Squat & Conquer

Raid on the beat. Squat the throne. Side-step spikes, dodge arrows, avoid enemies to conquer thrones then defend yours.

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Inspiration

Love King of Thieves, Crypt of the NecroDancer and Wordle. Decided to try a rhythm based platformer so anyone can play without worrying about precise split second movements.

What it does

Squat & Conquer is an async beat-turn dungeon game on Reddit.

  • Every day, players are presented with a new daily challenge map
  • Conquer the daily map, place your defenses, protect your throne
  • Place spikes, guards and bows, then test your defenses and post your throne room
  • Raiders will attempt to claim your throne

How it was built

Client: Phaser + TypeScript + Vite + Tonal. Tonal creates basic beats synchronised to the clock and tracks beats. Admins and mods have access to the author studio to generate daily challenge maps. Finalised maps are published and placed in a maps pool with varying difficulty.

Backend: Devvit Web + Hono + Redis. Daily challenge maps assigned weekly with adapting difficulty based on players performance over the week.

Challenges

1. Finding the right mechanics
Tried a King of Thieves-like run, plan-ahead strips and 4-directional movements. Decided on the simplest 2-button moves: right move and upwards jump/double jump.

2. Provable fairness under UGC. Similar to King of Thieves, users have to successful raid their own throne to publish their build.

3. Custom Map Editor.
Tried Tiled map editor but it took too much time to create individual maps. Built a custom map generator that creates playable maps from several parameters. Just needed to tweak the parameters so it works well out of the box.

4. Scope. I had too many ideas I wanted to implement but had to drastically cut down to meet the deadline and work around my available time.

5. Syncing local dev + live testing on Reddit.
Using Reddit's official starter template was great to see how the entire flow works but terrible for testing. I needed to create a separate local version without Reddit so I can quickly test builds.

Accomplishments

  • Built my first rhythm-based game
  • Built a custom map generator and editor that works and publishes maps directly to Reddit
  • Built my first Reddit game

Lessons learned

  • Choosing the right scope for the jam
  • Designing mechanics suitable for the async nature of Reddit games and posts

What's next for Squat & Conquer

  • More hazards
  • Achievements
  • In-game currency
  • Leaderboard

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