Swimsanity!

Swimsanity! is a multiplayer underwater shooter developed and published by Decoy Games. Players take the role of Mooba through a variety of game modes, using power-ups and Unleashes to dominate the underwater battlefield.

Gameplay
In all Swimsanity! game modes, players control Mooba, an underwater soldier equipped with a gun and an Unleash. As players defeat enemies in cooperative modes or other Mooba in competitive modes, their Unleash will charge up, allowing them to perform a powerful move. Throughout each match, players can also collect power-ups to give them a momentary advantage.

Each mode supports four players, but bots can be enabled to fill out missing slots. Competitive modes include Deathmatch, Last Mooba Standing, and Orb Rush. Deathmatch and Orb Rush can also be played in two teams of two players each. Cooperative modes include Adventure, a retro-style side-scrolling trek through four levels, and Survival, a wave-based mode.

Swimsanity! also offers over 150 challenges for players to complete across the various game modes.

Prototypes
Swimsanity! began in 2008 as a midterm assignment by Decoy Games co-founder Khalil Abdullah. As part of his Flash development class, he created "Swimsanity: The Adventures of Mooba Jiver the Scooba Diver", an underwater game where the player had to collect as much treasure as possible while avoiding sea creatures. The game was inspired by Game & Watch Gallery ' s Octopus game and proved popular with Khalil's classmates. He expanded the game into "Swimsanity 2: Deep Sea Jivers" by adding a multiplayer component as well as weapons and power-ups.

Over the next few years, Khalil, his brother Ahmed, and childhood friend Chris Venne worked together to develop a Microsoft XNA prototype of Swimsanity! to promote the game. Swimsanity! appeared at conventions starting in 2013, including PAX East and PAX West, and gathered plenty of fan support. Despite a failed Kickstarter campaign, Decoy Games successfully established development accounts with Sony and Microsoft, as well as Steam through Steam Greenlight.

Release
In 2016, Decoy Games began to recreate Swimsanity! from scratch on the Unity engine to support consoles and Steam simultaneously. The development team stopped promoting the game to focus on their real-life jobs and developing the game. The game was re-revealed in 2018 and appeared in conventions and promotions up to release. In 2019, Decoy Games announced that Swimsanity! would also release on the Nintendo Switch.

Swimsanity! ' s release was originally set for early 2019, but the game was pushed back repeatedly: first to summer 2019, then to fall 2019, and finally to 2020. Khalil cited the team's reiterations of the game as the cause for the repeated delays.