Swap Fire: Season 2 dev details the design process, need for funding

A portion of a Miketendo interview with dev Jeremy Alessi...

M: The cat’s out of the bag, you’re working on both Swap Fire and Swap Fire: Season 2 at the same time. How are you finding the process, given the reaction Swap Fire 1 had?

Jeremy Alessi: Honestly, at this point we’re looking for a way to get investment to keep working on Swap Fire the series. I’m working odd programming jobs to pay the bills. We have several other ventures at Midnight Status but Swap Fire 1 eradicated any and all safety nets. Financially, it was the biggest mistake of my life as of right now.

We have some changes that have already been made to Season 1 on Wii U and we’ve been listening closely for other small tweaks. For example many people were upset because they thought basic options like look inversion were skipped. Meanwhile, we actually improved on that by assigning the look inversion to the minus button during gameplay. This fits with our “jump in” anytime mentality. That’s why we have the 4-way split screen as the default view with AI that can dynamically “jump in” or a human that can “jump in”. Who wants to quit out to a menu to reconfigure controls? I hate that.

Anyway, long story short, it tells players in 3 places that they can invert controls (tutorial, loading tips, and e-Manual) yet that wasn’t enough so we have to find another place.

It also seems like many people missed our 8 Display Options that can be configured from the Wii U GamePad when the game is paused.

So, there were some small details that hampered the experience. Also, we may do something like swap “Drop ” Zone” and “Capture the Flag” in the play order.

Capture the Flag was designed to be a familiar game type along with “King of the Hill” but as it turns out I think it ended up being a little confusing and that it would be better to get players into “Drop Zone” earlier because it’s more fun and straight forward even though it requires a more refined understanding of the controls. Then once we figure out every little update and release in the US we can finally release in Europe.