With gaming, there are moments when something catches your eye and feels like it might be extraordinary. In those instances, you have the choice: will you try out the game and see if you like the experience, or will you leave it be and let the game pass you by?
At PAX East 2025, I encountered one of these moments. Prior to PAX East, One More Games reached out and asked us to check out their upcoming game, Swapmeat. The art the studio sent us felt familiar, but in a way different than other games we had previously played.
Upon arriving at the booth, we were given the chance to play Swapmeat. After playing the Swapmeat demo, my initial thoughts were, “What the Hell did I just play?”
You first deploy to an alien world with a body that you have constructed. As you kill different enemies, you can steal their different body parts and swap them with your own. Your character is made up of three parts: a head, torso, and legs, each with its own health and unique abilities.
As your body parts take damage, you will need to swap them out with new parts, or you will hobble around. As you lose them, your character will move around slowly, and ultimately, you will die.
At different points, you can extract from a planet you are invading with what you’ve gathered; stay too long, and a hunter will come down and destroy you.
Overall, the game itself was an interesting one and had a different take on how to build your character. The abilities did take a bit to get used to because I kept trying to use abilities from body parts that I had already swapped off, or had lost due to taking too much damage. The game seems to have a lot of promise and will be interesting to see how it is once it comes out later this year.
After checking out the SwapMeat demo, we have the opportunity to interview one of the founders of One More Games. Below is our One More Games’ Swapmeat interview with Jamie Stormbreaker.
Matt: Hi, can you introduce yourself to our audience?
Jamie: I’m Jamie Stormbreaker, I’m one of the founders of One More Game and also the lead designer of Swap Meat.
Matt: Alright, so what kind of really inspired SwapMeat? It’s definitely a creative take on a shooter, it has those different health elements. Obviously you’re swapping between meats. I thought there was a little bit of a dirty joke when I first heard of it. So what really led to the creation of it, even with trying to institute different meats, what kind of inspired it?
Jaime: Yeah, well, first off, I didn’t make that joke, you did, haha.
Matt: I can edit that joke out.
Jaime: Oh no, no, no, I’m just, that is actually a thing that we lean into. We’re just leaning into the absurdity, that’s the whole thing, right?
That’s the whole thing, right? I would say that some of our inspirations on the visuals and on, you know, just, like, the tone of the game would be: Rick and Morty, I Think You Should Leave, Invader Zim, Tim and Eric, ’90s Nickelodeon, the 2000s Adult Swim.
You know, there’s a lot of absurd humor, and that is what we are absolutely leaning into. The mechanic, the core mechanic of the game, which is defeating enemies, swapping body parts with them, gaining their abilities, and visually, you look like an amalgamation of parts.
It’d be an entirely different party if we made that photo-realistic, right? So we just leaned into the absurd. We named the game what it does. So on the tone side, those are the inspirations.
On combat, it is heavily inspired by the speed of Quake III, Overwatch, Risk of Rain 2, and Helldivers 2. You know, it is a rogue-like, so even aspects of Hades, which is not a third-person shooter, but there’s a lot to learn from that game. It’s excellent.
Matt: You have more of an open world/story than Overwatch had, so, you know.
Jaime: We have more story, and we absolutely have more of an open world, yes. We’re not a competitive shooter. We’re cooperative.It’s multiplayer, one to four players. Building cooperative games and giving players power also means that we can just give you ridiculous things. Like, if this was PVP, I think that players would be frustrated with how powerful you can get.
Matt: Now, obviously, being a head of a studio/lead game director, it takes a little bit of time. But kinda, like, what got you into that role?
Jaime: So, I’ve been building games for about 18 years, I think. I worked on things like Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons & Dragons Online, League of Legends, TERA, Guild Wars, and Guild Wars 2.
I mean, mostly, it’s, you know, been competitive online games. And I started One More Game with my business partner, Pat Wyatt, in 2019. And over the course of the last six years or so, you know, you just kind of own the company, and you build the best scene that you possibly can.
In a startup or a smaller environment, you kinda wear a lot of hats. And so, this is the second game that we’ve worked on. I’ve been the game director on both. This would be the first, though, that I’ve spent a lot of time building content for and directing other designers.
Matt: Now, with something as unique as SwapMeat, obviously, you have to have the creative idea, but then there’s also, like, coming up with new ideas/ways that you can reference stuff about, you know, using the actual intellectual property. What are some of your, like, I guess, thought processes, some things you wanted in the game that you couldn’t put in the game?
Jaime: Oh, yeah. Well, I… If I want it in the game, I’ll just put it in the game. You can change things just enough that it’s fine. The big thing is that, at One More Game, I have my team come to work every day, and the whole goal is to get someone to laugh. If you can get someone to laugh, it probably means you can get someone that’s playing the game to laugh.
I make this joke regularly; I write a lot of bad jokes, and one out of a hundred will be good, right? And so if you get the whole team doing that, eventually, over time, hopefully, you build something that has humanity, a soul, it connects with people.
A lot of that is by looking at the world around you and creating something that’s within the world structure that you’ve designed for the game and putting some of you and some of your interactions and some of your friends and some of your coworkers into that world, which makes it very relatable, but changed just enough. You’ll notice that one of the items in the game is Glizzy Gulp.
Matt: Yes.
Jaime: Right. So that is a reference to Brawndo. Like, you wouldn’t know that we did that.
Matt: Oh, the thirst quencher.
Jaime: The thirst quencher, right? The thirst mutilator. It’s what plants crave. Water, like from the toilet, right? But no, I’m insanely inspired by writers like Mike Judge, Trey Parker, or Matt Stone. Like, those guys are absolutely brilliant. And so we’ll make nods to them, and it’s totally okay. It’s not theft. It is literally saying, like, “I love that. I love you. I love what you’ve made.” And, you know, you put your own spin on it.
Matt: Now, while playing, I noticed there’s not actually the traditional first-person shooter reload mechanic. You actually have to reload with the same thing you’re shooting. So why did you kinda go down that path versus, like, the traditional FPS reload?
Jaime: Sure. So, what you’re referencing is the active reload system in SwapMeat. When you’re firing your weapon, we require you to deplete it or wait five seconds for it to automatically reload. We also have the ability to swap weapons with Triangle, Y, or the mouse wheel on PC. However, though, as soon as your weapon is out of ammo, you’re gonna need to engage with the active reload system.
The bottom line is that there are not enough buttons on a controller for all the abilities that we have, plus a reload mechanic and a weapon swap. I was inspired by Returnal, which is also a roguelike game. I saw how they did it.
I felt like that game, you know, when I first engaged with it, I was like, “What is… You know, this feels odd.” But after about 30 minutes to an hour, it kind of went away. And so, back in December of 2023, the active reload system was implemented in that engagement, and that interaction was added.
So, we’re listening to players. I don’t hear much past if players have played it for like 30 minutes or 60 minutes. That kind of like goes away for them as well. We’re happy to continue to listen to feedback, and if we need a directed reload button, I think the way we would do that is on weapon switch if it was a hold, instead of a press. We could do that.
Matt: Okay. Uh, I know if even just like swapping the body parts, each body part had like a health system, kind of like when you’re programming health systems, obviously there’s a certain attribute of how indicated. What kind of like… It looks almost like it’s just a uniform health there, at least quick appearance. Like, what kind of made you go towards a uniform health versus like each body part can have like, uh, like different stats?
Jaime: Yeah. Well, that’s a great question. It’s actually the hardest thing that we’ve had to tackle in building the game. It took a year to figure this out. And I’m serious. Like, this is the hardest thing.
Roguelike games, the health bar or health, in general, health response, anything that increases your longevity is the most valuable stat in the game. Because you are inherently supposed to die over time.
And so we knew that we wanted the body parts to be destroyed. We had this prototype where you could run around as a pair of legs, and we thought it was hilarious and it was iconic and like, you know, we thought it would draw attention. And so, it’s just fun. It’s delightful.
So we wanted to keep that. And for about a year or so, each body part was health. There were three health pools, and if you lost a body part, you a portion of your health. However, when you pick up new meat and we want you to swap, it’s also your ability. So we would refresh a third of your health.
Then, when you get to the boss, there’s a boss fight that is on the show floor today as well, and it has special meat in it, and it’s one use. So you take your head and throw it off, and by using the ability, you lose a third of your health. And now what if you’re just a head running around? Well, now you throw your head, you kill yourself. So it was a lot of issues by tying abilities, body parts, and health.
So there are actually four bars in that hut. One of them is health, three of them are armor. There is durability on the meat parts, and if you have a meat part, it mitigates 10% damage. So if you have three, it’s mitigating 30% damage. And if you lose them all and you’re just running around as your smart meat, it’s the little meat wad inside the body, you’re taken full damage. That was the innovation about a year into development.
I say like a year, as in we knew we had this problem in December of 2023. In December of 2024, we’re all on winter break. We give, uh, our employees about two and a half weeks off during the winter, and I was trying to solve it. And we came back in January. That first week when we came back, we implemented this, and it was fixed. Probably the biggest relief in the project. [laughs]
Matt: Now, I know that when I was fighting the boss, I lost all my meat body parts, and like trying to find a replacement for it felt like it was next to impossible. Obviously, game difficulties are a big and important factor in most games. I assume there’s gonna be multiple difficulties in some aspect with it being a Rouge-lite.
Jaime: I’m positive that when you finish the campaign, that there will be a mechanism that lets you continue to play for a long time with scaling difficulties.
Matt: So, more new game plus style like Dark Souls?
Jaime: It will be something. I don’t know what it is yet. And roguelikes, a lot of the time, we call it looping. There will be something at the end of the campaign that wants you to keep playing the game. You fought a boss, what did you fight?
Matt: It was like a star monster.
Jaime: All right. That is not a boss.
Matt: That’s not a boss?
Jaime: No. They’re intended to kill you. So you have a timer. You only have so much time on the planet. You, you didn’t know this because on the show floor, we’re not showing any of the story. And there’s no tutorial right now on the show floor.
But we would have explained to you, if you were on the show floor, that once the timer hits zero, it’s time to leave. You have to get away from them. It’s time to go. They’re your ushers, and they are indestructible. So you can hold them off, but you have to run away.
Matt: See, that’s where I made a mistake. I was trying to kill it.
Jaime: Yeah, I see this all the time. I’m, I’m so sorry you had that experience. [laughs]
Matt: It was just like, “Okay, what could I have done differently?” And now that I know that you’re just supposed to GTFO away from them. It’s a whole different perspective
Jaime: Yep. Get away from the hunters. But to your question, you know, you’re looking for meat. Right now in the game, we use something called true random. True random has streaks. Streaking is just inherent in everything. You know, if you ever play cards at a casino, blackjack, streaking is a thing.
We are looking at ways to mitigate that. We get this feedback regularly. I don’t have anything to announce, but we are currently looking at that and seeing if a particular interaction that we’re testing will address it.
Matt: Okay. Now, why meat versus anything else? Like, you know, Kabobs have vegetables and fruit and other stuff, but-
Jaime: Oh, there’s, there’s plant meat in the game. There’s also machine meat. Yeah, metal meat is, is a thing.
Matt: Metal meat?
Jaime: Yeah. So, it’s meat science. Like, you’re probably not as familiar about meat science-
Matt: Not at all.
Jaime: I’m really good at meat science. Kinda invented it with Jason, our art director. It’s just part of the humor. We are leaning very heavily into just that absurd humor.
And whenever we reach the bounds of, uh, of someone’s questions, we end up saying, “Oh, it’s meat science.” You just, you don’t know as much [laughs] about meat science. Yeah. [laughs] At some point, you can’t, you can’t answer it. [laughs]
Matt: I know, with looking at the art direction, obviously, there are inferences to other games. When you’re creating something of your own, you get, like, your own art direction. What kind of pushed into the style that you chose versus? Like the choice between a third person shooter versus a first-person shooter?
Jaime: Okay, third-person we chose because we wanted you to see your body when you swapped body parts.
Matt: Makes sense.
Jaime: The reason the graphics are cartoony, like, I mean, it looks similar to Fortnite than it would to, like, Call of Duty, right? The game was built in Unity vs using Unreal
Matt: It’s a Unity game?
Jaime: The reason that we went with this style is because if we had made it, like, photorealistic, that’s a totally different party. Like, it’s gonna look like, it’s gonna be a horror game.
So we had to play off of the humor. And the only way to really do that is cartoons. You know, if the Road Runner and the Coyote were real and not a cartoon, it’s not really funny anymore, right?
A lot of the humor and movement in, like, the way the animations are working is also to mask the fact that it’s really hard to get a body of three entirely different things to look cohesive. So that’s actually part of the humor, but it was a test that we did a long time ago to see if we could make this look right.
Matt: Did you try realistic at all or?
Jaime: No, but I threatened that that will be an April Fools’ joke constantly or it’s the sequel. [laughs]. That’s just a joke. I don’t think we would ever do it. It would be horrifying.
Matt: Now, you were talking about the story aspect. Have you really revealed much about it, or is it just mentioned?
Jaime: There are a handful of things that players have experienced so far, and those are the things that we’re talking about. Right now, we know that you are an employee that works at Rangis Meat Co., Rangis Meats. Carl Rangis is the founder of Rangis Meats. He’s your corner man. He’s the Deckard Cain of the game. You know, it’s the head in the jar, right?
He gives you quests, and he’s the person that kind of orients the player and pushes you along. You play as an employee of the company. Uh, you are not a human. You are a SmartMeat, which is a biological, bio-engineered, you know, biotech thing that Carl says he came up with.
Carl is not exactly a reliable narrator, but he means well. And he’s not mean, uh, but he doesn’t always get it right and then in the first acts that players have played so far, we are revealing some of, like, why the hunters are there, or at least the hunters are following you.
Those bounty hunters that spawn are hunters that you gotta run away from. We’ve talked a little bit about what your mission is. You know, you are trying to create a sustainable food source. Uh, you’re going down to planets to harvest their meat cores. Planets have meat cores. It’s just meat science. Everyone knows this.
Then you are going to fight a boss named Frankenbeans in the first act, and we’ve revealed that you are going and defeat him to get DNA samples that will allow you to engineer the fuel to get to the next solar system. We haven’t really talked about much past that. But there will be a multi-act game with a finale, for sure.
Matt: Now, with it being a multi-act game, how far would you say you’re in the development process? And then, are you leaning more towards going towards, like, open beta testing and then eventually launching? Or just a strict launch date, and then go from there, where you’re constantly expanding?
Jaime: Yeah, so where we’re at in development, Swap Meat right now is still public testing. We’ve run four public tests over the last year or so. Our fifth test is going live on May 15th, which is Thursday, just a couple of days from now. It’s gonna run for a week until May 22nd. In that test, you’ll be able to play Act One and Act Two. So there’ll be two bosses to fight. And a little bit more reveal of the story as we roll out act two.
We are not sure when the launch date is just yet, but we anticipate launching simultaneously on PC, MacOS. The game runs on Steam Deck. We’re gonna aim to be Steam Deck verified as well. We don’t have anything to announce there.
We’re not entirely sure exactly how many acts we’re gonna put in. We’re just listening to players and making sure that the game is fun and cohesive.
Matt: Now, obviously, you’ve talked about the PC elements of, like, platforms, but what about the console elements? Because if you’re gonna make it work on Steam Deck, that kinda leads into the Switch, a little bit of different layout, but still kinda similar.
Jaime: Yeah. Well, there, there are technical hurdles to overcome for cross-play. We absolutely fully support controller. We fully support keyboard and mouse. Um, we care about controller players. You know, post-launch, we’re gonna continue to explore where the market is, where the players are, and if people want it, and they tell me they want it, then I’ll make it for them.
Matt: Now, you were talking about the cross-play aspect. Like, obviously, PC, it’s a lot easier to do cross-play, but like with Steam Deck, there’s a bit of a change kind of a change, right?
Jaime: [laughs] Yeah, it’s actually not a problem. Cross-play becomes an issue when you jump between platforms, like Steam to Epic or Steam to Sony’s PlayStation service, PlayStation Plus, something like that, or to Xbox. Yeah, that would be cross-play.
Matt: Now, there’s like, you’re exploring a world. It almost gives like a Horde-like feeling. But are you gonna have like a maybe limited area Horde mode in it, or?
Jaime: There are Horde modes within the game, there are events that you overcome. There are Horde mode events, yes.
Matt: There was one area that it looked like I was engulfed in a circle, to, like, fight the thing, and then, so that is a Horde element, I would say. But I wasn’t gonna try to push past it, like beat the meat against the barrier, you know? Not that.
Jaime: Yep, we have a handful of events that are the wave defense type of things, yes. I hope you enjoyed the game.
Matt: I did. Thank you for your time!
SWAPMEAT is set to launch sometime later in 2025 for Windows PC and Mac (via Steam).
