Bomb Sworders — Currently in development
Steam, More Info, Press Kit, Mailing List
A multiplayer game about bombs and swords. And hitting bombs with swords. And explosions. And avoiding explosions.

Bomb Sworders — Currently in development
Steam, More Info, Press Kit, Mailing List
A multiplayer game about bombs and swords. And hitting bombs with swords. And explosions. And avoiding explosions.
Next Fest went great.
Heard some nice things and got good feedback.
(For any devs participating in future Next Fests — I highly recommend using something like Easy Feedback Form in your game — it allows players to submit feedback without leaving your game. Our players strongly preferred this way of leaving feedback.)
Here are some of the larger changes since then:
Thanks everyone for your help and feedback!
Some news here:
We’re in Steam Next Fest! So from June 19th (today) to June 26th, the Bomb Sworders demo is publicly available. Give it a try and let us know what you think.
Bomb Sworders Steam page
(PC and Mac. Linux users, please see the note below)
2 reasons:
1) To test the online. We’ve been playtesting for a number of months… but there’s nothing like more people playing to find more bugs. (Press F10 to leave feedback + automatically send useful debugging info!)
2) And, of course, we’d love to get more eyes on the game. This could help us bring it onto more platforms too so really every positive mention, tweet, whatever does us a world of good. Thanks!
All the online modes are now enabled!
One limitation: Unfortunately, Steam Networking doesn’t allow people in the full game to play online against those in the demo. So, if you want to find a match during Next Fest — you might want to download the demo. Unfortunately, Steam also makes this perhaps a little trickier than it should be. The best advice I’ve heard, which has apparently worked for a couple people, is to go into the Steam Console and then force install the demo with app_install 2474580
(2474580 is the appId for the Bomb Sworders demo)
Thanks to Spiked Games for the tip!
The Linux version overall seems to run well… but isn’t available quite yet. Why? I need to fix the video playback. It shouldn’t be a huge deal, but videos are heavily used in the QuickStart tutorial. I suppose if anyone might figure out the game without a tutorial, maybe it’s Linux folks, but for Bomb Sworders especially a working tutorial does seem important.
Coming soon to Bomb Sworders — online multiplayer!
And a bunch of other stuff too:
“Bomb Sworders — holy s#$! they have it!”
Favorite quote @ Midwest Gaming Classic 2022
Early design decisions can lead to headaches later on and for Bomb Sworders having wrap-around was one of these.
The problem separates into a visual side — getting the wrap-around to appear seamless — and into a physics side — having items at the wrap-around point interact exactly as if that space is no different than any other.
The visual side was “solved” awhile back. This new update attempts to solve the physics side.
It wasn’t absolutely terrible before — maybe a sharp-eyed player would spot a missed collision or a missed jump once-in-awhile. Of course, if players spent a lot of time right at the wrap edges, they’d encounter these issues much more frequently. But often the mistake would happen so fast that it’d lie in kinda an area of uncertainty for the player — “I guess *I* must have missed that jump…”
The worst issue was that there could be “unearned” trap shots — 2 bombs moving rapidly in succession across the wrap-around might trigger an extra (errant) collision event, which could result in an explosion. Super rare, but very annoying. This update should fix that too.
So:
A few small updates
This update (v0.8.0) focuses on the game’s early experience for new players.
The new “Quick Start” Tutorial is an attempt at 3 things:
It’s made up of a few explanations interspersed with practice levels — some of which provide guidance to players as necessary based on how they’re playing. e.g. If the tutorial notices that a player isn’t swinging their sword, it’ll gently remind them of the control/action.
Also, throughout the game, the control/action text is now shown correctly for each individual player’s (possibly custom) control mappings.
* Experimental = W.I.P.
Also — thanks Chaddog for feedback on the Steam controller!