Temtem: Swarm developers highlight their work on Steam Deck support

Looks like Temtem: Swarm, the spin-off from Crema and GGTech Studios from the original online creature-collector Temtem, seems like it's going to have great Steam Deck support at release.

This time around, the developers are jumping into the ever-increasing survivor-like genre made popular by Vampire Survivors with their own unique spin on it. They've taken the simple classic survivor gameplay but added in their strategy-based combat mechanics where you and up to 3 others can play together online alongside creatures from the Temtem universe.

In a post on Steam today the developers highlighted their work to ensure it works well: "Our clever little monkeys have been working tirelessly to make sure the game feels great in your hands. The game's interface scales beautifully to the Deck's screen, so you can keep track of your Temtem squad and the incoming enemy hordes with ease. And of course, full controller support lets you unleash your inner swarm-battling master without ever needing to touch a keyboard."

Since there's going to be a lot going on, they needed to make sure the game performed well and in some cases it didn't. So they went into a bit of detail on how they've been making sure that it does:

"You might be asking yourself how we got hundreds of detailed Temtem models to show on the screen without making the system crash and burn. For that we relied on the amazing TechArt and Programming teams to find ways to make the magic happen.

Normally, Temtem are animated using skeletons, but with so many animated characters on screen at once this can really slow things down. So, we used a special technique to bake animations into textures which allowed us to have the graphics card (GPU) handle those animations. This frees up the processor (CPU) for other tasks, like enemy behavior and executing your attacks, dashes, and movements.

The VFX teams were also responsible for making a ton of beautiful animations with eye-catching particle effects for the pick-up items. There can be a lot of those items on the screen at once - especially after Platypet’s Tsunami goes off! Those animations and particles were being handled by the CPU, but using a similar technique, they made it so that the process could be handled by the GPU instead.

On the programming side of things, we noticed the game was chugging a bit when players were going wild at the same time, especially when the host of a co-op game was on the Steam Deck. Turns out, one of the plugins we were using wasn't built for such chaotic fun! The team cooked up some special tweaks just for the Steam Deck, and voila! The game runs like a dream, even with a whole crew of players causing mayhem.

All of this means that the swarm can be larger, drop more items, and chase you harder all while the Steam Deck runs like a dream. We have even more we can optimize, so we’ll keep pushing to have the best experience possible!"

Even as a non-developer, I definitely enjoy seeing game developers note down specifically what they're doing, it makes for a fun read. And, testing performance against the Steam Deck is just a great idea, because it gives you a decent target to optimise for that then benefits all players.

There's currently no release date other than Q4 2024, and they said in the post it's a few months away still. Check out the previous trailer:

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You can follow it on the Steam page.