Square Heroes released on PS4

After many months of hard work, last Tuesday we finally shipped Square Heroes on PS4. It’s available right now in the PlayStation Store, and the coolest part is that cross-platform online multiplayer is supported between PS4 and PC/Mac/Linux players. Check out the PlayStation Game listing. If you’re not a PS4 gamer, you can grab a copy (or 3) on Steam. It’s on sale until 6th March for $1.99 to celebrate the PS4 launch.

If you’d like to read more about it, take a look at the PlayStation Blog announcement. Thanks to the Sony folks who let me be a guest author there.

Another cool thing I’d like to mention is that Square Heroes is the first ever game made in Perth, Western Australia to reach PlayStation 4. It’s also the first game by Gnomic Studios on any PlayStation system, which feels like a great milestone. Let it be the first of many!

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Being a twin-stick shooter with local multiplayer, the game is well suited to console platforms where people all use controllers and often sit on couches next to eachother. Unfortunately the people at Xbox One haven’t been super quick about supporting our framework (MonoGame) so you Xbox owners are out of luck for now. When we do finally port to Xbox, I’m not confident that they’ll let us have cross-platform multiplayer either as they tend to be more touchy* about their Xbox Live ecosystem than Sony is about PSN. Therefore, I’m declaring PS4 the ultimate Square Heroes platform! Let’s hope the sales justify the hard work! 😉

Here’s our PS4 launch trailer. Big thanks to my brother Jeremy Prestwood for the excelling editing, and to Bela Inkster for the rocking music!

* When I spoke to Chris Charla at PAX 1.5 years ago, he declared that cross-platform multiplayer with Xbox Live vs non-Xbox Live players was pretty much out of the question, citing issues with not being able to track and deal with potential bad eggs from outside their ecosystem.

1000 Free Retail Keys for Square Heroes Beta Players

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you should know by now that we’ve been running a free public beta of Square Heroes for the last few weeks. Today we’re announcing that you can also earn yourself a copy of the full version simply by playing the beta. If that interests you, then read on!

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Free Key Promo Rules

  • Download the Beta from any of the links below (web site or Desura).
  • Create a Profile with your email address.
  • Profile must reach Level 3 before the beta ends and must be in the first 1000 profiles to do so.
  • You can only be awarded one key.

Square Heroes is a hilarious comic arena shooter featuring Online, LAN, Co-op and local multi-player; a single-player Tournament; and an arsenal of weapons to blast your friends out of the sky! The game has the competitive multiplayer of twitch shooters like Quake and Counter Strike, the local multiplayer fun of Goldeneye and an art style reminiscent of Worms.

Links

http://www.gnomicstudios.com/presskit/sheet.php?p=square_heroes Press Kit (inc. videos, screenshots, history etc.)
http://www.squareheroes.com/ Game Web site
http://www.gnomicstudios.com Studio Web site
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=284888452 Steam Greenlight

Square Heroes is the sequel to Square Off, the critically acclaimed arena shooter that placed in the Dream Build Play Top 20 in 2009. It was released on Xbox Live Indie Games later that year and has since been ported to mobile platforms, nominated for Best Game in the WA Screen Awards 2013, and been downloaded 2 million times.

Square Heroes is one of the last games to receive a grant from Screen Australia’s Games Production Fund and is currently progressing through Steam Greenlight. The Gnomic team will be exhibiting Square Heroes at PAX AUS in Melbourne this October, find us at Stand IDP15.

Features

  • Price: TBD ($9 – $15)
  • Online and local multi-player, at the same time – Couch vs couch gaming.
  • Cross platform multi-player – The ultimate battle between Windows vs Mac users!
  • Arms-race gameplay mechanics – Players choose weapons and earn them during each round by collecting loot.
  • Unlockable weapons and hats with stat-buffing perks.
  • Various game modes – Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Gnome Hunt, Team Gnome Hunt and Survival.
  • Numerous challenging Achievements.
  • Seven stylish 2.5D arenas of doom.
  • Originally scored music and professionally crafted sound effects.

 

 

Website Rejigged

In preparation for the big Square Off release on iOS and Android, we’ve rejigged the website. This means our blog will be integrated in to the site itself and allow for easier content management.

Let us know what you think of the new layout!

Throng Concept Screenshots

These screenshots were put together using a “mish-mash” of old concept art, some of which can be found on this blog. Throng was a prototype game that was worked on before Square Off. This is an attempt at resurrecting some of the original elements of the game while redesigning it for the mobile devices. Throng isn’t dead yet!

Square Off WP7 1.5 Update!

We’ve just released the 1.5 update to WP7 Square Off! Here is the feature list:

– Choose any colour for your Square Avenger!
– Downloadable ringtones and wallpapers (the free version has one of each, the paid version has 4 ringtones and 3 wallpapers).
– Option to disable in-game vibration
– Messages from the Developers
– Various stability and bug fixes

We also hit 160,000 downloads of Square Off just on WP7 which got us pretty excited and to celebrate, we decided to drop the price of the full game to $1 until the end of January!

Here's to the update!

Check out a video and get the marketplace links here.

Square Off 1.4 Update (Mango Support)

The 1.4 update for Square Off is now live on the marketplace and is available for both the paid and FREE versions of the game. The update has increased the performance of the game significantly and also added support for fast resume.

We have another update in the works already with a much requested feature, but it is still early days and I would prefer to keep it a surprise :)

Thank you all for your marketplace reviews which have been overwhelmingly positive (click here to see reviews and comments from our many users around the world). The free version is really taking off and quickly climbing to the top of the free games category.

1.3 Update and FREE version released!

For a little while now we have been working away on the big 1.3 update to Square Off on WP7 and we just published it on the marketplace! Here are some of the updates and features:

– Online high-scores and ladders!
– Enhancements to movement control
– German language support
– A number of stability / bug fixes
– Smaller download size for new users (20MB)

We have also decided to release a free, ad-supported version. It has the same features as the full version, except ad banners will display while you are playing. Check it out here.