Swarm
Swarm is a real time strategy game with a twist. Instead of gathering resources, building or commanding teams of units, you control a swarm of ravenous insects that constantly emerges from your hive. The challenge is to guide your swarm through setting waypoints. The objective is to collect enough upgrades to raid and destroy the enemy hive.
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Waypoints
Waypoints lay out a path for your swarm to follow. They look like a flag with a circle around it. The arrows connecting the waypoints show which way the swarm will go. You can drag the waypoints with the left mouse button.
In order to create a waypoint, click the black flag button on the left. If you want to delete a waypoint, right-click it (or control-click it on Mac). You can connect waypoints to the hive by dragging from the hive to the waypoint.
An advanced way to make waypoints is to SHIFT-drag an exiting waypoint (or the hive). This will make a new waypoint, connected to the one you dragged.
Hive
The hive has 30 health points in the beginning of the game. When its health drops to zero, the owner of the hive loses. Protect your hive with your swarm and watch out for enemy flanking attacks.
Upgrades
Upgrade orbs periodically appear on the field. There are three types, each improving a different aspect of your swarm. The level of your upgrades can be seen on the upgrade meters to the left.
SPAWN RATE: This upgrade has an icon that looks like a bug. It will increase the rate at which your hive produces the swarm. Getting to level 10 will double your production rate from level 0.
SPEED: This upgrade looks like a lightning bolt. This will increase the speed of your swarm and the speed at which upgrades are taken to your hive.
ARMOUR: This upgrade looks like a shield and will make your swarm tougher. At level 10, your swarm will be twice as resilient as level 0.
In order to capture an upgrade, direct your swarm to it with a waypoint. Some of the swarm will sacrifice themselves to capture the upgrade. Once 20 swarmlings have attacked the upgrade it will start pulsing with your team color. After a short while it will start to move to your hive. Once it gets there, you will level up in that category. Of course, if the enemy intercepts the upgrade, they can take it back to their base.
Other
The game has a difficulty switch that will give the computer or the player additional upgrades in the beginning. Run Swarm.exe (or Swarm.app on Mac) with the “-difficulty X” where X is a number from -30 to 30. The default setting is 0, giving the computer no advantage. Positive values will help the AI.
You can run Swarm in full screen mode by passing “-fullscreen” parameter to Swarm.exe. You can also run the provided .bat file.
If you get tired of the awesome IndieBird splash screen, you can turn it off with “-nosplash”. Just be sure to view it once in a while to keep the subliminal messages active.
Also, the game can be paused by pressing “P“.
Thanks To
The makers of the following libraries:
SDL
SDL_mixer
FreeImage
Sound effects were taken from www.freesound.org and are licensed under Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 license. See http://www.freesound.org/legal.php for details. The following freesound contributors had their effects used:
Jovica
harri
Stephan.Matson
gelo_papas
The text font was downloaded from www.aenigmafonts.com
Legal
This game is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported license. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ for human readable form. Read http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/legalcode for a lawyer-readable text and the specific terms of the license.
If you re-distribute the game, you have to clearly indicate that it may be found at www.indiebird.com
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