Have a look at the changes since the first USC title!
The first game of the USC series is called Ultimate Space Commando and was released in 2015. The game is a turn-based, top-down view tactics game in which you control the crew of a stranded recon vessel in a "first contact war" for survival.
In the game, the portraits were mainly visible in the team management hub, and in missions at the top of the screen.
Portraits in Ultimate Space Commando:
In the new game USC: Counterforce, many things evolved, going from the gameplay to the lore, passing by the graphics, UI, and aliens. The portraits changed for more recent designs.
New portraits in USC: Counterforce:
The concept is the same as in the first game, you can easily see who each marine is, and create a diverse team. Our artist Veronica worked on all the marines of the game, have a look at some of them!
New portraits of the Space Commandos:
In USC: Counterforce, creating a complementary team is key to success. You will have the choice between many Space Commandos to deal with the ferocious alien menace.
Would you like to see other changes from the first game to USC: Counterforce? Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/vsxD6n8P8J
The USC: Counterforce team
Steam Next Fest - Developer Interview
Strategy players,
Our second broadcast for this Steam Next Fest will have Aliza, Lead Developer, interviewed by Louise Communication Manager while playing the new demo.
Aliza Wenders and Louise Le Guen will be live on February 12th, 8PM PST.
Click the 'set a reminder' button not to miss the stream!
Replays will be available on Youtube a few days after the initial diffusion.
Join us on Discord, and chat with the developers: https://discord.gg/vsxD6n8P8J
The USC: Counterforce Team
Steam Next Fest - Developer livestream
Curious gamers,
Our first broadcast for this Steam Next Fest will have Aliza, Lead Developer, and Csaba, Game Designer, of the game playing USC: Counterforce demo.
Aliza Wenders and Csaba Bak will be live on February 7th, 8 PM GMT.
Click the 'set a reminder' button not to miss the stream!
Replays will be available on Youtube a few days after the initial diffusion.
Join us on Discord, and chat with the developers: https://discord.gg/vsxD6n8P8J
The USC: Counterforce Team
Steam Next Fest - Developer Interview
Strategy players,
Our second broadcast for this Steam Next Fest will have Aliza, Lead Developer, interviewed by Louise Communication Manager while playing the new demo.
Aliza Wenders and Louise Le Guen will be live on February 12th, 8PM PST.
Click the 'set a reminder' button not to miss the stream!
Replays will be available on Youtube a few days after the initial diffusion.
Join us on Discord, and chat with the developers: https://discord.gg/vsxD6n8P8J
The USC: Counterforce Team
New demo for Steam Next Fest
Dear strategy lovers,
We are thrilled to announce that we'll be taking part in the February Steam Next Fest (06/02 - 13/02), but the demo will be available from January 26th!
This new demo will include:
2 game modes
3 map types
5 difficulty levels
December previous demo contained:
Rework on the tutorial
Squad customization enable
New difficulty options
New mission available
All portraits reworked
Your feedback is important, it helps us improve the game. Don't hesitate to share it and your suggestions in the comments and on Discord.
You will also be able to watch two broadcasts by the developers.
Join our Discord to share your feedback: https://discord.gg/vsxD6n8P8J
The USC Counterforce team
Our references: 90s turn based games
Hey retro game lovers!
In today's news, we're going to talk about two turn based games that inspired Aliza, developer of USC: Counterforce. From the 1990s, learn more about: Incubation: Time Is Running Out (1997) and Gorky 17 (1999).
USC: Counterforce and its prequel, Ultimate Space Commando, also take a lot of inspiration from some lesser-known games, a few „hidden gems” from the late 1990s, the “age of 3D revolution”. While many developers were preoccupied with the evolving graphical capabilities of computers, and the addition of the third dimension, there were still titles that mainly focused on classic, almost tabletop-like gameplay, and still managed to bring something new and cool to the table.
One of these games is Incubation: Time is Running Out (1997) by Blue Byte. It was a turn- and tile-based, squad-oriented tactical game with a heavy focus on management of very limited actions per turn. It was heavily story-based, with a long campaign mode, and squad members you grew attached to and could equip with different gear, gadgets, and weapons, tailoring them to the tactics you wanted to use. During the whole game, you felt like your options were limited, but never your tactics: this game really shined in shoehorning you into situations you could somehow still get out of alive if you found the proper tactics.
There were some very unique mechanics that are not seen in many games: a well-implemented weapon overheat system (instead of ammo); a non-class- or skill-locked overwatch mode that—since most enemies died from 1 or 2 shots—was very often important in stopping an alien before it reached you; a simple, but tactically relevant use of elevations; and the ability to control the battlefield with some items and weapons—for example, if you used the flamethrower, it created an area of impassable terrain for a few turns. Incubation also had a PvP game mode in which up to 4 players could fight against each other in asymmetric objective-based battles. USC is directly inspired by the way Incubation handles overwatch (or “defense mode”) and the importance of facing in the right direction with your units.
Another game to mention is Gorky 17 (also known as Odium, 1999) by Metropolis Software. It was also a very heavily story-driven game in which a small group of NATO operatives had to fight to survive and to reveal the mystery behind the sudden appearance of hybrid creatures in a former Soviet military base in Poland.
There was an “exploration mode” where you moved around with your characters in real-time, discovering items, talking to people, and finding your way, but whenever a combat situation ensued, the game would not only switch to turn-based but you and your enemies were put on a grid-based, not-too-big battlefield, where the actual fighting took place. All weapons and items had their specific, very board game-like mechanics, and that, combined with the often very confined spaces led to some rather interesting battle scenarios. Just like Space Crusade, Space Hulk, or Incubation, the emphasis on smaller spaces and tighter rules was not a constraint, but rather a playground for devising smart tactics.
In fact, I was so hooked on this approach to turn-based mechanics that I perfected dealing with the enemies using only the more basic weapons while stockpiling explosives and all kinds of nasty stuff for those really hard battles and ended up completing the game with a whole nuclear arsenal still in my inventory... All said and done, I think Gorky 17 was not flawless, but still an excellent game, and showed yet another way, another approach to how boardgame-like rules can be applied in a computer game, while making it feel like NOT a board game.
Did you know these games before? Let us know in the comments!
Join our Discord to chat with the developers of USC Counterforce: https://discord.gg/vsxD6n8P8J
The USC Counterforce team
Firesquid 2022 retrospective
This article is a recap of what happened in 2022 for us at Firesquid, a young publisher of strategy games. Read about our exciting year!
We are an indie publisher focusing on games that include strategizing and thinking. Whether it is a grand strategy game, a city-builder, or any other game where the brain is the most important muscle. Our goal is to empower diverse teams and offer players games that make their eyes shine.
What happened in 2022?
We started the year with the announcement of our first game Great Houses of Calderia, a modern generational Grand Strategy game set in the fantastic land of Calderia inspired by the Renaissance.
We received a warm welcome from the strategy game community, especially on Twitter. Players seemed to be intrigued by the Crusader Kings III and Game of Thrones mix and joined our Discord server. We organized a few playtest sessions with our community in the following months. Players shared insightful feedback and we carefully listened.
In June, the game was selected and showcased at the PC Gaming Show in front of thousands of viewers with an exclusive gameplay trailer.
The day after was the beginning of the Steam Next Fest, where the game was showcased. We shared a new demo and had two live streams by the developers at Resistance Games. The reception was good and gained us thousands of wishlists.
In the Summer, Léa and Igor joined us as game testers for an internship where they could learn QA testing, and work on all our games. Thanks to their hard work and passion, they helped the teams tremendously.
At the same time, we were working on another big project: TactiCon. TactiCon is a love letter to strategy games of all kinds. With our partners Hooded Horse, we wanted to celebrate this genre that’s so close to our hearts.
TactiCon is a five-day Steam festival showcasing a carefully curated list of exciting upcoming and recently released or updated strategy and tactics games across a number of different subgenres (grand strategy, 4X, RTS, turn-based tactics, and similar). It also features a series of unique talks, panels, interviews, and let’s plays given by experts from the genre in addition to showcasing the games themselves in a dedicated sale. The event is covered by streamers and the media alike and hosted as a weekend sale on Steam.
In total, 116 games were featured with 48 demos, and 58 games on sale. Two dozen speakers took part in 9 panels around strategy games, with the videos available on Youtube. The Steam page received +2.1M unique impressions and +1.5M unique visitors and a significant wishlists (among 62 respondents) and sales boost for the games participating.
In parallel, to take advantage of the TactiCon momentum, we announced our second game, USC: Counterforce. USC is a turn-based squad tactics game inspired by XCOM, Space Hulk and Aliens, featuring in-depth skill & combat systems and multiple game modes. The game invites you to discover the truth behind the demise of colony MC83-A, and to protect Humankind from an ancient alien threat.
We ran a first playtest session on the demo and new tutorial that was really promising. The developers, Angry Cat Studios, and us are eager to add new features and modes to the game. The community members will be able to test new exciting features in advance of its release.
We then prepared for December’s TurnBasedFest, a Steam strategy game event created by the turn-based community. USC: Counterforce participated with a demo including a new tutorial, new missions, and major visual changes.
We’ve been attending many events in 2022: Game Camp (Lille), Gamescom (Cologne), EGX Live (London), Game Connection (Paris). We plan of going to a few more in 2023, starting with the Game Developer Conference in March (San Francisco). We’d love to meet you there and listen to your pitch!
2023 is going to be very promising for us as a publisher. We will release our first games Great Houses of Calderia and USC: Counterforce, announce new partnerships, hopefully, have the second edition of TactiCon, and more!
Our references: retro games!
Retro game lovers,
Do you recognize the references in the following image?
In this news, Aliza, lead programmer on USC: Counterforce, shares her love for the old-school games that impacted the development of the game.
This time, let’s see some of the good old games that greatly influenced USC: Counterforce. We always wanted to strike a good balance between a kind of “realism” and old-school, boardgame-like combat mechanics—and though this is generally true about almost all games in the genre, we aim to emphasize the game’s “tabletop feel” in many ways.
First of these is the completely top-down presentation (at least as far as the tactical map screen goes, since you can also follow your marines through their head cameras)—and with this comes an almost completely flat map, without elevations and multi-story buildings. After Ultimate Space Commando we were experimenting with bringing elevations to its sequel, but ultimately, we found that it didn’t work well with the “flagship” USC mechanics, and it didn’t do good for the dynamic of the game. We didn’t want to change that special feeling that comes with this presentation, a feeling that made games like Julian Gollop’s Laser Squad (1988-1992), Space Hulk (board game: 1989, PC: 1993), or Space Crusade (board game: 1990, Amiga/PC: 1992) so great.
Screenshot of a mission in USC: Counterforce
We played these games as children back in the early 90s, and they made a huge footprint in our lives. Equipping your squad with weapons, ammo, and armor to take on a mad scientist, defending your base, or fighting aliens in a jungle in Laser Squad was an experience second to none. You had Time Units to spend in each turn, carefully planning your movement and shots, consulting the scanner (minimap) to devise your tactics—and then being gunned down by a well-placed opportunity shot from the AI. You could destroy walls and obstacles, and it was important to be aware of your surroundings as you moved with your squad. Many choices with a comprehensible system behind them, forcing you to think, to make the best of each of your turns. If there was only one game to name as an influence for USC and USC: CF, it would be Laser Squad. We often tend to call squad- and turn-based games against aliens “UFO or X-Com-clones”, but really, those games only came after.
Laser Squad "Screenshot 11" - Killed the enemy droid, mobygames.com
Space Hulk and Space Crusade, both parts of the Warhammer 40,000 universe, are a little bit different kinds of beasts, but only on the surface. You have a squad of hardened Space Marines; you have a grid-based map of tight corridors, rooms, and doors you can open. The rules are simpler, and your choices are not so abundant, but you have to act almost perfectly in every situation to survive. Positioning of your units is key, as Line of Sight mechanics and other rules are very strict—these are board games, after all! And the atmosphere, the feeling of constant and imminent threat at every corner, while your Marines themselves are nothing short of a human war machine—really unique! When we look at the systems behind these games, we can see they differ a LOT from that of Laser Squad, but what they have in common makes them very fun, very engaging, and indeed very difficult games. Making something this engaging in 2022 is no small task—graphics and UX expectations may have evolved, but those in themselves don’t make a great tactical game! We can still learn a lot from games we played decades ago.
Images of Space Hulk and Space Crusade, the video games and board games from the 1990s
Did you enjoy this news? Let us know in the comments!
Join our Discord to chat with the developers of USC Counterforce: https://discord.gg/vsxD6n8P8J
The USC Counterforce team
New portraits
Marines,
Have a look at the changes since the first USC title!
The first game of the USC series is called Ultimate Space Commando and was released in 2015. The game is a turn-based, top-down view tactics game in which you control the crew of a stranded recon vessel in a "first contact war" for survival, featuring a detailed combat system with RPG elements, fully interactive randomized maps, unique weapons and gadgets, crafting, and custom multiplayer modes.
In the new game USC: Counterforce, many things evolved, going from the gameplay to the lore, passing by the graphics, UI, and aliens. The portraits changed for more recent designs.
New portraits in USC: Counterforce:
The concept is the same as in the first game, you can easily see who each marine is, and create a diverse team. Our artist Veronica worked on all the marines of the game, have a look at some of them!
New portraits of the Space Commandos:
In USC: Counterforce, creating a complementary team is key to success. You will have the choice between many Space Commandos to deal with the ferocious alien menace.
Would you like to see other changes from the first game to USC: Counterforce? Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/vsxD6n8P8J
The USC: Counterforce team
New demo for TurnBasedFest
USC players,
A new demo of USC: Counterforce is available from the 8th to the 12th of December during TurnBasedFest.
This new demo includes a few changes, improvements, and additions to the TactiCon demo of September.
What's new in this demo:
Rework on the tutorial
Squad customization enable
New difficulty options
New mission available
All portraits reworked
Share your feedback on Steam, or on our Discord: https://discord.gg/vsxD6n8P8J
We really hope you will like our demo and can't wait to read your feedback!
