Dev blog #4

Every combat entity in Swarmdustry does a certain type of damage and is weak or strong against certain types. For example, feastlings do Piercing damage and they are weak to slash and crush, but have resistances against energy. Right now, there are only 5 types: Slash, Crush, Piercing, Acid and Energy.

Generally, Bloodflies are weak against Blasters and Towers while Feastlings are weak against Brutes. But most of the time, this shouldn’t matter as long as you use swarm tactics to overwhelm the machines. You just might have to use more resources than necessary.

The enemy faction in Swarmdustry is represented my AI-driven machines. Brutes are melee machines that get stronger over time, and will even cause splash damage at one point, while blasters are ranged machines that shoot a certain number of energy projectiles from one or two miniguns strapped to their arms. The machines also have energy based towers, brute spawners, blaster spawners, and Extractors. These guys mine deposits for their settlement. I’ll go deeper into enemy mechanics in another blog.

On the swarm side, you have Feastlings and Bloodflies. Feastlings are these tiny little spiders, which are meant to represent the classic zerg rush type of unit: weak, but cheap and mass produceable.

Bloodflies are an interesting unit. I spent quite a bit of time coding the logic of these guys as opposed to the vanilla stand-and-shoot of ranger units(blasters) or chase-and-slash of melee units(feastlings and brutes). When a bloodfly spots an enemy, it starts attacking it a bit like a wasp would in real life (as someone who got stung multiple times by wasps, I would know…) It would accelerate towards the target until it reaches it, stings it, then decelerates while trying to make a turn following an arc so that it can repeat the process, this time from the opposite side. When you have multiple bloodflies doing the same thing, it creates a really cool swarming behavior effect. Brutes may smack a bloodfly in one or two shots if they’re lucky to land a hit when the bloodfly is close, but they are usually powerless against a swarm of them.

You can have a bunch of bloodflies follow and protect you, but the follower bloodflies have a time limit before they die. They are also used at bloodroses where this restriction doesn’t exist, but more on that later.

The Swarm currently has multiple tools at its disposal to defend against the machines:

• Acid pods

• Hives

• Bloodroses

Acid pods are the most basic form of defense. These are your standard tower defense towers that shoot ballistics acid projectiles at enemies in a certain radius. They do acid damage. They can be filled with ammo manually by the player or via grabbers. This ammo comes in 3 different levels. There are genetic codes to make them stronger or faster. So acid pods are not something that’s very unique in terms of mechanics but they do follow a successful recipe and since they are usually the first thing you unlock in any game involving turrets, then it will be the same in Swarmdustry.

But then later you will unlock Hives and Bloodroses. This is where the Swarm will really start to behave like one. Steam post image

Hives use up feastling bombs. When an enemy enters a certain radius, the hive will spawn a flying suicide bomber. This bomber will beeline towards its target and explode, causing multiple little feastlings to come out and start attacking the enemy. These guys are pretty weak on their own, but they soak up some hits, giving your defenses a breather. Steam post image

Bloodroses act like some of the other worker buffers of the swarm. Actually they use the same worker/buffer logic I talked about in another blog. Once spawned in the world, bloodflies get assigned to a bloodrose and start idling around it. A bloodrose has a forward rectangular field of view. If an enemy comes in that FOV, the bloodflies will start swarming it. Unlike other towers, bloodroses are not replenished directly via grabbers, rather by unassigned bloodflies already placed in the world.

Swarmdustry currently has no guns or anything equivalent to that. The player cannot directly fight the machines. So there are 4 options to deal with them:

1. Tower Defense style and just ignore enemy settlements while they keep attacking you,

2. Attack enemy settlements with the ‘Turret creep’ method,

3. Attack enemy settlements with swarm bombs. Bombs come in two flavors: Feastling bombs and Bloodfly bombs. You throw a bomb and on impact it spawns a bunch of temporary bugs to fight for you. You can’t control these units, but the bloodflies at least follow you.

4. Or just play in peaceful mode.

For now, I think Swarmdustry offers enough of a combat system that’s at least worthy of an Early Access title. However, I do want to add more combat related content in the future. Maybe one day you’ll be able to build, or have the swarm build and maintain for you, a sort of a swarm minefield. Mines would explode on proximity contact and spawn feastlings or other units. Because Swarmdustry is all about the Swarm, the possibilities for unique game mechanics are numerous and exciting to think about and experiment with.

One last thing: Since I’ve gone public with the game last month, I’ve been struggling with managing socials and dev work at the same time. I want to dedicate as much of my time as possible to just developing the game. Many people have also been asking for more gameplay videos about Swarmdustry, especially about what sets it apart.

This is why I’ve partnered up with a team of professionals to handle marketing, communities and social media. Meet Zemore Company led by Richard. Richard and his team bring their experience from other games such as Erenshor to better showcase what Swarmdustry is all about. Hopefully in the coming weeks and months, we will be posting some gameplay clips and maybe even open up the game to public playtesting. The Swarm team is growing…

So that’s it for this blog, hope you enjoyed the read!