Disaster! An alien invasion and subsequent infestation have decimated this facility. Many lives were lost, the facility was ruined and the aliens were unstoppable. All hope was lost until one survivor found the courage to fight back and put the aliens in their place!
It was a long and horrific battle as the survivor dueled with all manner of horrific life-forms and alien mutations, but our hero won out in the end and destroyed the alien menace! Humanity was saved!
Unfortunately, the alien infestation and the heroic efforts of the courageous survivors have left rather a mess throughout the facility. As the janitor, it is your duty to get this place cleaned up.
So grab your mop and roll up your sleeves, this is gonna be one messy job.
Today you're on Viscera Cleanup Detail!
The current free prototype:
http://www.indiedb.com/games/viscera-cleanup-detail/downloads/viscera-cleanup-detail-alpha-v01
Steam Greenlight:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=159096666
Our page:
http://www.runestorm.com/viscera
Hi folks,
That's the latest game we're working on at RuneStorm. We hope you enjoy it and look forward to your feedback.
It started as a crazy idea that we all thought would be fun so we got to work and put the first prototype together in about 10 days.
In a way this game feels like all the lessons learned from the development of Rooks Keep rolled into one neat package.
I must say it is very exciting (and a bit terrifying) now to see the reception of this game out on the seas of the internet.
It was a long and horrific battle as the survivor dueled with all manner of horrific life-forms and alien mutations, but our hero won out in the end and destroyed the alien menace! Humanity was saved!
Unfortunately, the alien infestation and the heroic efforts of the courageous survivors have left rather a mess throughout the facility. As the janitor, it is your duty to get this place cleaned up.
So grab your mop and roll up your sleeves, this is gonna be one messy job.
Today you're on Viscera Cleanup Detail!
The current free prototype:
http://www.indiedb.com/games/viscera-cleanup-detail/downloads/viscera-cleanup-detail-alpha-v01
Steam Greenlight:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=159096666
Our page:
http://www.runestorm.com/viscera
Hi folks,
That's the latest game we're working on at RuneStorm. We hope you enjoy it and look forward to your feedback.
It started as a crazy idea that we all thought would be fun so we got to work and put the first prototype together in about 10 days.
In a way this game feels like all the lessons learned from the development of Rooks Keep rolled into one neat package.
I must say it is very exciting (and a bit terrifying) now to see the reception of this game out on the seas of the internet.
Comments
What other tools are you looking to introduce? Considering the space theme maybe there can be crazy upgrades (a nuclear powered floor buffer or vacuum cleaner with a tiny black hole inside - extreme suction!), or a mess detector that works like the motion tracker in Aliens (pings as you get near messes, to help find the last few bits you may have missed visually)
There should be tools for handling toxic alien blood and other things.
I want more!
You could have a hilarious easter eggs in this game. There are so many sci-fi horrors you could poke fun at :D.
The game's tagline should totally be: "The Final Frontier just got messier." :P
And boy, do we have plans for this puppy yet! So glad everyone is making these awesome suggestions :)
The list of features to add is more like a feature tower and ever growing.
It was a bit of a challenge to constrain it down to something we could release in a tight deadline. It was a very different experience to our previous work and very fun too.
I like the idea that some bits and pieces are difficult to spot, given the light and shadow, and that part of the gameplay is finding every bit of mess tucked into every corner. But then I'm a sucker for exploring 3d spaces in games.
Perhaps it would also be cool to have some areas that have dangerous jumps or traps, and other hazardous environments. So, without necessarily having anyone around, the player is still presented with some kind of conflict. I'm also picturing the player pulling apart a pile of bodies only to have a nearly-dead alien lunge out at him. The player would have to beat him back to proper death with the mop, and in the process make more of a mess.
Loads of fun potential here!
ALL THE TWITTER BUZZ :D
Please don't feature creep this. Just make a bunch of levels, add in a broom and dustpan and poke at the cleaning a little, then release it and win the festival circuit ;) Only add a story if it emphasises the terribleness of life, like your hourly rate decreases if your scanner-bot overseer detects organic matter you failed to clean up. Or the incinerator is replaced with a microwave disinfector that turns out ends up packaging mystery meat for soldier meals... Or something equally dark, but gameplay irrelevant.
The difficulty in cleaning things with physics objects actually adds to the awesomeness of the idea, so I'd explore that more. A broom that swept objects along the floor (and over other physics objects) could be really emergent - allowing people to catapult gibs they'd swept up onto a plank across a room directly into the incinerator. All you'd need to do to finish the game off is add a time-based leaderboard, make 5 levels and release the tools for people to make their own, and you'd be sorted :)
Such a rad concept guys!
I'll reply in more detail when I'm a little less light-headed :P
If it were up to me I'd probably feature-creep to hell and try to make an engine where the mop can "streak through" the blood if you leave it out, instead of interacting with decals on a one-to-one...
But yes that'd probably be just way too hard to implement, not to mention the headache of leaving bits out and not being able to find them...
Anyhoo the reception looks great so far! :D How long has it been in the wild? :D
aodendaal mentioned wetness. It made me think there could be some electrified surfaces, and the wetness interacts with that, maybe just shocks that make cleaning up more spastic (momentarily)...
But I agree with @Dislekcia. I'm definitely seeing an Octodad appeal, I'd think that allowing players to explore the awkward physics interface in interesting ways is going to get you the best value for development.
I don't like the idea of leaderboards though. I think that you will get you fewer machinima videos if you display information that evaluates the player actions. What you want is for players to set their own goals and explore those and evaluate that themselves. You don't want to tell players there is an official way to play the game.
Bennet Fody made QWOP. And that spread about the internet extremely well. Bennet has been very vocal about leaderboard's being a bad fit for his style of game. Also a game that is intentionally difficult (like Octodad or Surgeon Simulator) is amusing in its frustrations, but if it's telling you how not good you are compared to other people it'll be disheartening instead of amusing, and critically, that'll leave behind only the competitive players, who aren't the type of player who actually likes this sort of game in the first place. Leaderboards are good for arcady games. But the appeal here isn't arcadiness or competition. I don't think you should make it about that.
Also, just want to note that at this point, we don't want any "goals" as such. I'd rather foster player creativity, so focusing on the premise of the game, the physics and the interactions are our primary objectives :)
The goalless approach is great! Then let people build levels - that thing that RPS said about having to clean up a level of Team Fortress carnage is pure gold :)
@dislekcia Hehe, packaging mystery meat is definitely hilarious. Avoiding feature creep certainly does seem like it is going to be a challenge, I mean, enthusiastic feature suggestions seem to be the very spirit of the response to this game. I'm hoping our plan to stick to regular updates will help keep us on the straight and narrow. We don't intend to add any big story or narrative. There won't be any plot where the janitor has to save the day. It's strictly about being ludicrously mundane and the possible craziness of working with the quirks of physical and ill tempered tools.
@Tuism Yeah, that would be neat. We do plan to make mopping up splats and things a bit less boolean, but that didn't quite make the cut for the first release.
@BlackShips Oh, yes. I don't really like leaderboards much or any sort of competitive stuff. There really should be any right and wrong goals. Yeah, we don't usually play serious competitive games so I don't think we'd be the best at handling that kind of scenario... a mistake we made with RK.
EDIT: Just check the mouse-over text on that one. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/07/08/hotline-miami-2-footage-also-a-talking-chicken/#more-159353
This popped up a day or two before we had the release ready. At the risk of revealing my excessive knowledge of BlackAdder I thought "Well that's handy."
You guys are kicking ass!
Awesome idea guys, and super impressive for 10 days worth of work!
@dislekcia Indeed.
My god, the mop. He sure put that thing through its paces. I'm glad now for the effort that went into getting those damned tendrils to behave. It was a mission to get it to do anything and then when it did start working, every time you switched tools it would fan out across the level like uh... seaweed(?) rather than a nice squid tied to the end of a stick.
PS: I found this the other day, which is quite useful; Greenlight stats for 'Maia':
http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1i113o/full_stats_and_breakdown_of_maias_first_week_on/
From that article: I'm not sure what information he's basing that second point on. I don't see how the Greenlight falling flat is a problem. He's talking about Greenlighting a game that isn't finished yet, and in that situation you can always get more attention later once your game has improved (assuming you're making an interesting game).
But it's great to have more stats and REALLY cool that the MAIA guy shared his.
http://theawesomer.com/viscera-cleanup-detail/243418/?utm_source=pulsenews&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Feed:+TheAwesomer+(The+Awesomer)
I thought that maybe there is some insight to be gained from this. I think that this Super Robot Vacuuming game arises out of a bit of a tongue in cheek backlash against all the Mudane Occupation Simulator (like Truck Simulator or Cycling Simulator) videos that casters have been doing recently. Maybe with Viscera's more humourous simulation it can tap into that (without losing the thing that makes Mundane Simulators allow for entertaining machinima)...
Though this may be stuff you are very aware of seeing as you're making a game in this space. (I think it's an extremely interesting space right now)
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=159096666
Please help us give it that little extra push over the edge ;)
We'll be posting the stats soon as well. Just kinda hectic trying to get MP together :\
But now work continues on getting co-op together. Unfortunately multiplayer means players can see the character which very unfortunately means the character needs to look like something... preferably something better than an untextured cube too.
Here's a quick shot of progress so far on that front.
Pay close attention to certain key features:
-Janitorial gloves
-A handy brush
-Various sections of unfinished clothing
-Vision obstructing low helmet
-Utility pouches for storing items such as cleaning products, unauthorized beverages or perhaps loose change.
http://www.runestorm.com/viscera
Pre-ordering nets you the full game, access to beta's and other updates, a Steam key when greenlit, and our undying gratitude ;)
Grab your mop, vote on Greenlight, pre-order for 5 bucks, indulge in a bottle of rum!
http://www.runestorm.com/viscera
I bring word of future plans for VCD, and the latest screen I took from Greenlight :)
Future plans:
hmmm, clicking on that link gives me:
Oh, and try that; fixed :)