The focus of this update remains similar to that of our previous update – replace the things that are temporary while focusing in on the feedback that we received during the first few weeks of Early Access. We’ve also got a number of bug fixes thanks to a number of community members that helped track them down!
In this update and the weeks coming, we’ll still be working on replacing the things that are obviously temporary. Last week I mentioned we finished our first VO session and over the last two weeks we finish
all of our VO sessions. It’ll be a few weeks before the audio is updated in game, but the cinematics and VO for Solar System 1 and 2 will contain their final pieces pretty soon.
In this update you’ll find a hefty update of meta-progression content that should make progressing through the campaign and more challenging difficulties more accessible. We’ve also added a number of new events that you’ll encounter, a new enemy type, continued to pursue additional elemental interactions, quality of life improvements for new players, and added Item Containers back to the game.
Our plan until the end of the year is to continue working on replacing temporary UI, QOL improvements for new players, and new content. Specifically, you can expect not just new item upgrades, but different kind of item upgrades. The Item Containers introduced in this update are just the first required step to get there. We want you to be theory crafting builds and sharing them in Discord, and this is a long overdue rework to get there.
We’re still putting together a public roadmap that we’ll share with the community soon. I anticipated this would be ready before this update, but misjudged how much of my time would be dedicated to working on features for this new two week cadence. We’ll have a public roadmap before *the next update*. Promise.
Thank you for playing SWAPMEAT. Please join us in Discord and let us know what you think about the changes!
– Jamie Stormbreaker, Game Director
Gameplay
- Added Elemental Resistance Attributes. Enemies can now have a positive or negative resistance to each Element causing conditions to accumulate slower or faster, respectively
- Added a new machine enemy – Tommy Tank. Expect more of these machine enemies will begin to trickle into the game as we complete them followed by a new line of Meat and abilities for you to pickup and play with!
- All Dirtbag enemies (not just from Whack-A-Mole event) will be popped above ground by Squat Daddy ability
- Increased the size of Dirtbag’s hitbox making him easier to deal with
- We made improvements to the feel an timing of weapon switching to make switching between weapons feel more satisfying and provide an overall increase to the player’s total damage output. We’ll continue to tweak these numbers, but the goal is that the player can unload two to three clips by switching weapons before needing to participate in the active reload mini-game
- Reduced weapon switch delay from 500ms to 250ms
- Fixed a bug that was sometimes preventing your inactive weapon from automatically reloading. See the bug section below for more details
- Switching to a weapon that was in the active reload mini-game will now restart the active reload mini-game
- Mini Bosses (eg. Broadside) will now scale more appropriately with challenge, difficulty level, and player count
- Activating the Grenadier Torso ability now briefly stops the player from falling
- Added short durations with all interactables the player encounters during a run
- Added a number of new Alien “Diamond” events where the player needs to shoot a floating diamond object at the right time to progress an event objective
- The player will no longer have their ability damage and health scaled on each level up. This has been replaced by the items provided by Item Containers (see below)
Respawn Refrigerators
- All Respawn Refrigerators will now stay deployed until the map is completed
- Players will always respawn at the closest respawn location – either a Respawn Refrigerator or their initial spawn location
- A new cinematic will play when the player is respawning in a Respawn Refrigerator. Ding!
Elemental Interactions
[h2]Slime[/h2]
Added Elemental Interactions to Slimed Targets. Slimed targets now have -85% resistance to all other Elemental accumulation. Damaging Slimed targets with any Elemental damage type other than Slime will now much more rapidly accumulate that Element's condition.
This is in addition to the 30% Increased Damage that Slimed targets take from all damage sources.
Boss Encounter Difficulty Scaling
We’ve taken a first pass at scaling boss encounters in accordance with the difficulty level being played. In addition to tweaking the pretty standard fare - enemy hit points, damage output and mitigation, minion counts, respawn and cooldown timers, etc - you will also notice that some boss mechanics or behaviors only become active at higher difficulty levels. Overall, this should make Casual easier, while gradually scaling up to the point where better equipment upgrades and much more precise execution are needed as you progress up through Nightmare. This is a first step, so more tweaks are likely in the future as we gather data from more play sessions.
Item Containers
Item Containers will now spawn as a reward from completing certain events. One player can claim an Item Container by interacting with it for a short period of time. The player that claims the container will receive one to three different random uncommon items.
- Added various sized Item Container rewards for completing the following events
- Summoning Circle
- Meat Blender
- Crystal Tower (new)
- Machine Tractor Beam (new)
- Portal Generator (new)
Item Containers containers will spawn one to three different items depending upon the size of the container. This month we’re working on a refresh and overhaul for how the Item system works in SWAPMEAT and this is a step into that direction. We want level up rewards to be *build defining* while these randomly acquired items are what continue to grant the player power even after level 30.
Over the next month the items found in these containers will change as will the upgrade pool at level up. Once more of the content is available the number of events which reward these containers will increase. Our goal is to give more reason, reward, and fun random to the secondary objectives and locations found throughout each map.
Meta Progression
- Added 33 new Carl quests and upgrades in total
- Added new main quests to track completion of each campaign system at your current difficulty, that will then unlock the next difficulty once completed
- Added new side quests for unlocking all of the ultimates, unlocking all of the weapons, beating the random system on each difficulty, and for meat swapping an elite number of times
- Added new side quests for completing primary directives with each weapon that appear once any given weapon’s entire weapon grid has been opened up at the weapon terminal. These do not require any resources being spent on the weapons. Just fully opened up
- Added new higher difficulty versions of the boss upgrades “Franken Felled” and “Lord of the Rings” for beating the bosses on Standard, Hard, and Nightmare difficulties. Beating them at a higher difficulty will also unlock all lower upgrades, such as if you first played and beat a boss on Hard with a friend, then that would also give you the option to get the Casual and Standard upgrades as well
- There are new upgrades for beating the Random System on each difficulty. Beating it at a higher difficulty will also unlock all lower upgrades, such as if you first played and beat it on Nightmare, then that would also give you the option to get the Casual, Standard, and Hard upgrades
- Made Rangus Effort Points "REPs" visible at employee info terminal, so it was easier to understand how to earn them
- Updated Trader Mike to have a new trade option for the “Big Red Button” resource after completing a Random Solar System on Hard or higher difficulty. This resource is primarily planned to come from a future solar system, however we didn’t want to block the completion of the smart meat grid or weapon grids until then, which require it to reach rank 30, so everyone can resume powering up further to push the limits on the Nightmare ascension ranks!
- Reduced cost to trade up minerals and ancient tech from 5 to 3 at Trader Mike
- Reduced cost to trade up trinkets to boss resources from 25 to 10 at Trader Mike
- Increased health gain of Health Insurance v1 and Health Insurance v2 from +5% to +20%
- Added Health Inusrance v3 and Health Insurance v4 which also provide +20% health gain when interacting with health terminals
Art
- New models for high-tier Duckstone and some alien enemies. Tier 3 Duckstone throws a large bowling ball that spawns a bowling ball Buster enemy when it lands
- Improved Harvester Lobby visuals
- Added new art for Flair Terminal
Design
- Payload Event is improved with brand new tractor beam obstacles
- Payload health has decreased to bring it in line with our other Rangus Meat Tech
- Payload repair has decreased to match Payload health
Animation
- Galaxy Terminal now has animations for entering / exiting the terminal, and swapping systems.
- And the warp jump also happens on the ship, and the planets out the window change and all that jazz
- Added new animations and VFX for Gathering
- Added new animations and VFX for general interacts (eg. healing the payload)
- Lobby will now play a warp animation when changing the current solar system
- Minor adjustments to some camera cuts in some of the cutscenes that were showing sub-frame blips. (We haven’t fully fixed all blips, but have minorly adjusted the content to minimize it ahead of a real tech fix in the future; probably only OMG\_d0gheart cares anyways)
- Mutant Referee General animation polish
- Mutant referee movement behavior has been changed, he should be easier to hit while being more lively
- Mutant referee now has an animation to indicate a foul is called before charging at the player
AI
- Turrets and some other enemies will now be better at hitting the payload
Audio
- Respawn SFX have been added in support of the respawn moment
- Galaxy Map has audio for: Enter, Exit, Changing Systems
- Added some more audio cues to the Monday Night Midterms participants and event
- Broadside’s footfall SFX have returned
- Added a new music track for ambience when engaged with map mini bosses
- More SFX feedback for various parts of Monday Night Midterms
- Various SFX mix updates and performance adjustments
UI / UX
- You can continue a previous run from the main menu, starting directly at the last planet reached instead of the lobby
- Hitting ESC / Back on the main menu prompts you to exit the game instead of opening the main menu
- HUD should now update to reflect the correct inputs when key rebinding has been done. Note that most non-default inputs still don’t have pretty icons hooked up for them (see known issues below), but the labels should at least update with the default binding text
- Enabled meat glow VFX on the folding chair head meat spawns around the ring on the Monday Night Midterms map
- Interactable prompts should now be hidden properly if they are active when the game menu is brought up
- When unlocking new features from Carl, new tutorial popups should appear explaining them. Also the cinematics that frame them are now unskippable
- The player is no longer forced to face the object you are performing a hold interaction with
- The player longer needs to be facing meat for the “auto pickup missing meat” mechanic to work
- Mouse hover no longer “selects” things in the carl and currency trader terminals
- The player can click the lower left “exit” button in the carl and currency trader terminals
- Lobby terminals have a more obvious inactive state
- Added glow and sparkles to Resource Nodes that the player can interact with. These will be hidden until you have the appropriate gathering resource unlocked
- Referee has speech bubble and some additional VFX to telegraph him knocking a player off of a pin
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug where you could tunnel through objects while using certain movement abilities at weird camera angles
- Removed the collision gaps between the boxes on the payload, so it’s smoother to walk on
- Fixed an issue where an inactive weapon would not automatically reload if it had zero ammo when switched to inactive
- Fixed bug with melee attack that it wouldn’t hit a Dirtbag if you aimed up at it in the air
- Ascension Rank UI should no longer let you select Ascensions that you haven’t unlocked yet
- Damage numbers will no longer be displayed if an enemy takes no damage
- Fixed subtitles not displaying while audio is low or muted
- Lots of minor performance fixes
- Nightmare Ascension Rank 5 will now properly reduce health gain from health terminals by
- 50% instead of grant +50%. Thank you @SoulReaper!
Known Issues
- Late joining players will spawn at the initial player spawn points. In a future update they will spawn @ the most recently activated Respawn Refrigerator
- No significant performance tuning has been done yet. If you are graphics bound, you can try lowering the quality settings in the Esc menu via Options → Video, but systems with more constrained hardware may struggle
- Not all input buttons and keys have icons in the UI yet. Text descriptions (eg. “J”, or “Button West”) will show up for things that do not yet have an icon in the input glyph map
- When observing other players, some UI bits such as the reload HUD don’t show accurate information for the observed player
- All cutscenes and voiceover dialogue are WIP (and most lines aren’t in at all yet)