The team at Seattle-based game developer One More Game is finally sharing its first title with players, six years after the company initially started.
Shortly after landing a $22 million funding round in 2022 from investors including Lightspeed and Andreessen Horowitz, One More Game decided to scrap Spellcraft, the game it had been working on for over three years. The company completely shelved the hybrid real-time strategy fantasy game and started over from scratch.
“I am really proud of Spellcraft — the game was good,” said One More Game co-founder Jamie Stormbreaker. He said the company saw player interest shifting away from competitive games where you match up with strangers in random lobbies to games that can be played with friends coordinated via Discord, like Among Us and Lethal Company.
“We were pushing the boundaries of what the next hybrid real-time strategy could be, but ultimately we didn’t have confidence that the 1v1 PvP free-to-play business model fit our company values, so it was best for us to switch gears,” Stormbreaker said.
And boy did they ever switch gears. The studio’s new game SWAPMEAT is a goofy third-person squad-based cooperative shooter with humor inspired by 2000s Adult Swim shows like “Tim and Eric,” and “Aqua Teen Hunger Force.” It’s a different genre, graphical style, writing style, game engine, and player count from Spellcraft, but perhaps the biggest change is the shift from free-to-play to an upfront purchase.
“When you buy something from us, we want to respect your time and give you great value,” Stormbreaker explained. “We want to make something that’s going to be in your Steam library forever.”
SWAPMEAT wasn’t just a new style of game for the studio, but a whole new game mechanic where body parts with different abilities and skills are scavenged from defeated enemy units and swapped onto the player’s body, a concept the team referred to internally during development as “meat mixing” and is the source of game’s distinctly memorable name.
This past summer, Stormbreaker and his fully-remote, 13-person team brought SWAPMEAT to the Seattle gaming convention PAX West, where their booth was busy all weekend as players got their first look at the game. “PAX was absolutely excellent, an unbelievable show for us,” said Stormbreaker.
PAX West came at the tail end of a busy season for One More Game, during which it brought the game to a series of shows including PAX East in Boston and Gamescom in Cologne, Germany. At the shows the company would get the game in front of players, make tweaks to the game — often mid-show — and then get it right back in front of players again to see what other tweaks should be made.
“We follow something we call alpha-driven development,” Stormbreaker noted. “You get the game in front of people as soon as you possibly can. They’re going to roast the game, and I love it. We want the feedback, and by showing up regularly and engaging with players, we constantly make the game better.”
Thanks in large part to the insights the team gained from watching thousands of people play the game on the show floor at various gaming conventions this year, they’re gearing up to open SWAPMEAT for Steam Early Access next week.
One More Game co-founders Stormbreaker and Patrick Wyatt both have a deep history in the gaming industry. Wyatt had a 9-year role as a VP at Blizzard where he worked on Starcraft and Diablo games and later co-founded ArenaNet, the Seattle-area gaming studio responsible for the Guild Wars series. Stormbreaker was a developer at ArenaNet, Riot Games, and Undead Labs, a Seattle-area game studio purchased by Microsoft in 2018.
For Stormbreaker and Wyatt, bringing SWAPMEAT to PAX West wasn’t just a product showcase — it was a full-circle moment.
Nearly 20 years earlier, the two met for the first time on that same show floor, bonding over server tech at the ArenaNet booth. “I walked over to the ArenaNet booth to ask how they keep the servers online all the time,” Stormbreaker recalled of his first encounter with Wyatt.
That chance conversation sparked a partnership that would eventually create One More Game. This year, they returned to PAX not just as curious developers but as studio founders, showing off a game of their own.
