The Adventures of Square

The Adventures of Square is a standalone first-person shooter using the ZDoom Engine, featuring real, retro first-person-shooter gameplay! Save anywhere and at anytime! Food is health! No ragdoll physics! It has it all!

The brilliant Doctor Octagon has been kidnapped! Square must find him, and rescue him from the clutches of the Circle of Evil, a mysterious cult hellbent on the domination of Shape Land. He will square off against terrible monsters and impossible traps in order to prove that he's no square when it comes to justice. Guide him to the center of the Circles' domain, unravel their malicious plot, and win the day fair and square!

The "Secant Edition" version of The Adventures of Square features the first two episodes of the game, Cornered By Circles: Radial Dawn and Galactic Lunacy: A Small Step for Square, which includes:

Nineteen fully playable levels (and three secret ones - shh!).
Four maps exclusively for Square-Off play (multiplayer VS)!
Arcade-style Time Attack! mode for Square-Off levels.
A full, awesome soundtrack in The Adventures of Square OST, courtesy of the musical minds of James Paddock, Xaser Acheron, Augustus Knezevich, Jazz Mickle, and Paul Corfiatis.
Amazing voice acting by Marian Paddock, Matt Tropiano, and Matt Cibulas!
Beautifully crafted ambient soundscapes.
Superb pixel-driven artwork and colorful texturing.
Support for Xbox controllers.
Really, really awful puns. Really.

I saw "Doom" - does this require Doom to run?

No! Square is entirely standalone, which means it needs no Doom Engine games in order to run! The bundle for your OS of choice is all that you need! Make sure you extract it to a directory that can be written to.

I'm used to Doom's play mechanics. Will I like Square?

Most likely. Square's gameplay is fast, engaging, and controls similar to most Doom-generation FPSes, but you'll be jumping and crouching more than you would probably be used to.

The difficulty scale of the game is also different, as well. You may not survive the harder difficulties if the normal difficulty is giving you trouble. Swallow your pride, pal - you may not be as good as you thought you were. This game's an entirely different beast.

What will the full game include?

The full game will have a total of three episodes, which will take Square to the moon and beyond! There will be more enemies, more music, more locales, and a bunch of surprises!

See our press page for details.

This uses the GZDoom Engine? So will any version work with this?

Probably. Latest version tested is 4.1.3, both Windows and OSX. This version and higher can load Square as an IWAD with the -iwad parameter.

This game is awesome! Can I mod or make maps for it?

Absolutely! However, there are a few caveats:

The Adventures of Square is a game currently in development, which means that things could be changing internally with each release.

Keep in mind that our progress in development could break your mod or map. We accept no responsibility if this happens, but we'll do our best to inform people of major changes.

BigBrik Games is a closed team. Do not map or sprite or create things intending for your work to "make it into the game" in any fashion.

We are not accepting outside work unless we explicitly commission it.

Setting up a network game is a bit of a pain. Can this work in Zandronum or other ZDoom/GZDoom-derived ports?

Unfortunately, no. As of the time of this writing, Zandronum does not support most of the GZDoom engine features in The Adventures of Square that exist in the current official version of GZDoom. They are working towards closer compatibility at the moment, so it may be sooner than you think! See their Roadmap page for details.

However, we are currently looking into a way to start games up quickly over the Internet despite GZDoom's old-school, ad-hoc nature, so stay tuned for those types of developments in the future.

I updated Square on MacOS/OSX and things don't look quite right. Help?

If we update the engine, there's a chance that some configuration may be out of date or deprecated. To clear up those issues, navigate to the ~/Library/Preferences folder and delete TheAdventuresOfSquare21.ini. The default values will be recopied when you run the game again.

Will this ever be released for iOS or Android?

We do not govern the development of GZDoom, but the moment that there's a build of it that would work on those platforms, it might happen. Unfortunately, that is not the case today, so no.

I'm getting solid black areas on ladders/railings/hanging moss. What gives?

GZDoom's HQX texture upscaling modes do not support transparent textures, and may not fall back properly to regular upscaling modes. We are currently looking into what causes this.

I want to make videos of this game on YouTube/Vimeo/Other Popular Video Site! Can I enable options to monetize my videos?

Of course! Don't worry about that sort of thing; we like seeing people play Square - even really obnoxious videos of it! Let's Plays and the like are A-OK in our book. We'd also like you to link back to this site so people can download the game!

We do, however, not like monetization of the assets EXCLUSIVELY, i.e. uploading videos of JUST music or JUST sound effect montages. If you do, please do not enable monetization on them. No problem if you're playing the game and they come up naturally, or if you use a sound clip or sprite or music chunk or two in some kind of parody or presentational work. Use common sense as to what is and isn't Fair Use, and everything's fine.