OMG Insiders: Update 0.19.0 Rise & Shrine
Looking for the Patch Notes? Read those here.
Introducing Shrines
We wanted a visually identifiable thing that would draw player's attention. You should pretty clearly know what you are going to get by going and interacting with one.
It is also risk versus reward. We wanted an event that you could fail without entirely stopping your run, but it could hinder you if you did so.
Lastly, in co-operative games we want players to be attempting them together. You should see one and say "Hey, help me with this Shrine over here"
We're still working on what the exact reward are of the Shrines. Right now, what we're testing is player behaviour. In co-operative games are you asking your teammates for help? How are you prioritizing activating them? Do you wait until you've got some upgrades or do you run right to them? Tell us how this plays out for you in Discord!
– Jamie "OMG_Stormbreaker" Stormbreaker, Game Director
Biomes come to Barbecuria
Awhile back I polled the team and asked them to rank their top 3 favorite maps. Our first map, Scurvian Alpha received high marks. This is one of the few maps that has sub biomes and we believe it really helps with navigation and replayability.
With this feedback in mind we've taken another pass at our Barbecuria map and added 4 sub regions/biomes:
The Fungal Forest features alien trees inspired by rotten apples and classic shelf mushrooms.
The Sand Worm Desert has bleached coral like rocks and a giant sand worm skeleton.
The Central Crater Field is home to plenty of secondary events to complete in between your prime directives.
The Crag Pools reside directly opposite the Fungal Forest and have a higher concentration of mineral deposits.
I hope you enjoy these changes and we'll be looking to level up more of our maps as we get closer to our 1.0 launch.
- Jason"OMG_Crangus" Stokes, Art Director
Shrine Animations
Interview with Animator Rocky "OMG_Tangent" Newton
OMG: Let's start with the big picture. What's in the latest update?
Rocky: It's a pretty full one. We've got shrines — which are a whole new feature — two reworked artifacts, Flash Freeze and Overload, a new enemy called the Meat Pug, and Brady did a pass on enemy stagger animations that I think players are really going to feel. Oh, and I quietly made the XP orbs a little more satisfying to collect, but that's more of a side quest.
OMG: Shrines feel like the headliner. What are they?
Rocky: The concept came from Jamie (Game Director) then worked out the full spec with Rebecca (UX) and Peter (Engineer). The idea was to create these "weenies" — landmarks you can see from a distance that pull you toward them. You see this mysterious thing on the horizon and you want to know what it is. Once you get close and activate it, that's when things get spicy.
OMG: What actually happens when you activate one?
Rocky: Ancient machine spawners rise from underground, and enemies start pouring out of them and make a beeline for the Shrine's central tower. Your job is to defend the tower for about a minute and a half. If you do, you get a Boon — something like a 25% move speed increase, which can last the entire run. If the Shrine goes down, you get a Curse instead. There are a number of different colored Shrines that grant different categories of Boons and Curses.
OMG: So it's very much a risk-reward thing.
Rocky: Exactly. In playtests, when I personally see a Shrine when playing solo, I think, "I'm gonna maybe skip that." But in co-op, I have no fear. Rally the team and go for it. That tension is intentional. We want it to feel like a meaningful decision that can genuinely change the shape of your run. You don't want to just willy nilly activate a Shrine if you're not ready.
OMG: You animated the Shrines yourself. Walk me through what they look like.
Rocky: I did them directly in Unity, which I love for speed — I can play and iterate immediately without bouncing between tools. The Shrine has a spinning head while it's idle, and asleep, which is a motion cue. From across the map, motion catches your eye faster than a static shape.
OMG: What does the activation look like?
Rocky: When it goes active, it telescopes upward, the eye opens and glows gold. I actually think we may have that backwards. My instinct is that it should stand tall as a weenie, when inactive, and then hunker down to defend itself when you trigger it. That makes more narrative sense, and it'll make it easier to see from the two key distances of far away and right under it. I've flagged it for v2.
OMG: Any other animation details worth calling out?
Rocky: The telescoping animation has this little detail that was inspired by the "stepped" design of the "neck". So I made it so that as the head rises, it pauses at each step of the pyramid neck instead of just floating up smoothly. It gives it this bumpy, mechanical, lurching quality.
The eye color is also doing a lot of work: gold while it's active, blue if you win a Boon, red if you're Cursed. I consulted with Rebecca to ensure it follows our color language. I wanted it to feel a little nervous, and we'll push all this a little further after we get more feedback.
OMG: Any bigger ambitions for where Shrines go?
Rocky: I want them to have more personality. Right now they're functional, but I think of them as a little buddy — something that feels genuinely happy when you win and kind of defeated when it's destroyed. That's the version I'm excited to build toward and really want to hear what players think about the Shrines as we iterate on them.
OMG: Let's talk Artifacts. Flash Freeze first — that used to be Armor of Chill, right?
Rocky: Right, we renamed it and reworked it pretty significantly. The old version had periodic chill pulses and a barrier. Which worked well for the previous design where the player could use it frequently on a cooldown. Now with the single-use design in place, the new version throws all of that out and goes: one button, one giant freeze bomb. Everything in a large radius freezes instantly.
OMG: That sounds fun.
Rocky: They don't stay Frozen for very long, but you can reposition, escape, or — and this is the fun part — shatter them. Melee attacks with your Spatula shatters frozen enemies, but the real fun is if you have a Kinetic weapon or ability to pair with it, since Kinetic damage shatters frozen enemies. Once you figure that out, it's a satisfying combo.
OMG: Overload got an upgrade too.
Rocky: We basically took our internal "superhero" dev cheat that we use for testing, which gives you tons of speed, a very high fire rate, extra jumps, etc. We use it to clear out enemies or get somewhere quickly while testing, but it's fun in its own right. We asked, "How can we give players a taste of this?" Overload is the answer. It's a timed burst: dramatically increased move speed, dramatically increased shoot speed, and extra jumps. It's much beefier than it was, should feel like a genuinely powerful moment. Think Mario star.
OMG: The Meat Pug. Great name. What is it?
Rocky: We had an old Meat Frog enemy model, that we'd shelved. So, I took a stab at a simple design, added eyeballs to the larger variants, and suddenly it had a face and a personality. It walks around, flees if you get close, and shoots slow laser projectiles out of its mouth, and it's pretty easy to kill — intentionally. But it splits in two when killed. We wanted a squishy Franken Meat enemy that's just fun to pop.
OMG: What's the split mechanic?
Rocky: When you kill a large one, it splits into two medium ones. Kill those, and each of them splits again into small ones. We're genuinely curious whether that's going to feel satisfying or tedious — it's easy to tune down to one split if players don't love it.
OMG: Any pro tips for dealing with them?
Rocky: If you stay on a medium Meat Pug as it dies, you can hit the small ones before they even land. And any AoE squishes them easily. They're not meant to be a threat — they're meant to be fun to destroy.
OMG: Last one — Brady's stagger animations.
Rocky: We've had some first pass animations on a lot of our enemies to support Staggering. Brady and I had been wanting to make some better ones for a while, and he decided it was time. He went through and added much better animations to enemies. Now you can really feel it. Brady has a great sense of weight, entertainment value, and feel. And these animations make combat feel so much more satisfying. It's gonna feel great to knock Squat Daddy's on their ass now.
- Rocky "OMG_Tangent" Newton, Animator
And on that topic, let's hear from Brady himself!
Enemy Staggers and Little Alien animations
Stagger animations for a lot of our enemies have been very placeholder for quite a while. As we come down the final stretch I thought it was about time we went in and tried to improve these animations to really up our moment to moment gameplay. Giving staggers a glow up came with the added benefit of leaning into some of the wackiness of our characters and silliness of our game.
As I was going through the animations Little Alien got caught in the cross fire, for a long time he was sharing animations with Squat Daddy, and it was about time we got the little guy to show off his moves. He got a lot of love this update and I hope now that he is free to express himself you get a chance to laugh at him moving about before he blasts you.
- Brady "OMG_Brady" Gutierrez
Sounds of the Shrines
I went about the sound design for shrines as wanting to be big, ceremonial. Every time it spins up, I honestly compared it to the 20th Century Fox spotlights logo, and to the absolutely best movie in the Alien universe: Covenant. (Just kidding, but they did do a pretty good job with big sound design in that movie.)
I geared towards huge brass-adjacent synth hits, arrogant low-end, and a mechanical whirring. I also wanted to give it a Voice of some sort mixed into the absurd oversized sci-fi-ness that makes up the Swapmeat soundscape.
The way the team creates new features like the Shrines normally starts by introducing me to what the overall goal of the new thing will be. I'll then put together a bunch of pieces of audio. The animations come in super fast. Most of the time animations and programming are done around the same time, and I need to have some form of audio ready to go. I take my building blocks of audio ideas earlier mentioned, and arrange them in a way that they'll make sense for the animation.
- OMG_SMG, Audio Engineer
Have feedback on the new content? Tell us about it on Discord!