Developer Interview: Squeakross: Home Squeak Home

Hey all! We're Luka and Alex, the two devs behind Squeakross: Home Squeak Home! We started our respective videogame careers around 10 years ago and always wanted to create our own games. We started The Spirit and the Mouse as a side project and showcased it in the first Wholesome Games Direct in 2020. Seeing everyone's reactions gave us the boost to turn our indie dream into a reality! After our game was well-received, we continued our indie game journey. Now we are making our second game, Squeakross: Home Squeak Home, a totally different game still themed around rodents.

After we finished console ports for our first game, Alex wanted to try to do a The-Spirit-and-the-Mouse-themed nonogram just for fun to try our hand at self-publishing. After replaying recent Picross games, I discovered that while I loved them, I felt like I was missing an incentive that would push me to finish puzzles. I love decorating houses in videogames and thought it could be a great fit. Having furniture as rewards for a nonogram sounded like a great idea because we could use [its] visuals as the puzzle while making the reward tangible!

HAHAHA! We currently have three gerbils at home (we had many more in the past), and we love them very much. Rodents are so tiny and fragile but also very smart and resilient. Seeing the world from their perspective was one of the reasons why we made the main character for The Spirit and the Mouse a rodent. We see many cats, frogs, and dogs in games but not many rodents. We wanted to bring more cute mice and rats into the front stage, share our love for them and connect with other rodent lovers!

One of the first things we made was a tool to generate a nonogram from a 3D model instead of a pixel art image. Then, nailing the transition between the 2D image and 3D model was very important for us to make the player understand where the reward came from!
Because we love building worlds and funny stories, it was important for us to have a basic narrative to link the nonograms and decoration aspect: you get a free house from a program called Home Squeak Home. The CEO Nini, a mouse that obsesses over nonograms, welcomes you into your empty home and proposes a deal: if you can solve Squeakrosses, you get the real furniture for free at home! That's a deal you can't refuse, right?

We do not have anything specific right now, but we have a big list of things we would like to do after release. We would love to update the game regularly after release if we can!

Alex: Not much. We had a good idea of what it would be from the start. Since we are using already existing game concepts, it made it easier to pin down the design ideas. We get some ideas from the community (Discord), like QOL features or customisation options, that we end up implementing.

Luka: We started with the idea of making a classic nonogram game, and Squeakross evolved into an accessible, beginner-friendly experience! The game has many unique features not present in typical nonogram titles, making it more approachable. Each player can toggle those options on/off, so nonogram veterans can play the hard difficulty as well!

The rodent pet owners community! They are not used to having their pets represented in games. Since The Spirit and the Mouse was released, we have had many people message us to let us know playing the game helped them through the grief of losing a pet or made them cry. It always makes us happy to see people being able to connect with their pets, all thanks to our games.

Definitely! We learned a lot about publishing, marketing, and business with The Spirit and the Mouse. We are reusing a lot of that experience for Squeakross. There is little overlap between the two games, but that keeps it fun!

First, we love them! Second, we feel that the accessibility of nonogram games can be improved. Most of them follow the same rules that Picross laid out years ago. While I love those games, I find them a bit rigid sometimes.

We have plans for console versions in the future, but we cannot announce anything yet! Squeakross would be great on the Switch, for sure!

The biggest one I can think of is the housing system. When we showcased our first trailer, people joined the Discord server and asked if they could have colour variations for the furniture. It was one of the features we purposefully cut to keep the scope in check. However, after seeing how everyone would ask for it at release, we realised we had to do it. Our system was not built for this at all, but we found a way to implement it anyway. This was a big technical challenge!

Yes! You can join us on our Discord. We have a very cool community of rodent fans!

Luka: This is a hard one. I feel like food names always work for me, haha. It's just so cute. One of our current gerbils is named Citron. It means lemon in French, and she's adorable!

Alex: Food also. My favourite is Miel, which means honey in French, the name of one of our late gerbils (RIP King)!

Luka: Probably just tons of cheese accessories. I love cheese so much!

Alex: A clown hat.