DarkSwarm News

Attention on deck!

So before we head into summer vacation we would like to reveal our internal project roadmap we try to scope the project for until we hit Early Access.
Be mindful the development of DarkSwarm is a highly complex project with many interdependencies so do not be surprised if we have to push deadlines and change features.

But we remain extremely committed to bringing you the best game we can!


[h2]DARKSWARM: LIVING ROADMAP FALL 2023 [/h2]

[h3]NETCODE[/h3]
Lot’s of netcode for online multiplayer. Additionally, local co-op enables friends to join your game from the same console or PC, enhancing the cooperative gameplay experience. To ensure smooth team play, DarkSwarm includes a ping wheel that provides real-time feedback.

[h3]MISSION TYPE: BIO EXTRACTION[/h3]
In this new mission type, players are tasked with hunting down a special enemy to retrieve valuable biomass. Engage in intense battles and overcome crazy enemies as you strive to extract the biomass.

[h3]MISSION TYPE: CONQUEST[/h3]
DarkSwarm introduces the Conquest mission type, where players must capture nodes on an infested planet colony.

DarkSwarm infested planet colony (early prototype of planet environment)

[h3]MORE ENEMY TYPES[/h3]
More advanced enemy AI. More enemy types & growing hive mechanics. Modular system for enemy destruction and variations.

[h3]THE HUB[/h3]
The ship hub serves as a central location within DarkSwarm, providing players with a variety of essential features. Here, you can conveniently spawn your characters, allowing for quick access to missions.

[h3]VISUALS[/h3]
Plenty of updates to the visuals and effects. New UI graphics and integration. New options and settings menu.


[h3]CHARACTERS & CLASSES[/h3]
During this fall, even more class special abilities are introduced, providing additional depth and variety to gameplay. Experiment with different character classes and their abilities to find the perfect combination that suits your playstyle and complements your team.

Thanks for your time and have an awesome summer!

Sign up for the newsletter DarkSwarm

Feel free to drop by our Discord. You are very much invited! :)
https://discord.com/invite/YDrrCwA


And wishlist of Steam if you haven't

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2303200/DarkSwarm/

I'm super proud of what the team has accomplished in a mere 10 weeks of effective team time. From hiring a completely new team to getting everybody on the same page and delivering something that actually feels, looks, and sounds really good. We essentially rebuilt the original prototype you saw in the trailer into something much better for development.

Post update:

Adding some of the things we have been working on in various stages of development:

[h2]Classes[/h2]
- Assault
- Engineer
- Medic
- Hacker

[h2]Character class abilities[/h2]
- Medic: Healing ray
- Medic: Area revive
- Assault: WaveCracker (Shockwave blast)
- Engineer: Droppable gun turret
- Hacker: Stasis field
- Hacker: Invisibility field

[h2]Weapons[/h2]
- Engineer: Shotgun
- Assault: Assault rifle
- Medic: Burst rifle
- Hacker - Rapid fire SMG
- Handgun for all classes

[h2]Bullet types[/h2]
- Bouncing bullets
- Penetrating bullets

[h2]Level based pickups[/h2]
- Minigun
- Flamethrower
- Grenade launcher
- Burst / Auto shotgun

[h2]Haulables[/h2]
Things you can haul around in the levels
- PowerCore (mission objective)
- Gun turret
- Energy recharger
- Health recharger
(Also static versions of charger and turret)

[h2]Level systems[/h2]
- Room based fog of war system pushing the feel of exploring the unknown.
- Procedural level generation

[h2]Mission types[/h2]
- Swarm (Basically a first stab at a survival mode as a time based challenge as it's own thing)
- Infiltration (One of the main game modes.. get ind.. do stuff.. get the hell out!)

[h2]Other things[/h2]
- PlayerHUD (Individual small floating player HUDs following the player)
- Selecting class and late joining in the game.
- A massive push on the environment art side of things.
- A more dynamic and smooth character locomotion system.



Milestone 1 was focused on getting class-based gameplay up and running in local co-op. And that's exactly what it does. Although there are still a lot of rough edges, feedback from local 4-player testing has been very positive so far. The game seems very easy and intuitive to pick up and play.

There are a ton of design challenges ahead, from all the little things to big things like online multiplayer. That is the next big hurdle to overcome in Milestone 2.

While in the delivery phase of MS1, we actually got a head start on MS2. Today, we had the first playtest of online multiplayer at the office in a VERY early stage. We were basically running around in the player hub where many things were not being replicated over the network for the other players. But it was actually functional and a great leap forward nonetheless to see the game running online.

Yes, the playhub is also something new and will be expanded upon in the future.

The four classes we will initially focus on are Assault, Engineer, Medic, and Hacker.

More good things are in the works!
And now, back to making the rest of the game!

Cheers and all the best for the Bitfire crew!
Jonas / Game Director @ Bitfire Games

Feel free to drop by our Discord. You are very much invited! :)
https://discord.com/invite/YDrrCwA


And wishlist of Steam if you haven't.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2303200/DarkSwarm/

Long time no update!

Simply put, we have been busy getting down and dirty with the development of all the nitty-gritty details. The stream of new things has almost been too overwhelming to write about on a regular basis, and not all of them have been super exciting to show off to the world. Since the last update, there have been 358 commits to the project repository, so stuff has certainly been happening.

A lot of time has been spent on 'the hauler,' which is a rather tricky feature to get working really well due to its complex physics and player interaction. (Early work in progress)


There has been a BIG push towards reworking a lot of the core functionality prototype systems and preparing them for when we will start focusing on online multiplayer functionality in Milestone 2. It has basically involved rewriting most parts of the old prototype to make it performant and 'future-proof' in C++, with proper code structure in general, so we won't run into too many issues when we open the next 'can of online multiplayer worms'.

So this whole big, wonderful world of game development has felt like doing open-heart surgery with a muddy spoon and a power drill. Okay... maybe not 'that' bad. ;)
Still not done, but getting there one step at the time!

Also, the team has been doing a lot of work on the mission system and difficulties, procedural level generation, classes, abilities, how we communicate the dark levels to the players, new art assets, camera, VFX optimization, and a bit of sound effects without a dedicated audio guy. We have been designing and mocking up control schemes and UI, but they still need to be implemented.

Big things have happened on the visual side! We finally turned the camera 45 degrees and got a lot of brand new modular level assets in. We can really feel that it's beginning to look pretty dope! However, it's still far from where we want to take it in terms of visual quality. Many improvements will come as we progress.

As we approach the Milestone 1 deadline in late June, we have 'sort of' locked down new features while focusing on bug fixing and polishing what we already have.

On a personal note... we are still having a blast every day at the office! I love every day and feel the love and passion of the team on a daily basis. Ox somehow managed to severely pull a leg muscle while out running and has been our office cripple for a while now. However, he is getting better now and has been a real trooper! :)

All in all, we are still on track! And there is still a lot of things to get just sweet and right!

Cheers!
Jonas / Game Director @ Bitfire Games

MILESTONE 1 - Work in progress! (Minigun is Minifun)

DarkSwarm Devlog time!

Things are going great here! Milestone 1 is well under way! We are 3 weeks now into MS1 until the deadline in June.

First of all SOOO much has been happening it has been hard to keep up with the more frequent devlog posts. While Jonas and Ox has also been VERY busy going to and talking to a lot of potential new candidate interns from The Games Assembly in Malmö. These guys will bring so much coolness to the project. It will be absolutely amazing!

The goal of Milestone 1 is to create a good definition of the core gameplay in local co-op. Stuff like a first pass on weapons, classes, abilities, camera, controls, character controller, a smaller selection of enemies and a single mission type (extraction) playable in a procedurally generated level.

So we can play and feel how all the intended mechanics interact in a fully playable and tweakable setting.
The game will also scale visually so it will look sweet in 4K on high-end PC hardware depending on graphical settings.
Also we are usually Friday testing on Steam Deck on ‘medium’ settings. Runs around 60fps depending. It even runs fine at around 50-60 fps on an older integrated chipset laptop on low settings. Looking pretty good even for what it is.

A lot of time has been spent on janking out and refurbishing my old prototype and optimizing what was there. Creating structure ‘real’ programmers like, fixing bugs and developing all the unseen systems of the game so we can play and iterate as fast as possible on the project. All going super great!

We also did a bit of work on trying out split screen as dynamic switching and a single camera zooming out and framing the action. It was clear that for dynamic split screen switching we need to implement a more custom solution if we want to go down that route. Split screen and camera things is on the radar.
Split screen does indeed cost a bit of performance. But it’s not that bad really . We might make various options regarding. Let’s see where it lands! No promises as always. ;)

The latest development has seen all 4 classes in the game. With various class weapons and skills. Still >super early< but it lends a lot to the game already.

There was also some VERY early work on a minigun.. It just feels very dear to our hearts! We are in absolute love with the power of the minigun.

I did some work on the environment shader. There will be blood!.. like everywhere if we want that. Also includes alien goo and other things.


Also great work on visuals and audio and procedural levels. We will try to make the levels look as hand crafted as possible.
Lore wise it has been pretty still as we are very busy with actual gameplay and lore is actually not part of the Milestone. But at least we now have a rough and broad idea about the universe and how it operates and its relation to the players.

And as mentioned last week we (Jonas & Ox) also went to Malmö in Sweden to talk to a lot of SUPER talented students from The Game Assembly. It was INTENSE! We managed to talk to 40 students during the day. So hope we will land some more great talent at the studio to work on the game. We were certainly impressed by the level of quality they have produced. We are REALLY looking forward to working with some of those guys.
Yay! We have matching Bitfire Games hoodies going to Sweden and other biz events.


Epic Games representatives will dropped by our studio last week! How awesome is that! As part of this local Copenhagen MatchUp event. They mostly talked about us getting on the Unreal Developer Network. And always nice to have a chat.
We had a few biz talks planned at the Matchup venue and online. But it is not a large focus right now, as we already have our base covered with Ghost Ship Games. It’s just for meeting new people and hanging out. Great fun!

All in all.. It has been some suuuper great and productive weeks! Much awesome things in the pipe. So far it looks like we are in good shape to reach MS1 in June! And hopefully with flying colors! Guess we will see! :)

Cheers from
Jonas and Bitfire Games

Hi again!
We are still very much alive and kicking alien ass even harder since last time.

Milestone 0
We would like to announce that we consider Milestone 0 for DONE!

The milestone consisted of building the company and the core team that will build the game. It is probably the most important thing we could do, we are very happy with the team! They are truly on Bitfire! ;)

And without further ado! Milestone 1 is coming along great. The ultimate chair swarm system is in the works. It will be great! ;)


Also we moved into new offices from our very tiny broom locker space. Into slightly bigger premises that can hold the core team on location in Copenhagen. It cannot be underestimated how important that will be for the production of a co-op game like DarkSwarm. It was a strong wish for us to have people on location as much as possible during development. We are very happy it was possible.

Our big thanks and gratitude goes out to all of you guys who have wishlisted the game and are following our process.

Without your support and interest the journey never had been the same. The better community the better the game.

We see our community is an absolute core pillar of our company and game. It is our job to craft the best game for you guys and we always take your input into consideration.
Obviously we are the ones with the hard decisions and it would be impossible to please everybody. That is the nature of the game. But we hope to be as thoughtful of your input and see it in relation to our production reality, vision and scope of the game.

The trailer you have all seen is just a very early beginning of a spare time developed bedroom prototype. We will take it much further.

For more frequent updates on DarkSwarm and the company around it, you can always visit the Dev Micro Log on various sites.

Steam Community: https://steamcommunity.com/app/2303200/discussions/0/5940851423459317748/
-
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoinDarkSwarm
-
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkSwarm
-
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/YDrrCwA (If you want to be real close to production Discord is #1)

Milestone 1 - Core gameplay in local co-op.
The goal of Milestone 1 is to build the core gameplay for 4 local players with proper systems.
We have already begun a got a 4 player local build of the game working on the SteamDeck a few days ago. Things like lore, design, new character controller system and the swarm system are in the works already.
A lot of clean up, debugging and prepping for future development will be required.

As said the current focus is local co-op. But we are still being smart about it and preparing for online functionality. As we want maximum iteration speed that very easily could break multiplayer otherwise, if we went for fully supported online play at this early stage. Iteration speed is essential right now. Online co-op will have to wait a bit while we are fleshing out the core systems. We hope it will be good!

Cheers from the Bitfire team!
And may your ammo feed never jam.