Viscera Cleanup Detail

edited in Projects
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

image image image

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

  • Hehe, the perfect game for folks who are keen on cleanliness - looks quite cathartic actually. Will that mop be able to have a 'mopping' action where you hold the mouse button down and then move the mouse around to mop up, or is it only 'click to clean'?

    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)
    Thanked by 1ShadowBlade
  • I love this idea! I want to see more tools and procedures you have to follow like putting down Wet Floor cones and things. When you finish the level you're rated on your cleanliness and presumable there's a time limit.

    There should be tools for handling toxic alien blood and other things.

    I want more!
    Thanked by 1ShadowBlade
  • That just made my day so much better. :D
  • I really love this idea :D.

    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
  • Thanks you guys! Rather exciting that is being so well received already. The tweet by Fork Parker and DevolverDigital made my day :P

    And boy, do we have plans for this puppy yet! So glad everyone is making these awesome suggestions :)
  • Sheer genius! Love it! looking forward to see what gameplay challenges you guys can think of.
  • Thanks very much everyone.
    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.
  • Haha what a fantastic idea! Who thought cleaning up blood and gibs could look like so much fun :D

    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!
    Thanked by 1ShadowBlade
  • Great video from 'AllShamNoWow' on youtube!
  • One of the great things about this idea is the game's potential for environmental storytelling. Gamasutra has an OK article on this: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3186/environmental_storytelling_.php - nailing that will take this from being a novel idea to a good game (imo)
    Thanked by 1hanli
  • Excellent, also this seems to be taking up my entire twitter feed, so far the best one is William Gibson retweeting Charlie Brooker: now I just have to wonder how long until it is through Greenlight ;) (I'll place my bet on the next 2 batches)
    Thanked by 1ShadowBlade
  • Awesome Idea. In the words of Roger Wilco from Space Quest fame : "In space no one can hear you clean".
  • Yay!

    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!
    Thanked by 1ShadowBlade
  • Thanks for all the great comments and feedback guys. Can't believe how quick this thing is exploding :D

    I'll reply in more detail when I'm a little less light-headed :P
    Thanked by 2Bensonance Tuism
  • This looks pretty damn fantastic! :D

    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
  • edited
    Lol! What a cool idea, and great execution so far. I'm glad the internet is loving it!

    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.
    Bennet Fody said:
    One of the things I found with QWOP is that people like to set their own goals in a game. Some people would feel like winners if they ran 5 meters, and others would feel like winners if they inched all the way along the track over the course of an hour. If I had put a social leaderboard or par system in, those people would probably have all quit out of frustration, leaving only the most determined or masochistic players behind
    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.
    Thanked by 1ShadowBlade
  • @Tuism: We uploaded the game yesterday afternoon :) Greenlight page went up at midnight yesterday.

    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 :)
    Thanked by 2EvanGreenwood Tuism
  • @ShadowBlade That sounds really smart.
  • That's awesome!! :D Shows it takes a really cool idea to hit primetime! :D

    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 :)
  • Thanks for all the great comments guys.

    @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.
    BlackShipsFilltheSky said:
    ...telling you how not good you are compared to other people...
    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.
  • edited
    Oh yeah, mod support is definitely in the plan!
    Tuism said:
    that thing that RPS said about having to clean up a level of Team Fortress carnage is pure gold
    Ironically, it was jokes and comments on RPS's about 'having to play the guy that cleans up' that seeded the idea.

    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."
    Thanked by 2Tuism EvanGreenwood
  • edited
    One can never reveal too much BlackAdder knowledge! It only ever makes people like you more.
  • I just wish people would stop making retarded sexist comments like "Finally a game girls can enjoy" and "I'm buying my girlfriend this game" :(
  • Great idea! And looks like a lot of fun...Good luck! :)
  • Woah totalbiscuit video!
    You guys are kicking ass!
    Thanked by 1ShadowBlade
  • Omw, that was hilarious! I couldnt stop laughing at that mop for the first 2 minutes, and then when Totalbiscuit spills his only bucket of clean water - he he he.

    Awesome idea guys, and super impressive for 10 days worth of work!
  • Thanks guys.

    @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.
  • The question is how can you make the bucket of water dispenser more obvious because I keep screaming at the TotalBiscuit video for him to use it!
  • Aye, in the new v0.11 we added a bucket to it by default, so it indicates that it is there to deliver buckets. Furhter enhancements might be a glowing light or something along those line :)
  • edited
    @ShadowBlade I've been looking at your Greenlight page (just at numbers of comments), and it looks like VCD is rising meteorically! A start like that can only mean good things (and I'd guess a relatively short time on Greenlight before being accepted).
    Thanked by 1ShadowBlade
  • @BlackShipsFillTheSky: I think this week is going to be critical for it. We'll try and keep momentum going. :)

    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/
  • edited
    I'm not certain that keeping momentum is important. Getting enough votes definitely is important (and momentum affects that of course, but the momentum as a value itself I don't think is important).

    From that article:
    When to Greenlight:

    If you are crowd funding, create "concept" Greenlight rather than a full one during your campaign. Firstly, a Greenlight campaign will dilute your marketing, use up precious time and be a distraction. Secondly, if are a small developer, you risk the Greenlight falling flat (spreading your votes out too thin over time) and not getting Valves attention.
    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.
  • You speak wise words ;)
  • edited
    Just saw a game called "Super Robot Vacuum Simulator 2013" being played on Yogscast. (with 420,000 views) I thought this might be interesting because it also has a cleaning up simulation theme, and while the casters may not have really enjoyed it, cleaning simulations seem to be able to produce interesting machinima:

    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)
  • edited
    Interesting.. Thanks for pointing it out :)
  • Well, we're right on the verge of breaking into the top 100 on Greenlight! Woohoo!
    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 :\
    Thanked by 1Bensonance
  • Supported! :D Good luck with the meteoric rise! :D
    Thanked by 1ShadowBlade
  • Oh dear, we made it to the top 100 :D
    Thanked by 1creative630
  • Hoorayidlium!

    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.
    image

    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.
  • Hey hey! In a terrifying turn of events, you can now pre-order VCD for the princely sum of $5! Please help us out by throwing a buck or two it's way :)
    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 ;)
  • Big news! New v0.12 update is out, and includes co-op MP! Booyah! Also, two new maps, some more trash to pick up, lanterns, blood graffiti and a "punch-out" panel to deliver condescending messages at every turn ;)

    Grab your mop, vote on Greenlight, pre-order for 5 bucks, indulge in a bottle of rum!
    http://www.runestorm.com/viscera
  • edited
    Hail!

    I bring word of future plans for VCD, and the latest screen I took from Greenlight :)
    Future plans:

    image
    GreenLight20Days11PM.png
    1022 x 814 - 126K
  • #27!!! Wow congrats!!! :D

    hmmm, clicking on that link gives me:
    Sorry!
    An error was encountered while processing your request:

    That item does not exist. It may have been removed by the author.
  • Thanks!

    Oh, and try that; fixed :)
  • Soaring through the ranks!
    Thanked by 1ShadowBlade
  • Yeah I don't see any problems with you getting Greenlit. You've had great media attention, there's LOADS of discussion activity on your Greenlight page - I think it's just now a matter of when :D
  • Congratulations!!! :D
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