The crew at Seattle-based sport developer One More Game is lastly sharing its first title with gamers, six years after the corporate initially began.
Shortly after landing a $22 million funding round in 2022 from traders together with Lightspeed and Andreessen Horowitz, One Extra Sport determined to scrap Spellcraft, the sport it had been engaged on for over three years. The corporate utterly shelved the hybrid real-time technique fantasy sport and began over from scratch.
“I’m actually pleased with Spellcraft — the sport was good,” mentioned One Extra Sport co-founder Jamie Stormbreaker. He mentioned the corporate noticed participant curiosity shifting away from aggressive video games the place you match up with strangers in random lobbies to video games that may be performed with associates coordinated through Discord, like Amongst Us and Deadly Firm.
“We have been pushing the boundaries of what the subsequent hybrid real-time technique may very well be, however in the end we didn’t have faith that the 1v1 PvP free-to-play enterprise mannequin match our firm values, so it was finest for us to change gears,” Stormbreaker mentioned.
And boy did they ever swap gears. The studio’s new game SWAPMEAT is a goofy third-person squad-based cooperative shooter with humor impressed by 2000s Grownup Swim exhibits like “Tim and Eric,” and “Aqua Teen Starvation Power.” It’s a unique style, graphical model, writing model, sport engine, and participant rely from Spellcraft, however maybe the largest change is the shift from free-to-play to an upfront buy.
“Whenever you purchase one thing from us, we need to respect your time and provide you with nice worth,” Stormbreaker defined. “We need to make one thing that’s going to be in your Steam library eternally.”
SWAPMEAT wasn’t only a new model of sport for the studio, however a complete new sport mechanic the place physique components with totally different skills and abilities are scavenged from defeated enemy models and swapped onto the participant’s physique, an idea the crew referred to internally throughout improvement as “meat mixing” and is the supply of sport’s distinctly memorable identify.
This previous summer time, Stormbreaker and his fully-remote, 13-person crew introduced SWAPMEAT to the Seattle gaming conference PAX West, the place their sales space was busy all weekend as gamers received their first have a look at the sport. “PAX was completely glorious, an unbelievable present for us,” mentioned Stormbreaker.
PAX West got here on the tail finish of a busy season for One Extra Sport, throughout which it introduced the sport to a collection of exhibits together with PAX East in Boston and Gamescom in Cologne, Germany. On the exhibits the corporate would get the sport in entrance of gamers, make tweaks to the sport — usually mid-show — after which get it proper again in entrance of gamers once more to see what different tweaks ought to be made.
“We observe one thing we name alpha-driven improvement,” Stormbreaker famous. “You get the sport in entrance of individuals as quickly as you presumably can. They’re going to roast the sport, and I adore it. We would like the suggestions, and by exhibiting up commonly and fascinating with gamers, we always make the sport higher.”
Thanks largely to the insights the crew gained from watching 1000’s of individuals play the sport on the present flooring at numerous gaming conventions this yr, they’re gearing as much as open SWAPMEAT for Steam Early Access next week.
One Extra Sport co-founders Stormbreaker and Patrick Wyatt each have a deep historical past within the gaming trade. Wyatt had a 9-year position as a VP at Blizzard the place he labored on Starcraft and Diablo video games and later co-founded ArenaNet, the Seattle-area gaming studio liable for the Guild Wars collection. Stormbreaker was a developer at ArenaNet, Riot Video games, and Undead Labs, a Seattle-area sport studio bought by Microsoft in 2018.
For Stormbreaker and Wyatt, bringing SWAPMEAT to PAX West wasn’t only a product showcase — it was a full-circle second.
Practically 20 years earlier, the 2 met for the primary time on that very same present flooring, bonding over server tech on the ArenaNet sales space. “I walked over to the ArenaNet sales space to ask how they maintain the servers on-line on a regular basis,” Stormbreaker recalled of his first encounter with Wyatt.
That likelihood dialog sparked a partnership that may finally create One Extra Sport. This yr, they returned to PAX not simply as curious builders however as studio founders, exhibiting off a sport of their very own.
