Hiya, Pal!

Thanks for joining the Squirmish Email Club! I’m Steven Stwalley, the game designer and cartoonist behind Squirmish, The Card Game of Brawling Beasties. It has been a while since I have sent anything out to this list. How have you been? Still hanging out at the same bus stop? Did you ever finish that enormous pile of mashed potatoes you were working on? Is that rash doing any better? Well, I hope all is well with you.

I’m going to start sending news out this way on a more regular basis, so tell your pals! Or, if this sounds awful, unsubscribe! I do hope you’ll stay with me, though, as I enjoy your refined digital company, your wit, and the many impressive ways in which you can imitate the sounds of flatulence.

I have a lot of wondrous Squirmish updates to share with you. Like this:

Squirmish: The Videogame of Brawling Beasties is Coming to Steam in May 2024!

The first and most exciting update is that the Squirmish Videogame is almost ready to be released! It will be out this May on Steam. It is designed for single player or two-player PVP play. There are a bunch of new characters of varying degrees of brain-smartses for you to do battle against.

My pal Jeff Faust and I have been working on the videogame adaptation for a number of years now, and I think anyone who likes the tabletop game is going to get a big, fat, hairy kick out of it. In addition to being able to play Squirmish in the way in which you have become accustomed, the videogame also introduces a number of new and interesting play-styles to try out.

You may be even more excited to hear that you do not necessarily have to wait until May to check it out. We are currently looking for a few good playtesters for the Squirmish videogame. Experience the hilarity of unique bugs that (hopefully) won’t make it to the final version! You can sign up to join the playtest by clicking on the button that says “Request Access” under “Join the Squirmish Playtest” on the Squirmish Steam page.

Also, you may want to consider wishlisting the game on Steam so you get a reminder there when it gets released. Do that by clicking the button that says “Add to My Wishlist” on the Squirmish Steam page.

Carl the Magical Wishlist Fairy Will Now Add Squirmish to Your Steam Wishlist

You can check out some gameplay videos on the Squirmish Steam Page or our YouTube page.

Note that, for those of you who do not play videogames on Steam but do elsewhere, we hope to eventually port it to a number of other platforms. Personally, I can’t wait to play it on my toaster.

Squirmish 3.0 Print Edition…

and Expansions!

The Videogame is not all the big news, though! I’m excited to share that the Squirmish tabletop game is about to get a new edition… and some new expansions… in the very near future!

I recently got the rights back from Gamewright so I can self-publish Squirmish again. This will allow me to expand and build on the game however I see fit, which I am very excited to do. I actually have made hundreds of Squirmish cards at this point… I’m looking forward to getting more of them out into the world.

The first thing I will be publishing is a new edition (3.0) of the basic 70-card game you are already familiar with. It will contain the same cards you already know… so it is pretty non-essential for those of you who own the Gamewright edition. There will be some changes… not all of which are good:

There will be a revised rule book (which will also be downloadable for free).
The errors on the cards have been corrected (like the really glaring one on Old Man Eggplant).
The Gamewright-edition googly-eye damage counters will be replaced with the tiddlywink damage counters from Squirmish 1.0.
The cards will be slightly smaller. I am using an excellent print-on-demand service called The Gamecrafter to make the games… but one limitation of print-on-demand is that stuff needs to be built to default specs. So the new cards will be 2.5 inches square instead of 3 and 1/8 inches square.
The backs of the new cards obviously will not have the Gamewright logo, since they are no longer the publisher. Otherwise, they look pretty much the same.
The new set will only come with one green die, and it will just have pips instead of numbers.

I realize the card changes will be annoying-as-holy-howling-heck to some folks who already have a set of these cards. The new cards are compatible with the Gamewright set if you don’t mind intermingling two different size cards with slightly different backs… but that is kind of like shuffling salami and swiss cheese. To try and minimize this annoyance, I will also be offering a no-frills basic card set version that is nothing but the cards at a considerably lower cost than buying the whole 3.0 set (so you can get the cards without the cost of the box, rules, die and tiddlywink damage counters).

Simultaneous to the release of the new 3.0 set, I will also be releasing the first of many planned expansion booster packs… The Biscuit Sisters Vs. The Gravy Brothers set (which will include 24 cards).

Squirmish Discord Server

Squirmish now has a Discord Server! Come and talk with your fellow card-brawlers about the ins, outs and intricacies of the game of Squirmish. Debate the merits of The Wee Admiral of the Sea! Discuss advanced strategies! Post fan art! Share your Killgor the Conqueror fan fic! Report game bugs! I hope to hang out with you there!

Squirmish Art Process

I thought some of you may enjoy seeing some production art in these emails. I still do most of my initial work on paper like some weird Victorian, if you can believe that. I have a pretty esoteric and probably overly-complicated process for creating most of my Squirmish art. It usually goes like this:

1: I scribble on paper. Then I let the scribbles inform some rough pencils that I draw. Then I tighten the pencils just enough to feel comfortable for the inking.

2. I ink on paper, usually using a Pentel Pocket Brush Pen, the single greatest drawing tool ever invented.

3. I do a 600 DPI greyscale scan the black and white art.

4. I convert the scan to vector art in Adobe Illustrator,

5. I paste that vector art into Adobe Animate and clean it up. Then I create three layers. The top layer I leave as black and white line art. The middle layer I color with flat color. The bottom layer I take the shape of all the lines and filled color and make all black to block any potential gaps in the artwork. On the color layer, I generally expand the shape of the color fills by 2 pixels to nest the edges of the color under the lines on the top layer.

6. Once I’m happy with the flat coloring in Adobe Animate, I export the three layers as three separate .svg files.

7. I import my .svg files into three layers in an Adobe Photoshop document. The nice thing about this is that it leaves all my color and line art as vector art, which is infinitely scalable if I ever want to change the size for different purposes.

8. Then I start toning in Photoshop using a stylus on a Huion Kamvas Drawing Tablet. I usually start with the darks. I create a layer between the color and line art and work with black, usually at around 25% opacity. Once I’m happy with the toning, I usually convert the layer to a multiply layer.

9. Then I start with the lights, adding another layer on top of the darks layer. I usually draw with white at around 25% opacity, and then usually apply a blending mode (often overlay at the end.

10. Next, I usually another layer on top of that for highlights. For that I use white at 100% opacity.

11. I sometimes add other layers of other colors, lights and tones to get it looking snappy.

12. After that, I generally add a simple background behind everything with shadows and light of its own.

Here is some rough art on paper I used in creating the Squirmish Email Club header at the top of this email.

Most of this drawing was too quick and embarrassingly cruddy to be usable, but I did use a very digitally-edited version of the banner for the email header.

I took some more time drawing these reprobates that ended up being used in the final header above.

Anyhow, thanks again for playing Squirmish and for subscribing! I’ll talk to you soon. Until then, I recommend trying some lotion on the rash. It can’t hurt.

Yer pal,

Steve