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Squirmish: Steam Playtest Guide
Hello Playtesters!
Welcome to the first Steam Playtest for Squirmish: The Videogame of Brawling Beasties!
Squirmish has been extensively tested, but as a two-person development team, our pool of playtesters is small. For this playtest, we'd like to have a much bigger group of users run the game through its paces looking for major problems. This playtest is happening before our initial release and will help determine the game’s readiness for public release.
Squirmish will be released first as Early Access, so some incompleteness and lack of polish will be acceptable at this point. For this playtest, we are primarily looking for showstopper problems like major bugs, game crashes, play stoppages, and execution failures.
Also, with this first batch of playtesting, we expect finding PvP opponents to be difficult, so we encourage you to focus on the single-player areas of the game: Tutorial, Rogues' Gallery, and Spar.
That being said, both Online PvP experiences do work. If a Steam friend of yours is also an active playtester, you can use Fight A Friend to battle with them directly. You can also try to find a random opponent through Matchmaking, but since not many people are playing yet, you might not always find someone to play against.
How to report bugs and give feedback
Squirmish game controller functions
Of course, a good place to start is to play the interactive Tutorial. It provides a good introduction to basic concepts, card anatomy and the steps of a turn, but is generally not the best way to get a deeper understanding of the game’s rules.
Squirmish: The Videogame is based on Squirmish: The Card Game, a tabletop game for which there is already quite a bit of information online.
For example, here you can view the tabletop rulebook for Squirmish.
There are some differences between the games. The Videogame is strictly limited to 2 players, whereas The Card Game supports up to 4. The Videogame limits card placement to a 6x6 grid, whereas card placement is freeform in The Card Game. The Videogame includes some alternative play formats, such as 2 Group Monte which would be difficult to reproduce in tabletop play. Beyond these, The Videogame sticks pretty close to The Card Game, and any how-to-play resources for Squirmish: The Card Game are likely still relevant.
Squirmish supports the most common forms of user interaction. From the start, the game was designed to work intuitively with a mouse and keyboard, as well as touch screens. More recently, we’ve added support for game controllers and keyboard-only interaction. We’ve also given a lot of attention to the Steam Deck play experience.
If you’re playing the game with a game controller, or on a Steam Deck, you may want to read the Game controller support section later in this document.
You can report bugs and give feedback in the Squirmish Playtest Forum in the Steam Community Hub. To keep up with all playtest discussions, we recommend that you subscribe to this forum.
On the other hand, if you had a good time playtesting Squirmish and just want to say something nice or give a mini review, please do this in the general Squirmish Community Hub where other users can see it.
Another great place to report and discuss playtest bugs is over on the Squirmish Discord server in the #bug-reports channel located under the category THE VIDEOGAME. The Squirmish Discord server is brand new and also supports the Squirmish tabletop card game. Please consider joining and helping us to build a Squirmish community there.
Additionally, you can simply email your playtest feedback directly to support@squirmish.net.
For all bug reports, please include the version number of the game. This version number is displayed on the Splash screen and in the Hodgepodge section of the Settings popup (under the gear icon). The current version is “0.2.09 (playtest)” but may change if we upload new builds during the playtest.
If you’re seeing performance problems or having trouble getting the game to run at all, please include a description of what kind of device you are running it on -- Desktop PC, Laptop, Steam Deck, or whatever. Please include cpu, gpu, and memory details if you know them.
Experiment with different display resolutions, both Fullscreen and Windowed, to see if this has any effect on performance. Resolution can be changed in the Graphics section of the Settings popup.
If you’re in the middle of a Squirmish game and everything appears to still be working but the game no longer advances through the turn, you may have encountered a game logic bug.
For this kind of bug, the game includes a simple way to copy text of the game’s message log to your computer’s clipboard. When the message bar is selected and the message log is revealed, there is a clipboard button on the left side.
Clicking the clipboard button will copy a plain text version of the game’s message log to the computer’s clipboard. From there you can paste it into a text document which can be attached to your bug report.
Alternatively, sharing a screenshot with the message log visible and showing the most recent game occurrences might help here.
For these kinds of bugs, we’ll try to recreate your game state, and maybe we’ll trigger the same bug on our end.
Game controller support is always a complex topic, especially when Steam Input comes into play. You can play with Steam Input enabled or disabled, with each setting having its own benefits.
With Steam Input disabled, Squirmish should natively support most Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch Pro controllers. These are typical modern controllers featuring (at minimum): 2 sticks, 2 triggers, 2 shoulder buttons, 4 action buttons, and a Dpad.
When Steam Input is enabled, you get the benefit of additional controller support (such as Steam Controller) and also the ability to remap some of the controls.
At Faust Logic, we regularly test Squirmish with these game controllers:
If you have a game controller that is not on your list, let us know if it worked or not.
When using a game controller, much of the Squirmish user interface is controlled using the Left Stick in combination with action button A, (Cross on PlayStation controllers).
Here is a (surely incomplete) list of some known issues and other problems in the game.
Squirmish: Steam Playtest Guide: © 2024 by Steven Stwalley and Faust Logic, Inc.
