly happy with how it has turned out and am infinitely grateful to my team for making such a great product. I’m proud of everyone.
The game is continuing to be made into a completely unique gameplay experience – and hopefully not just stylistically. The game features an instantly lovable player character with a ton of personality thanks to Ben Paddock’s excellent voice-acting, a plethora of villainous geometrical characters with their own charms, and a set of well-designed, quality-assured levels that harness the endless wonders of the GZDoom engine to create an experience unlike any you’ve seen before. And best of all – it’s totally free to play.
BE THERE AND BE SQUARE!