After several months of development, Chapter 2 has been released!

Guide Squally through the scorching desert of the Underflow Ruins!

The focus of this chapter is mainly on `cmp` operations, and conditional moves. Our assumption would be that conditional moves are easier to teach than branching, but if this turns out to be untrue, I'll put out patches to change this.

We've started to work on more puzzles, for example this logical OR puzzle:

The game's engine has become much more structurally sound, allowing for quicker development of content. This means future chapters will be released fairly quickly! We plan to release 8 chapters total, although most of the important concepts will be covered by the end of CH4.

- Develop and release CH3
- Iterate on CH1/CH2 based on your feedback to improve the educational quality.
- Release a better version of the deprecated mini-game Cipher. Cipher was a flop, so we'll be redesigning it to be more fun and educational. This will not be released until after CH3 probably, exact details TBD.
- Address issues below.

- All CH2 content released -- enemies, puzzles, story, etc.
- Engine now supports multiple layers, giving maps depth! This allows for more creative and engaging maps.
- Slight CH1 revamp. Story dialogue updates, some maps redone to take advantage of new layer system.
- Added real hacking tool tutorials as a separate menu on title screen
- Added objective tracker to top right of screen.
- Implemented out-of-combat consumable usage.
- Warps between worlds added to Mages Guild / Mage Shrines
- Improved tutorials/help on hackables.
- Fixed crash on localization change
- Fixed rare crash in Hexus help menus

- A couple maps are under-developed, as well as the CH2 boss fight. In the next week or so I'll be putting out hotfixes to improve these issues.
- Walking animations sometimes do not play for enemies. (Resolved, but unreleased)
- Sometimes equipment visuals do not load when entering a map. Purely visual bug, no gameplay is impacted.
- Hacking UX could use improvement.
- Some abilities like the Goblin Shaman Curse are under-explained.

==============

Thank you for your continued support!

The first chapter of story mode in Squally went live today! It's been awhile in the making.

Summary of changes:
- Removed mini-games menu. Mini-games have been rolled into the main game as puzzles/side content.
- Content up to the first boss released. The boss fight isn't implemented yet, so early-access content ends there. The released content includes story, items, helpers/followers, various game mechanics, and of course puzzles!

From here on out updates will be much more frequent. All major game systems have been implemented. Apologies for the previous buggy updates. I've been attempting to apply the startup mentality of "move fast and break things", but it turns out broken games suck quite badly. Squally should be much more stable and enjoyable now.

All I need to do from here is polish existing game mechanics, address any concerns players have, and release more content!

Cheers,
Zac

------------

Some known issues:
- Hexus cards in the inventory menu don't show any stats.
- Items aren't stacking in the inventory menu yet.
- Combat camera can be a little weird/jarring -- the combat system needs a good amount of polish.
- Visual bug with mage portals showing up as red instead of blue (oops)
- Followers lack swim animation
- This game needs more music/SFX in many places

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rs3PHyB17A

We just launched a new mini-game that teaches important fundamental skills, including x86/x64 registers, pointers, segfaults, and addressing.

We've only launched a few levels, and it's not super polished yet. (This is early-access after all). Sound FX are missing, there are a few minor glitches/bugs, etc. We'll be pushing out daily updates for the next week adding new levels and fixing these issues.

Our next steps are:
- OSX build will go live on 5/7
- Release more levels daily
- Polish this mini-game and fix the known bugs*
- Get our Linux build up to date, as it's lagging behind OSX/Windows
- Revisit the gameplay for the Cipher mini-game. We pulled it because it was hard and honestly not very fun
- Continue working on story-mode.

----------

* Some of the known bugs:
- Leaving a level in Pointer Trace sometimes doesn't work. Workaround is to exit via the 'esc' menu.
- Music volume/tracks can get reset when changing scenes
- Deadlock when starting story-mode on some machines
- Crashes on startup on some machines.

----------

This mini-game made it to #1 on r/programming! We're glad this mini-game was well recieved, and we'll continue to put out content that you all enjoy. https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bks7av/squally_new_minigame_to_teach_x86x64_registers/

We know many of you are still waiting for the main story-mode, however in the mean time we've launched puzzle-mode for Hexus!

We're hitting some build issues on Linux -- we'll push out the Linux version soon (along with fixes some reported crashes!)

https://youtu.be/3u36colnDKs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcocY92-26Q

Hey all,

Quick update on Squally's development progress. We've released a super small level that was previously only available to KickStarter alpha users. Here's a video that we made a few weeks back that explains the current state of development.

It's really rough around the edges, but we'd rather release something than leave everybody waiting.

Squally's movement is really bad. There's no real criteria for beating this level. Combat isn't available. There is no storyline in the game. These are all things that we're working on still.

It's just a few assembly obstacles to demonstrate the engine.

We have more changes in the works, and are going to get into a groove of posting updates more often.

Cheers,
Zac

Edit: Mac build isn't out -- we'll get that out by the end of the week

We've launched in-game tutorials for Hexus, so this should help clarify the gameplay.

For those who are new, Hexus is card game to teach binary operations, which are fundamental to learning reverse-engineering.

Hexus is not perfect, and we'll continue to tweak it, however at this point we're going to shift focus to getting out parts of the story mode released.

Cheers,
Zac

Hey everyone,

We released a new version with Linux support, some stability fixes, and some Hexus tweaks.

We're finally deviating from Gwent:
- We allow you to draw some cards at the end of a round.
- The pass button changes based on the context

• Flags if you are losing
  
• A shield if you are currently winning, but the opponent still has moves
  
• A sword if you can win immediately

- We also added particle effects and some additional sounds

We're hoping these changes make it easier to learn how the pass system works.

We did not add a Hexus tutorial yet, but one will be in the next release.

We want to thank you all for making this project possible! It's still very early, and we're working our tails off to get updates out.

For those who don't know, I quit my comfortable high paying job to work on this game. There's a chance this game is going to be "too niche", and that I'll lose money making this. And that's okay, because this project is about education and spreading passion for game hacking and reverse-engineering.

Some notes about the future of this game:

First off, our apologies for lack of a Hexus tutorial! This is coming very soon. At this point, the game plays very similar to a card game called Gwent. Looking up tutorials for that game should help guide you through this game.

We plan to divert from the Gwent gameplay a little bit in the next update, and get in-game tutorials (finally).

We're working through the StoryMode as well, which I know many of you are eager to play, as well as additional mini-games.

Cheers,
Zac