I've been developing BUG STOMPERS on and off as a hobby project for years. Eventually I decided that if I'm going to keep spending time on it then I should at least release it publicly. Might as well let other people enjoy it, y'know?

(As a side note, designing and testing a game is one thing. But polishing and formatting it for release? That's a whole other project in and of itself. And I thought it would be done in a weekend or two...)

Anyway, BUG STOMPERS is finally finished and available at Itch.io. It's completely free - you can check out the rulebook without needing an account.

About the Game

BUG STOMPERS is a cooperative skirmish game where you control a team of commandos fending off an alien swarm, a la Starship Troopers. Each mission has a random objective, random complications, and random enemies. The enemies follow a super simple "AI", but have enough randomness built in to keep you on your toes. You can play single standalone missions, or string missions together into an overarching campaign with permanent upgrades and injuries.

Design

The initial design was heavily influenced by games like Mordheim and This Is Not A Test. But as I worked on it, I started to wonder if I could make this into a purely co-op game. At the time, there were a lot of competitive skirmish games with a tacked on co-op mode, but few that were co-op from the ground up. I wanted to explore that design space. So BUG STOMPERS ultimately ended up diverging from the classic skirmish game formula in a few places, borrowing a elements from tactical RPGs like ICON.

By now, BUG STOMPERS is far from the only co-op focused skirmish game out there. I've been pleased to see several similar games springing up recently. It's interesting to compare how each game handles various design challenges which I also encountered. BUG STOMPERS' design isn't necessarily better, but I think it brings a few new ideas to the table.

Bluesky source.