Swarmborns
Swarmborns is an incremental colony sim about growing a living swarm of monsters.
You act as the Hive Lord, shaping the swarm through organic buildings, abilities, and mutations. Monsters are born, evolve, fight, and die on their own — your role is to influence their behavior. Turn chaos into a weapon!
- Place organic buildings where monsters are born.
- Influence your army through abilities instead of direct control.
- Spread a plague to destroy humanity.
Development Status
Swarmborns is currently in an early prototype stage. Core systems, overall gameplay direction, visuals, balance, and content are changing as development continues.
Development Pipeline
Current focus:
- Improving the game's visual presentation
- Enhancing game feel: combat feedback, blood effects, and monster animations
- Working on audio design and music
Next steps:
- Adding new monster types
- Monster mutation system
- Playable maps with different weather conditions
Your feedback is very welcome!
If you enjoy the idea or have thoughts about swarm behavior, progression, or balance — feel free to share them.
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- Small update 0.1643 days ago
Comments
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Some feedback on current version:
-needs tweaks in terms of difficulty, its an easy win if you get a corner start and impossible if you are in the middle.
-the ressource generator building should be brought back since spamming expansive Hives for income gets laggy because of drones ( or consider making spawning toggleable by clicking on buildings ).
-building and units should regenerate health over time / make drones sacrifice themselves to heal buildings.
-the tentacle spell needs to have a health bar.
-Consider making the spells to attract your units integrated into the mouse click ( for example holding down the left click somewhere makes the two options appear and you can just flick the mouse towards what you want and it automatically puts it down on the spot without a cost but with a cooldown ).
-Add buildable walls to help funnel enemies ( make it very low on enemy target priority and you'll have a use for siege enemies that will come later on in developement ).
-Make the creep spread / corrupt the water and mountains + add a more detailed creep texture to differenciate better from the uniform color from enemy influence zones.
-update the screenshots on this page since you removed the skill tree.
Otherwise nice work on the enemy art.
This was really refreshing to play. depending on how much time and effort you want to put into it this could really end up as a game i'd even be willing to buy, reminds me a lot of Buggos on steam.
Now for the feedback/suggestion part:
Art:
-i feel like there's an identity crisis (probably because of free assets you took here and there) you can either choose to go full on fantasy which in my opinion would be bland and soulless or you could just go all out with the starcraft flash game aesthetic.
-add more tileset, weather shouldn't be this high up in your roadmap since it risks adding visual bloat.
Gameplay:
-you should add a cursor and hotckeys for skills and clicking a skill should automatically deselect building construction.
-Skills should be moved to the Skill tree along with the different buildings you unlock automatically would make progression a bit better, make an evolution chamber building that can research the speed/health/damage upgrade to reduce bloat in skill tree.
-Units should be able to pass over buildings but be included in the grid (you can only have one unit in a square) this would stop the massive deathballs from forming and make higher quality units more valuable, for further update it'll also probably make it easier to program ranged unit since you'll be able to calculate range by block distance and air units would be valuable because they could stack one time on top of your ground units.
-Creep spread needs some tweaking to stop it from removing large patches of it when one of your building dies despite having other buildings around it.
-Add more elevations level that future ranged units and defenses can take advantage of.
-Consider some roguelike elements to make it replayable.
Also even if its called "Swarmborn" i think that you should completely embrace the starcraft clone aspects and replace enemies with protoss and terran that fight each other and have different building mechanics (terran no creep can build everywhere, protoss needs to build next to pylons) this way you'd no longer have these awful area of influence around enemy bases, rename souls as biomass. Going this path instead of the fantasy one would make this very eye catching and you'll have a lot of players + 2 iconic factions you'd be able to play so even people who don't really like swarmy factions can be attracted.
Sorry for the bloat hopefully you'll really consider going the copycat route.
Wow! Thank you for your feedback, I appreciate it.
The game's visuals are mostly sketches. Of course, the graphics will be redrawn in the future. Right now, I'm focusing on replayability, balance, and greater variety, such as adding new monsters and new types of human settlements (improving human AI). I agree with your comments, and in fact, some of them are already ready in the upcoming update, such as units in the grid, ranged units.
As for Starcraft, I am inspired by the gameplay of different units (Zerg, Terran), which makes Starcraft truly unique and interesting, at least for its time. However, I do not plan to take units and races from it as they are, as I still want to bring something of my own, something fantasy-like :) Besides, there may be copyright issues.
And thank you for the important comment that not everyone likes to play as a swarm of monsters. Adding a new race in the future could really expand the audience.
Cool, im a bit sad that you're going full fantasy but hopefully you'll make it work, i won't complain if its gritty and gory.
Also if you need inspiration i suggest looking at the tile and tower art design of the tower defense "Cursed treasure" i think it could give you some ideas to change the atmosphere of the game.
Neat, gets chuggy later on, you kinda have only one attacking unit and one working unit which means you get quantity rather than quality.
Hey, thanks for the comment! Yeah, in the current version, the game can get boring kinda quickly. A greater variety of monsters, enemies and upgrades are planned for a more addictive gameplay
Why are there so many starcraft clones all of a sudden? Did a trademark expire or something? Did it become public domain?
Thanks for the comment. I'm really inspired by the zerg gameplay from Starcraft, but I don't pursue the goal of cloning someone else's IP. The game is in the early prototype stage to test the idea, I plan to rework most of the graphics in the future.
Not even saying it's a bad thing, the company has abandoned the game for a long time now and it's not even trying to capture the same particular nieche
Was a good game, played this a fair bit - soldier meat is strong and expansion is too punishing without it. Don't do nft.
Good luck
pls do nft
the workers get stuck in mountains too easily and soft lock your progress
Thanks! I did not encounter this bug during the playtest, I will try to fix it :)
Not a bad start, I can see a lot of ways this could be a fun puzzle. I'll definitely check back as you work on it. One bug I noticed is that if you lose a building, it clears all the creep in its radius; which is to say, all the creep, even if you have other buildings.
Thanks! There are a lot of bugs in the game right now, because this is an early prototype for the sake of showing the idea. I will be reworking the code and graphics.
Great game
Please add caravan and so you can rob it
And if you can please NFT bitconin pls
Thanks for the comment! I'll think about it :)