WELCOME: SWAP/MEAT EMPLOYEE ORIENTATION
Welcome to your first day at Rangus Meats, humanoid Meat Scientist! I'm Rodd, VP of Humanoid Resources and Diuretics Research here at Rangus. This orientation is designed to help you embark on your SWAP/MEAT career, and to provide an overview of what to expect in the field.Before I begin, let me say this: This orientation is for humanoids who are new to the Rangus Meats corporation and are a part of the SWAP/MEAT division. If you are attending this orientation in the hopes of becoming or learning how to impersonate a humanoid, you have made a mistake. This orientation is not for you.
With that out of the way, let's begin!
EVERY PLANET IS A UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY TO FEED THE GALAXY
In the times before galactic fast food hegemony, humanoids would describe your SWAP/MEAT experience as a "third-person shooter with roguelite progression." Primitive, amiright?!But history can still teach us a lot, even if it's technically illegal. Your goal in SWAP/MEAT is to travel around the galaxy, defeating creatures large and small to harvest their DNA (and meat) to help your fellow Meat Scientists at Rangus develop a sustainable meat product everyone can enjoy!
Use your Rangus-approved Galactic Map to choose a planet to drop into. Once you're in, our state of the art Hivemind Meat Sensor will provide missions for you to complete within a deadline. Fight your way through the local fauna, fulfill your missions, and extract the planet's meat core to finish your run.
Sounds simple, but danger is around every corner in SWAP/MEAT, valued humanoid employee! Any time you're not sure, you can always make a run for the extractor to escape with what you've harvested so far. Remember: a productive employee is a living employee!
IN SWAP/MEAT, YOU SWAP MEAT
There are some dangerous worlds out there, humanoid employees. Flying from planet to planet to harvest new meats to feed the universe at any one of Rangus Meat's billion locations requires grit, determination, and the ability to actively swap your body parts to improve yourself each time you visit a planet. That cute butterfly-looking thing flying at you? Son of a gun is packing a rocket launcher. Take him out before he uses it on you. Then, swap your meat with his to unleash rockets of your own.
THERE'S NO I IN MEAT… BUT THERE IS A ME
You can go on planetary runs with friends, single-serving co-workers, or - if you're looking for a unique career challenge - by yourself. SWAP/MEAT's tuned for co-op shootin' and lootin', but we at Rangus Meats will never stop an intrepid employee from entering the field, even if they're destined to die alone and friendless!
EVERY RUN ADVANCES YOUR CAREER
Every time you make it back to a Rangus spaceship with your body intact, you move yourself ever closer to Rangus Meats Upper Management. Corporate Leadership was inspired by early 21st century simulations like Hades and Returnal to ensure that while the worlds around you change, you yourself can consistently progress over time. Short- AND long-term goals? That's Rangus(™)!
RANGUS MEATS THANKS YOU
Once again, humanoid employee, welcome to Rangus Meats and the SWAP/MEAT division! We're sure your career will be a productive one. To meet more of your co-workers, join the Rangus Meats Microsoft Teams channel, add SWAP/MEAT to your Wishlist (MANDATORY!), and visit our corporate social media presences for additional memoranda and guidance.🕹️ Partial Controller Support
🎮 Full Controller Support
Core-Loop & Session Length Improvements
One of the first design documents we wrotebefore we even had the idea of swapping body partsoutlined the structure of a run:
[olist]Start on the mothership (now ROX-1)
[/*]Select a Galaxy (yes, it took about 8 months before someone pointed out we were calling solar systems Galaxies)
[/*]Deploy onto a planet and complete or fail it
[/*]Return to the mothership
[/*]Purchase upgrades
[/*]Repeat this process for two more planets
[/*]Deploy to a boss arena and complete or fail it
[/*]Run complete return to the mothership
[/*][/olist]Heres a screenshot of our User Story Map that we used to make sure we were all on the same page while we were building the initial experience:
[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/45058792/141a67eca0748928338787fd10fc0320f3c0457f.png\"][/img]
User Story Map of the game loop from June 18th, 2024
Well, theres a few more steps in there than I noted above, but one thing that youll notice in Early Access or even if youve tested SWAPMEAT prior is that Step 4 of that shortened flow is missing.
[p align=\"start\"]Our intent was to allow the player to break their run into 10-15 minute sessions and bring them back to base to cash in rewards, upgrade or change their equipment, take a bathroom break, or just socialize with friends and take a breather after a hard fought escape.[/p][p align=\"start\"]We dropped the return to ROX-1 because we didnt have all of the affordances necessary to communicate to players that a run was more than just a single planet. Objective trackers, on screen markers, or even anything for the player to even spend on upgrades, so we decided to keep it simple for now and chain the planets together.[/p][p align=\"start\"]Over the last few months weve heard from many of you that youd like to be able to take a break and resume a run and, while we did enable that feature a few updates ago, its still not very clear when its okay to quit out of the game.[/p][p align=\"start\"]Additionally, weve heard you loud and clear that the core-loop of fighting and upgrading is much longer than expected, so were going to tighten it up.[/p][p align=\"start\"]In todays update youll now return to the ship after each planet you complete. You can interact with everything normally on ROX-1 except for changing your equipment before launching down to the next planet.[/p][p align=\"start\"]We werent able to get this in for this past Tuesdays update but we wanted to get it in your hands before our holiday break (starting tomorrow). This is a big structural change, so please let us know what you think in Discord or on the Steam forums .[/p][p align=\"start\"] Jamie Stormbreaker - Game Director[/p][u]Gameplay[/u]
Reduced the Out of Combat Timer from 15s to 5s. If you dont receive damage, deal damage, or heal another entity in combat youll begin to move 30% faster after 5s.
[/*]Youll return to ROX-1 at the completion of each planet
[list]When this is mid run, youll be unable to make equipment changes but can make upgrades through terminals, talking to carl, and the currency trader
[/*][/*]Increased overall director cost of Siege Enemies Highbeam, Eyeclops, Paper Bobby
[/*]Abilities
Increased Elemental Accumulation for all Abilities
[/*]Reduce Explosion Impulse on most Ice Abilities. This will leave the enemies closer to the player where they can more easily shatter them
[/*]Tuned Squishy Blast (on default Rangus Torso) so that it gets enemies off of you more consistently. Some flying enemies werent really responding well previously. Some larger enemies cant be knocked back, but it should feel more natural and useful now, for clearing some space. (Hint: you can also use it to get rid of some projectiles!)
[/*]
Meats
Assigned Quake Rush Ability to Eyeclops Legs
[/*]Assigned Turbo Boost Ability to Belly Grinder Legs
[/*]
[u]Meta Progression[/u]
Added new Lunar Rifts for fishing from on Barbecuria and a corresponding fish collection quest
[/*]Added new Sludge Rifts for fishing from on Calypso and a corresponding fish collection quest
[/*]Updated icons for ancient tech tiers 2 through 5
[/*]
[u]Animation[/u]
Animation and VFX changes for item container presentation
[/*]Animation polish on Hunter Intro cutscene (the one that plays at the end of the tutorial)
[list]If youve not seen it in a while, OMG_d0gheart would love feedback on the scene and how the Hunters are first introduced. Nothing huge has changed, but they have their voices now, so have more personality, and some more polish and personality for Squishy as well.
[/*]
Campaign cutscenes (like the two major Boss outros) will no longer play in Random Mode. Bear with us as we continue shaping the core experience and how it relates to the overall world and story of the campaign
We are excited to not have to watch these over and over now! Unless you want to! Were always open for ideas around the story and world were building, and weve got so much more in store on that side of things down the road.
[/*][/*]Added interact animations to all hold actions
[/*][u]UI / UX[/u]
Team XP Bar will now display while in ROX-1
[/*]Additional entries have been added to the FAQs in the Codex
[/*]Damage health flashes on the player and enemies have been tweaked
[/*]
[u]Art[/u]
Add new models for Tier 2 Pestie and Zorpjet alien enemies
[/*]
[u]Audio[/u]
New audio for item container presentation.
[/*]Added more voicing, efforts and laughs to the Hunters in their Intro cutscene after the Tutorial.
[/*]A lot of game mixing updates. so be sure to reset your audio to defaults and see how things sound. We bumped up Player, Enemy and UI sounds, while ducking Music and VO just a bit
[/*]
[u]Bug Fixes[/u]
Fixed an issue where the Meat Market secondary directive marker was located in a wall of ROX-1 instead of in the actual Meat Market
[/*]Fixed a bug where the Out of Combat Buff was showing in the item inspection menu
[/*]Items that you obtain during a run will more reliably show up in the Codex
[/*]Fixed broken text all bad things on the red player status tag and hooked tags up to localization (non English translations for the tags will come in a future update)
[/*]Fixed some broken VO that was cutting out early (namely Carls first set of lines from a fresh save file)
[/*]Fixed incorrect handling for the Esc key / back button in the Employee Handbook if a tutorial popup was being displayed
[/*]
[u]Known Issues[/u]
No significant performance tuning has been done yet. If you are graphics bound, you can try lowering the quality settings in the Esc menu via Options Video, but systems with more constrained hardware may struggle
[/*]Not all input buttons and keys have icons in the UI yet. Text descriptions (eg. J, or Button West) will show up for things that do not yet have an icon in the input glyph map
[/*]When observing other players, some UI bits such as the reload HUD dont show accurate information for the observed player
[/*]
Minimum Setup
- OS: Linux Kernel 5
- Processor: Intel i5 7th generation or equivalentMemory: 4 GB RAM
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: AMD Radeon HD 5670 / Nvidia GeForce 8800
Recommended Setup
- OS: Linux Kernel 6
- Processor: 3.00 Ghz Intel or AMDMemory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: AMD Radeon HD 5670 / Nvidia GeForce 8800Network: Broadband Internet connection
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