The staff at Seattle-based sport developer One Extra Recreation is lastly sharing its first title with gamers, six years after the corporate initially began.
Shortly after touchdown a $22 million funding spherical in 2022 from buyers together with Lightspeed and Andreessen Horowitz, One Extra Recreation 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 happy with Spellcraft — the sport was good,” mentioned One Extra Recreation 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 buddies coordinated by way of Discord, like Amongst Us and Deadly Firm.
“We had been pushing the boundaries of what the subsequent hybrid real-time technique could possibly be, however in the end we didn’t believe that the 1v1 PvP free-to-play enterprise mannequin match our firm values, so it was finest for us to modify gears,” Stormbreaker mentioned.
And boy did they ever swap gears. The studio’s new sport SWAPMEAT is a goofy third-person squad-based cooperative shooter with humor impressed by 2000s Grownup Swim reveals like “Tim and Eric,” and “Aqua Teen Starvation Pressure.” It’s a unique style, graphical fashion, writing fashion, 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 offer you nice worth,” Stormbreaker defined. “We need to make one thing that’s going to be in your Steam library perpetually.”
SWAPMEAT wasn’t only a new fashion of sport for the studio, however a complete new sport mechanic the place physique elements with completely different talents and abilities are scavenged from defeated enemy models and swapped onto the participant’s physique, an idea the staff referred to internally throughout growth as “meat mixing” and is the supply of sport’s distinctly memorable identify.
This previous summer time, Stormbreaker and his fully-remote, 13-person staff introduced SWAPMEAT to the Seattle gaming conference PAX West, the place their sales space was busy all weekend as gamers bought their first take a look at the sport. “PAX was completely wonderful, an unbelievable present for us,” mentioned Stormbreaker.
PAX West got here on the tail finish of a busy season for One Extra Recreation, throughout which it introduced the sport to a collection of reveals together with PAX East in Boston and Gamescom in Cologne, Germany. On the reveals 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 must be made.
“We observe one thing we name alpha-driven growth,” Stormbreaker famous. “You get the sport in entrance of individuals as quickly as you probably can. They’re going to roast the sport, and I find it irresistible. We wish the suggestions, and by exhibiting up frequently and fascinating with gamers, we consistently make the sport higher.”
Thanks largely to the insights the staff gained from watching 1000’s of individuals play the sport on the present flooring at varied gaming conventions this 12 months, they’re gearing as much as open SWAPMEAT for Steam Early Entry subsequent week.
One Extra Recreation co-founders Stormbreaker and Patrick Wyatt each have a deep historical past within the gaming business. 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 chargeable 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.
Almost 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 might ultimately create One Extra Recreation. This 12 months, they returned to PAX not simply as curious builders however as studio founders, exhibiting off a sport of their very own.
