Hey everyone!
We’re deep in the game dev caverns right now working hard on Stretchmancer, so it might be a while until you can get your hands on the game. In the meantime, we thought we’d start doing some devlogs to give you a closer look at how development on the game is going! We’ve got a lot of topics and features we want to show off, but we thought we’d start with one of the more exciting ones that you haven’t gotten a chance to see officially anywhere else yet - the Squishtroopers!
Alright, so. What the heck are these? Well, for starters, they look a lot nicer now than they do in that picture above. But we’ll get there in a second. The Squishtroopers are loyal, dim-witted servants to the dastardly Sgt. Squish. They’ve got heavy-duty Stifle Rifles that they’ll fire the second they spot you. Luckily, you can stretch and squish any number of things in the environment to get the upper hand on them and defeat them.
Initially, Stretchmancer didn’t have any kind of enemies in it at all. When we made the first “vertical slice” version of the game, Sgt. Squish had a line mentioning that he was sending in his “elite Squishtroopers” - but the gag was that they got stuck in the lift, so the player never actually saw them. We really patted ourselves on the back about that one, but then our producer Tom mentioned that it was kind of disappointing that we mention them but never even see them!
So, we decided to figure out what the Squishtroopers would actually be. Obviously in terms of their gameplay purpose, we were really inspired by the turrets from Portal. We wanted enemies that were simple to understand, and that could flip the dynamic of the game just by being present. As soon as you enter a room full of Squishtroopers, you need to evade them and stealthily find ways to take them out. Those methods might involve stretching a crate so that it smashes into them, warping the world so that lasers hit them, or just sneaking up behind them to pop their air-release valve and send them flying!
At first, we set up these strange watermelon-shaped placeholders to get a feel for how the Squishtroopers would occupy space in the game world. Our next step was making them look nice. Stretchmancer is heavily inspired by loud and wild 90s cartoons, so we wanted to tap into that kind of vibe when designing the Squishtroopers. Think inept cartoon henchmen, like the toads from Bucky O’Hare or a Star Wars Stormtrooper with even less training.
We had lots of awesome concepts for what the Squishtroopers could look like, but most of the designs weren’t really nailing that round, bounce-able shape we had in mind for them. We eventually managed to nail it down to a few really nice ones, and out of them all we loved this dog-faced one the most - but he looked a little too confident and capable. So we gave him a sillier face, drew up a detailed version of the detachable back-valve, and our Squishtrooper was born!
You might notice something cool about the way our Squishtroopers are animated. While they’ve got a proper 3D model, the face is actually flat 2D animation projected onto the model. We’ve got lots of talking 2D characters in the game already, but blending the 2D cartoon art and our 3D world together like this was really exciting to us. What do you think of it?
Now, we aren’t 100% done cooking when it comes to the Squishtroopers. Like I said at the start, Stretchmancer is still deep into development so we’ve got quite a few more… unexpected behaviors to iron out with these guys.
That’s all for this devlog, though! Hope you liked getting a bit of a peek into what we’ve been working on. We’ll see you all for another one of these soon-ish!
We share development updates in here and answer questions about the game all the time, so come on in and chat with a friendly rebel crew! We'll have a dedicated channel for sharing speedrun times, too, so you can discuss strats or just flex your times.
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