Squirrel with a Gunfollows the antics of a fiendish squirrel after his escape from a secret lab. Players will be able to bound around town, terrorizing their neighbors, running from agents, and blasting their way through platforming puzzles. The game is also set to include additional features such as more guns, accessories for the squirrel, and different coats of fur. Although the game does not yet have a release date, this highly anticipatedindie gamewill be available on Steam, and fans can wishlist it now. Those who enjoyed the cheeky gameplay of other animal-centered sandbox games are sure to enjoy a little furry fun with the upcoming release ofSquirrel with a Gun.
Game Rant spoke with solo developer Dan DeEntremont about his journey from this passion project going viral to makingSquirrel with a Gunhis new part-time job.The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
RELATED:Skyrim Fan Recreates Daedric Greatsword in Unreal Engine 5
GR: I always like to start off by asking a little bit about you. Before we get into the actual game, please talk a little bit about who you are, what you do, and how you got into working on games.
DeEntremont: Sure. I’m Dan DeEntremont. As a day job, I do3D visual effects for film and TV, and I work for a company in Hollywood called MuseVFX. It’s mainly pre-rendered effects, so I guess it’s kind of a cousin of game development. But it’s definitely different enough that there’s not an enormous amount of overlap. Maybe not as much as one would think.
As for games, I’ve always loved playing games. I’ve always been interested in doing 3D stuff and figuring out how mechanics and everything work in games. I think the school I went to taught me more on pre-rendered effects, so that’s the industry I ended up going into. I’m circling back now as an independent developer.
GR: I think my first question that we’re all wondering iswhy? How did you get to this idea and what was your inspiration for creatingSquirrel with a Gun?
DeEntremont: My inspiration is kind of nebulous. Although looking back at some stand-up of all things that I’ve listened to from Eddie Izzard or Kat Williams, they both actually happen to mention squirrels with guns. I feel like that might have been a subconscious inspiration.
GR: You got incepted in a way. I was going to ask if there was a specific reason why you had chosen to go with a squirrel versus another animal when there are so many out there.
DeEntremont: I don’t know if there’sa specific reason for that besides the stand-up influence. If I happen to get around to it or maybe as a DLC, I would be interested in diversifying.
The interesting thing is that squirrel with a gun, after it went viral or maybe even before it went viral honestly, I’ve been attracted a lot of gun enthusiasts of course, but squirrel enthusiasts as well.
People who know far more about squirrels than I do. They always tag me on Twitter with GIFs of squirrels doing weird things I’ve never seen. I’ve seen the water-skiing one, but there are other ones where they’re trying to fight a stuffed animal, weird things like that. I thought that was all interesting.
GR: Have you incorporated any of the things you’ve seen into the game or has it been a source of inspiration for you in the process to see those sorts of real-life things that squirrels do in the wild?
DeEntremont: It’s a great animation reference. He kind of goes out of the realm of reality when he’s walking around, but he’s running around. He’s bounding like a regular squirrel. I tried to make his climbing on poles and stuff kind of similar to how squirrels do it, so there’s definitely some inspiration with the real-life squirrels.
GR: Obviously it’s not a very serious game, so I wanted to ask how do you think it sort of fits into the industry which is kind of dominated right now by these very like heavy AAA blockbuster games?
DeEntremont: Yeah, I kind of feel like I’m on a completely separate plane of existence from the gameplay almost. I’m more concerned with its contemporaries.The obvious equivalence is something likeGoat Simulator, right, or various similar things like that. I try to put little unique twists on it like squirrels doing takedowns and things like that, or trying to get golden acorns by either committing crimes or doing nice things for people.
GR: I know you’ve been very public with your updates and letting people know where you’re at in your process. Is there anything that you haven’t shown or something that maybe won’t make it into the final game that you thought would be interesting?
DeEntremont: Oh yeah. As the realities of solo development fall on me, there are a lot of random ideas that I’m like, “maybe, maybe for the sequel.” One of those things is maybe a wider variety of animal friends, or–and this is going to be very upsetting to some people–but it’s going to have to be single-player for now.
A lot of people were saying it has to be multiplayer and, you know, I understand the appeal of that, but it’s a very tricky thing to write. I would definitely attempt to do it for a sequel. Something I’d like to implement at the very least is a Sonic and Tails kind of deal where somebody tags along just being your assistant.
RELATED:Why Traditional Call of Duty Multiplayer is Suffering
GR: I want to talk now a little bit about the world ofSquirrel with a Gun. Can you tell me just a little bit about the nature of the world that you’re in and what players might be able to expect to encounter?
DeEntremont: So, the plot is like paper thin. The squirrel begins by breaking into this secret government base where he steals one of the golden acorns. And then that prompts an alarm, which causes a bunch of these agents to appear. That’s pretty much the motivation for random encounters in the game. That’s generally how the plot goes after that initial underground lab. After that, he escapes into what I believe is going to be the main event, which is a neighborhood that’s just a residential place. It’s just gota bunch of goofy Sims kind of peoplenot particularly acting realistic in many situations and interacting with the squirrel or with the world in some ways.
And the general idea I think is to collect golden acorns. When you get enough of those and enough of the regular acorns, you’ll be able to get different skins, different colors, and maybe like an outfit or two. That’ll probably be the major end motivation of it. He’s also able to use the recoil of a handgun, for example, shooting downwards to get some extra jumps in.
GR: You mentioned you kind of attracted gun enthusiasts as well as squirrel enthusiasts. How many guns have you designed and incorporated into the game so far?
DeEntremont: So far I only have two of them, which I’ve shown repeatedly, but I do plan to make more. It’s just I’ve been focusing on completing a bit of a vertical slice, which would not generally incorporate all the guns, but I understand that’s a big interest. There would be the typical ones like the handgun, the assault rifle, the grenade, and the rocket launcher. That kind of deal. With each archetype of gun, like a shotgun or whatever, I’d like to have slightly different abilities or different ways that he uses that gun to gain height or distance since they’re kind of incorporated into puzzle-like jumping, as well.
GR: Can you kind of tell me a little bit about what your process has looked like and how you’ve managed all of the aspects of bringing the game together on your own?
DeEntremont: Well, I’d say probably the number one help is the Unreal Engine and theUnreal people at Epic Games. Every month they have a free asset giveaway where there are very nice assets that you can download for free. For example, one of them is the neighborhood assets. And, you know, with every asset you download, you have to give it some tweaks to make it your own, but they’ve been a huge help with doing the heavy lifting with that kind of thing.
I hope to make it more than what people call an asset swap. I want to have some definite unique features to it, but those have been a big help in the development process. And aside from that, Blender’s been nice. I usually work in like $1,000 programs at my job, but Blender’s free and it’s really good for something free. It’s been very helpful for making the squirrel rig, making him anime, making the humans animate, and just being able to import that into Unreal en masse and adjust those things.
GR: Did you have any particular goals when you were putting this together that you were setting out to achieve?
DeEntremont: I guess my only real long-term goal is to make a job out of this if it all goes well, but it’s mostly just been a nice change of pace from the pre-rendered stuff. You get instant feedback, and you know things are looking better and better in real-time. But yeah, the project originally started as a demo and has evolved a lot since. I like to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what people are interested in seeing. This one thing really, really caught, on, and I’m like, “all right, I definitely have to bring this one to completion.”
GR: And how long have you been working on it so far?
DeEntremont: I want to say the time I’ve been working on it seriously has been since it went viral around August of last year. So, I’ve been putting in a lot of–I don’t know–as many hours as is possible with it being part-time. It’s been going on for a while now.
RELATED:Roll for Sandwich Interview: Viral TikTok Star Talks About D&D, His Novel, and Future Plans
GR: I do want to talk a little bit about working in Unreal Engine 5 a bit, because I’d seen in one of your dev diaries that you had talked about being able to use it for making the game. How does it feel to have such a powerful tool at your disposal for makingSquirrel with a Gun?
DeEntremont: Oh, I love it. I did a lot of Unity hobbyist stuff in the past and Unity is really great, but so open-ended that it kind of–how do I put this–Unreal has a framework in it that’s designed for most games, not necessarily a third-person shooter, but most games kind of centered around a character in a world.
Unity is very open, and you’re kind of building most things from scratchand coding it, which is a great learning experience, but Unreal kind of has a lot of things that streamline that process. The number one reason I moved to Unreal was a thing called blueprints, which is sort of a system where you’re plugging nodes into the system and nodes into other nodes in lieu of scripting. I haven’t really typed a word into Unreal at all. I haven’t yet had to get into their coding with C++. I know that’ll be a huge time-sink, so I hope I don’t have to do that at all. But yeah, the blueprints are my favorite things about it. Unreal 5 in particular, they started doing the fur and grooming stuff before 5, but they’ve kind of made it a lot better.
In addition to that, there was one other thing about it that I really was fond of: their character remapping. you may take motion capture from anywhere and remap it to a character. That helps because even though all humans in 3D kind of look the same, they have a slightly different skeleton. Because of that, it’s just this enormous deal to make one character’s animation go to another one. But, Since 5, they’ve made great improvements to that extent. Technically, if I wanted to, I could probably take some mocap of a human and apply it to the squirrel. They’d look a little strange and wouldn’t have tail movement, but maybe one day. It seems cool.
GR: What have been some of the challenges that you’ve been having, either working by yourself or just putting a whole game together?
DeEntremont: There definitely has been a lot. You know, many of the challenges are from me starting Unreal a little more naive. You know, like a month or two later realizing how young and foolish I was and wanting to refactor that system. It’s a new thing, and I’ve been trying to cut down on that a bit. For example, how the squirrel behaves and moves. I gave them different states like running, jumping, and all that then kind of went in there with a Unity mindset of, “I’m going to start making my own system.”
Before long, I realized Unreal has this great state machine already, and it’s kind of integrated with the rest of the system. So, it’s probably the best idea to switch over to that one. So yeah, basically the way the character controls got refactored a bit.
RELATED:Minecraft Modder Fulfills Some Bizarre Community Requests
GR: Do you have any advice for people who are interested in also pursuing making a game for the first time or doing work on their own in Unreal Engine 5?
DeEntremont: I guess my best advice isI see a lot of people who aren’t sharing their work a whole lot. It’s basically like an arm of marketing. And everyone always says, “you know, a lot of indie devs don’t do marketing and marketing is so important.” Sharing your work is a huge thing, in my opinion, because it’s good to share with the community and, well, get hurt. They’ll hurt your feelings with critiques, and then you’ll grow up and be able to deal with that a little bit better.
It’s also good to stick with the project. I know a lot of people like to drop their projects, which could be useful if it just so happens to be something that was just a learning experience for them. But you know, if you have something going on that people have an interest in, then keep at it.
GR: One of my next questions is about your community and the reaction that you’ve had. You mentioned it did go viral last year, and you’ve gotten a lot of response to it. What has it been like being so public with your process, and how has the reception been so far?
DeEntremont: It’s been overwhelmingly positive. I’m very thankful for everyone who contributed to the interest. There was a guy on TikTok who made this song, and it still gets stuck in my head. It was funny, and it’s still in my head all the time. But anyway, the community has been very nice, and it’s been very positive. It’s good to have this much attention and, you know, wish lists and all that.
GR: Kind of along the same lines, what’s something that you’re really proud of that you’ve achieved so far?
DeEntremont: The things that get me excited are so silly, but I like that I gave the people in the game a system where they distrust characters, which includes a squirrel. They don’t distrust anyone by default, but if you’re running around and you pull a gun on them, suddenly you’re not seen as an affection target. You’re seen as an aggressive target, and they act completely differently. And then the bad guys are intrinsically distrustful of squirrels, so it’s kind of like a prejudiced system.Iknow it’s really silly, and it wasn’t a huge deal to implement, but I just thought that it was kind of cute.
GR: Lastly, in terms of the features you put into it, what’s your favorite thing so far that you’re really excited for people to experience?
DeEntremont: I guessI’m most interested in the gun-based jumping puzzles. I think that I implemented just a few platforming challenges, but in a new way. You know, with the shooting and everything everyone’s done that a thousand times before, so it’s got a little bit of a unique quality to it. I think the most unique part is probably going to be how the squirrel navigates platforming challenges.
GR: Well, that was it for all my questions. I appreciate you letting me take up some of your time. It’s been fun, so thank you!
DeEntremont: Sure. It’s my pleasure.
[END]
Squirrel with a Gundoes not have a release date as of late, but players can wishlist it now on Steam.
MORE:All Games Confirmed To Be Using Unreal Engine 5 So Far
