SWAPMEAT Playtest - JZTN
We're live! Venture into the Meat Lab and kick the tires on some new goodies we've been working on. That too vague for ya? You're in luck -- we've got full patch notes for ya right here.
In Meat Lab 3 we introduced you to Carl Rangus, the founder of Rangus Meat co, through our trailer and social media posts. In Meat Lab 4 Carl will orient you as a new employee, get you going on your first mission, and continue to provide you with employee rewards for completing events and company directives.
The rewards will grant you access to interact with terminals on the ship (eg. Weapons & Artifact Terminals) and also inherent power in the form of increased health, the ability to respawn, and protection from the Hunters that are pursuing you from planet to planet throughout the galaxy.
Drop-in and play support is important to us in co-operative multiplayer games, and so employee rewards can be discovered and earned in a non-linear way – basically if you choose to play with a friend as soon as you launch SWAPMEAT but they’re further ahead in the story, we support you. You’ll just probably want to go back and earn the employee rewards you missed.
The story in SWAPMEAT is still in heavy development, we’re delivering these systems in Meat Lab 4 to test them alongside gameplay, but we’ll get you something cooked up real nice for a future Meat Lab.
One of the more challenging systems to get right in SWAPMEAT was, maybe unsurprisingly, meat swapping. It’s a simple concept that comes with a number of unanswered questions because there aren’t any other games to reference that let you swap your meat. One of our longest standing questions has been how do we handle player health, meat loss, and death.
In Meat Lab 3 each of the three Meat parts had their own health pool and when one of those pools reached zero, you would lose that body part. Your feedback helped us validate that swapping meat was fun and intuitive, but we still had one remaining problem – we’re building an action Roguelite which means health is a valuable and sometimes scarce resource. Health on Meat is intuitive, but swapping meat is also about changing your abilities and traversing an environment, so we needed to decouple your health pool from your Meat.
These changes plus the inherent power progression from Carl aim to bring SWAPMEAT closer to the Roguelite experience of having challenging runs that get easier as the player progresses over successive runs.
Can any real gamers defeat Franken Beans with no deaths and just their Pistol and Spatula?
We’ve reworked nearly every ability in the game to give much greater variety between various Meats. We’ve also added a number of new Meats to go along with the Mutant and Alien factions.
In addition to these new abilities, each one of them can be mutated in one of the five damage types – Fire, Ice, Slime, Electric, and Kinetic. Once you’ve unlocked Mutations from Carl, just like in Meat Lab 3, some of your level up choices will be a “Mutation Round” instead of an “Item Round”. Selecting a Mutation will mutate the highlighted ability slot in the UI to have properties of that damage type.
For example: the player obtains a Grenadier Head which provides the player with a Grenadier Bomb that launches a grenade that damages and staggers nearby enemies. The non-mutated version of Grenadier Bomb does Fire Damage and applies Burning. If the player has mutated their Head Ability Slot with an Electric Mutation type, the grenade will now deal Electric Damage and apply Electrified.
The goal with this system refinement is to allow players to capitalize on the equipment they’ve chosen at the start of their run more regularly even while consistently swapping their meat.
Overview
- Two new factions: Mutants and Aliens
- An all-new Mutant biome to explore / ravage
- Employee rewards: Track your progress through the game's story and net new inherent powers
- Mutated Abilities: Modify your Meat to optimize your build
- Controller support, for the WASD-averse
- In-game Voice Chat support
Gameplay
Narrative Progression
In Meat Lab 3 we introduced you to Carl Rangus, the founder of Rangus Meat co, through our trailer and social media posts. In Meat Lab 4 Carl will orient you as a new employee, get you going on your first mission, and continue to provide you with employee rewards for completing events and company directives.
The rewards will grant you access to interact with terminals on the ship (eg. Weapons & Artifact Terminals) and also inherent power in the form of increased health, the ability to respawn, and protection from the Hunters that are pursuing you from planet to planet throughout the galaxy.
Drop-in and play support is important to us in co-operative multiplayer games, and so employee rewards can be discovered and earned in a non-linear way – basically if you choose to play with a friend as soon as you launch SWAPMEAT but they’re further ahead in the story, we support you. You’ll just probably want to go back and earn the employee rewards you missed.
The story in SWAPMEAT is still in heavy development, we’re delivering these systems in Meat Lab 4 to test them alongside gameplay, but we’ll get you something cooked up real nice for a future Meat Lab.
Meat Swapping
One of the more challenging systems to get right in SWAPMEAT was, maybe unsurprisingly, meat swapping. It’s a simple concept that comes with a number of unanswered questions because there aren’t any other games to reference that let you swap your meat. One of our longest standing questions has been how do we handle player health, meat loss, and death.
In Meat Lab 3 each of the three Meat parts had their own health pool and when one of those pools reached zero, you would lose that body part. Your feedback helped us validate that swapping meat was fun and intuitive, but we still had one remaining problem – we’re building an action Roguelite which means health is a valuable and sometimes scarce resource. Health on Meat is intuitive, but swapping meat is also about changing your abilities and traversing an environment, so we needed to decouple your health pool from your Meat.
- You will now have a health bar that works just like any other health bar – when it reaches zero you die.
- Meat pieces still have their own resource bar, but it is now a “durability”. When a meat part’s durability reaches zero, it will pop off just like before. However, you will no longer die if you lose all three Meat parts – instead you will fall back to your internal form of Smart Meat.
- Your main health bar will take reduced damage based on the number of Meat pieces you have
These changes plus the inherent power progression from Carl aim to bring SWAPMEAT closer to the Roguelite experience of having challenging runs that get easier as the player progresses over successive runs.
Can any real gamers defeat Franken Beans with no deaths and just their Pistol and Spatula?
Mutated Abilities
We’ve reworked nearly every ability in the game to give much greater variety between various Meats. We’ve also added a number of new Meats to go along with the Mutant and Alien factions.
In addition to these new abilities, each one of them can be mutated in one of the five damage types – Fire, Ice, Slime, Electric, and Kinetic. Once you’ve unlocked Mutations from Carl, just like in Meat Lab 3, some of your level up choices will be a “Mutation Round” instead of an “Item Round”. Selecting a Mutation will mutate the highlighted ability slot in the UI to have properties of that damage type.
For example: the player obtains a Grenadier Head which provides the player with a Grenadier Bomb that launches a grenade that damages and staggers nearby enemies. The non-mutated version of Grenadier Bomb does Fire Damage and applies Burning. If the player has mutated their Head Ability Slot with an Electric Mutation type, the grenade will now deal Electric Damage and apply Electrified.
The goal with this system refinement is to allow players to capitalize on the equipment they’ve chosen at the start of their run more regularly even while consistently swapping their meat.
Elemental Damage
- Added Kinetic Damage
- This is a “normal” type of element which is designed to enhance any build. It applies no status effects, but typically mutations, abilities, and weapons will have increased damage, radius, health, and stagger chances. For example:
- Kinetic Pistol – +10 damage over elemental pistols (50 - 60 damage instead of 40 - 50) with a 15% chance to stagger
Item Changes
- Removed chance OnKill effect from Sharpnel Spitter and replace with a static increase to projectile speed
- Renamed Brawndo to Glizzy Gulp to circumvent trademark issues
Enemies
Hunters
- Hunters have been adjusted to be slightly easier to deal with, but are still un-killable
- Hunters will no longer despawn when the Harvester arrives or begins harvesting
Mutant
There are three new Mutant enemies to encounter alongside Squat Daddy (previously Muscle Man) who returns for Meat Lab 4 - Duckstone
- Dirtbag
- Formula Dingus
Aliens
There are three new Alien enemies to encounter and the Machines have been temporarily merged into their faction- Little Buff Alien
- Lanky Alien
- Jetpack Alien
General Changes
- Each planet you encounter will now have the home world’s faction of dropships in the sky
- Peterium – Franken Meat – Glizzy Gliders
- Alien Town – Alien – Fridgeraiders
- Tangus Prime – Mutant – Blozo Blaloons
- You can now aim directly at the ground or the sky
- Increase Ammo Pickup Gain from 20% -> 40%
- Only one player can use a given bolt burger during harvester evacuation stage
- The harvester core will now descend to the meat core site when the event spawns and you will need to F the meat core in order to start the Harvester event
- Removed Healing Abilities and Mutations. You will now primarily regenerate health from completing prime directives and finding healing stations across the map
- Muscle Man renamed to Squat Daddy
Art
- New model for Insectoid Leviathan
Audio
- Rangus theme now plays during level up selection
Animation
- Added new swim animation for Meat Zord legs
- Updated animations for Insectoid Leviathan
UI
- UI Navigation has been hooked up to all UI elements, so you should be able to navigate around using only keyboard or controller now
- If meat has a limited number of uses, we’ll display the remaining usage count on the meat ability
- Input glyphs should automatically swap to show the most recently used binding
- Added controller rumble feedback
- New Death sequence in UI
- Player flashes red when at low health
- Reworked level up screen
- Options menu reorganized into tabbed sections
- Added a global voice chat volume slider in audio options
Bug Fixes
- Fixed fish biting you through the floor (or at least the most obvious case which kept popping up in AlienTown)
- Previous run mutation choices are no longer retained for the next run
- Fixed an issue where sometimes events could not spawn reliably even when there were available event locations
- Fixed item reward UI repeatedly showing up
- Fixed inaccurate projectile meshes for Octopus and Meat Zord head abilities
- Fixed various audio dropout issues
- Fixed an issue with damage accidentally scaling between 2x and 0x at point-blank to short range
- Fixed issue where weak point hits were applying critical damage multipliers even if the hit was already a critical
- Fixed issue where “Clarity” item was increasing torso ability recharge speed, not head ability recharge speed
- Summoned entities will now disappear if you die
- Fixed some UI navigation issues in Main Menu screens (Options, Multiplayer, Exit Dialogs, etc)
- Fixed collision on Franken Beans' inactive stalks. Previously they would not be visible but projectiles could still collide with them
- Fixed UI issue where time remaining for temp items was overlapping the stack count
- You can no longer click invisible buttons on the level up screen
- Late joining players should no longer see multiple “bolt burgers” during their intro sequence
- Fixed an issue where players could be presented with duplicate level up item choices
- Fixed an issue where certain categories of Threat were not being calculated correctly
Share: 
