Working alongside ProbablyMonsters, Companion Group formed the core development team for Storm Lancers across Design, Engineering, Production, Art and QA. Taking the project from concept to launch.
introduction01
Storm Lancers is a fast-paced rogue-like, where every run means dodging death, overcoming enemies, and mastering powerful skills. The battle is on, so team up in chaotic co-op to double your chances of survival.
Companion took ownership of the development of the title, assembling a team to deliver the project from inception through certification in a highly condensed timeline.
Every choice, every mistake, and every dodge truly counts. This is roguelike mayhem by design: clean code powering messy fights, and enemies who absolutely want you to panic. With couch co-operative at the heart of the game every design decision catered towards a frantic, fun experience with friends and family.
Game design
Prototyping
Art and modelling
Work included design and development of all game systems, such as movement and combat mechanics, the creation of enemies, levels, interactables and upgrades, as well as save functions and inventories.
We were proud to deliver a final product featuring polished visuals and stable performance within the timeline agreed upon before starting development.
Gameplay programming
Platform native co-op gameplay support
Unreal Engine State Tree AI bots
In order to meet a hard deadline to align with our promotional plan, the team delivered a certification passing build at first time of asking, followed by multiple updates made available to players prior to public release.
After delivering the title on Nintendo Switch the team expanded the audience to include Nintendo Switch 2 and PC ports in under two months.
Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 certification
Epic Games Store and Steam support
Unreal Engine Enhanced Input System
Even though the initial release of Storm Lancers only targeted Nintendo Switch, we made sure our decisions within Unreal Engine would not interfere later with additional target platforms.
Even though we support full platform integration for features like Cloud Save and achievements, we built these systems in a way that keeps the core game logic platform-agnostic.
For building AI enemies, we chose State Trees over Behavior Trees to ensure we were working with Unreal Engine’s latest AI systems, enabling us to build an event‑based AI control.
This experience has given us tremendous knowledge about building systems with the newly released Unreal Engine State Tree system.
Randomization is a core game feature of roguelikes. Therefore, we introduced modular level chunking with support for data table driven procedural content generation, further enabling a rapid development pipeline.
By working with data tables, we can easily add new weapons to the game or balance different levels. Additionally, we have extended Unreal's projectile functionality to more easily work with our weapon definitions.
testemonial06
"We are really thankful for all the help from Companion Group! They delivered excellent work on time and kept us updated with thorough reports and comms. Moreover, they were a wonderful cultural fit with our team. Companion have been an amazing partner and we truly hope we get to work together again in the future!”
PROBABLYMONSTERS - PRINCIPAL PRODUCER