Bitsquid Bitsquid AB, the company that created the Bitsquid game engine, was founded in 2009 in Stockholm, Sweden, Niklas Frykholm and Tobias Persson, two engineers who had previously worked at game studio
Grin, and by the owners of game developer
Fatshark. The game engine was built to be flexible and scalable, with support for
visual scripting, Lua, and C++ for advanced users. The use of Lua allowed Bitsquid to be smaller and lighter than other game engines thanks to its lean code base. In April 2010, Bitsquid and Fatshark released a demo highlighting the Bitsquid engine's capabilities. Support for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 was made available that fall. In 2011, Fatshark released Hamilton's Great Adventure, the first game to run on Bitsquid. The money from the sale helped Fatshark develop
Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide, the studio's first self-published AAA game. Frykholm and Persson went on to develop a short-lived "modular" game engine called The Machinery.
Autodesk Stingray In 2015, Bitsquid was retooled into
Autodesk Stingray, which integrated with the company's game development
toolchain, including
3ds Max,
Maya,
Mudbox, and Maya LT. Autodesk hoped to compete with other low-cost-to-enter game engines like
Unreal Engine,
Unity, and
CryEngine. Stingray was offered on a monthly subscription basis and even packaged with some of the company's other offerings. In June 2017, Autodesk introduced Stingray as a 3ds Max plugin called
3ds Max Interactive. This feature allowed 3ds Max users to create
virtual reality experiences. In December 2017, citing its inability to compete with Unreal Engine and Unity, Autodesk announced Stingray's end of sale and development as a standalone product, effective as of January 7, 2018. 3DS Max Interactive was discontinued on March 30, 2022. On February 8, 2024,
Arrowhead Game Studios released
Helldivers 2, a third-person co-op shooter built in Stingray, six years after official support ended. CEO Johan Pilestedt confirmed that the game had entered production before the shutdown in 2018. == Games using Bitsquid and Stingray ==