Posts Tagged ‘Viscera Cleanup Detail’

Greetings, my suave custodians and guardians of hygiene liberty!
I come bearing a bountiful and dripping bucket of interesting news.

 

The first order of business is the new DLC:

His plans set in motion, Dr. Hades and his villainous underlings laughed to themselves from their seats at an elaborate table, deep underground on a remote island lair. It would prove to be a short-lived interlude however, as Fox Huntington, dapper plot-foiler extraordinaire and international man-of-action, proceeded to lay waste to the twisted Doctor’s evil plans! The world was saved!
Now that an international super-spy has done their part, it falls to you to get on with the real work..
So, straighten up your bow-tie, spray on your finest fragrance and pay a visit to your nearest gadget store; it’s time to clean this place up!

 

The new DLC features a number of new game elements.

• An entire facility to explore and give a good scrubbing.
• Eight new songs for the Big Banger radio.
• Ten new achievements to complete.
• A whole bunch of new mechanics and odd things to discover.
• A satisfying feeling.

 

 

As always, you can access any DLC through the “Switch Game” button on the main menu.

 

More Maps!

 

Along with the DLC in this release, we have also added another three levels for the main game!
Yes, three! We even managed to squeeze another one in there.

 

The three new levels feature a number of interesting new features and/or new content.

• Core Sample: An experimental energy and research facility featuring high-tech equipment and the largest gameplay additions of any of the three levels.
• Penumbra: An abandoned storage facility that went dark and had to be investigated.
• Pestilent Penitentiary: A backwater prison colony subjected to a rather unfortunate event.

Each one has its own achievement.

 

More Info

 

Head on over to the Steam Announcement page for more info(especially regarding Steam Workshop) and a tasty Changelog.

 

Also, if you want to buy the new Vulcan Affair DLC, simply head on over here, or directly to the Steam store page.

 

Whew, that’s about it.
Enjoy, everyone!

--------------------------------------------------------------

Hey hey!

Because I’m an idiot, this blog has gone un-updated for a little too long.. Feel free to whack me over the head with your virtual baseball bats!
At any rate, I come now with a summary of what has happened since the last post (a shit ton!). Big news first then:

Viscera Cleanup Detail has hit v1.0 and is now out of Early Access! Hooray!

Head on over here to get your hands on the finest space-station janitorial simulator around!

Over the last year, we managed to finish off all the content and features we intended (mostly), added new maps, fixed a ton of things, polished up others and generally cleaned up the place! Here is a launch trailer to gaze upon:

 

And the cherry atop the pile of disposal bins? We even managed to craft a Halloween themed DLC, “House of Horror”; a content rich map set in a haunted suburban home.

Check out here for more info on House of Horror!

And here is also a funky trailer for you to feast your dead eyes upon:

We’re still working on a few outstanding tasks, however. These include getting a Mac build going (which it mostly does, check here), merging the spinoff titles (Santa’s Rampage and Shadow Warrior) into the main game, and hopefully I can finish off a map or two for Christmas (free updates!). They will be regular Viscera-themed however, nothing too outrageous.

Otherwise, we’re going to start figuring out what to work on next. We have a few prototypes rattling around that we’ll flesh out in greater detail in the new year I expect. We’ll also be taking our usual bit of time off over mid-December to sometime in January, but we’ll still be around to check out what’s happening/deal with stuff.

And lastly, another enormous thanks to the players and fans of VCD. Ya’ll have been amazing
For now, keep on cleaning!

--------------------------------------------------------------

Greetings everyone,

We just wanted to put up a brief summary of what we plan to accomplish during the remainder of the year. We will take some time off mid December and resume work early-to-mid January, as it’s been pretty hectic since we started work on VCD. I’ve been plagued by a neck/muscle problem, and as such I haven’t been able to get much of anything done. The J-HAMR would probably have been done by now if not for that. It’s recovering though, so I’ll get done as much as I can!

So, before the end of the year we are aiming to:

-Release Rooks Keep.
-Implement Steam Workshop for Rooks Keep and Viscera Cleanup Detail.
-Implement the J-HARM tool for VCD.
-Release normal VCD updates (fixes, tweaks, features, achievements, etc)

As you can see, the Workshop support for both Rooks Keep and VCD is high priority and should be complete in a few weeks. It’s a tricky undertaking, requiring a dedicated application that needs to handle the preparation, downloading and uploading of the mods.
Rooks Keep will probably be released from Early Access very soon, and Workshop support will be ported to it as we get it working for VCD. The two should get that quite close together.

So there we go! VCD updates will continue until we break for the year, and those priority implementations and releases should all happen before then as well!

Happy janitoring/slaying!

--------------------------------------------------------------

Hi everyone!

First off, apologies about the recent slow-down in regular updates to VCD. That is mostly down to a seemingly endless stream of admin and biz work relating to us setting ourselves up as a company, accounting and so forth. This is all new to us, so we’re stumbling around figuring it all out, and it’s taken a large whack of time away from proper game development. Hoping we’re near the end of that now. The other thing that took time away was the launch of Rooks Keep. We wanted to get that out to fans as soon as we could, otherwise it might only have hit after we finished VCD. Anyway, to the matter at hand!

Read the rest of this entry »

--------------------------------------------------------------

Our initial plan for 2014 was to have time end on the 31st of December 2013. As it turns out, there was betrayal, things were said, contracts with certain deities were severed and now we have to roll with the hastily concocted “Plan B”.

First up, we’re working on fixes for the most troublesome problems in Viscera Cleanup Detail and its bonus editions. We’re hoping to be able to release updates weekly even if they only include fixes and the mostly uninteresting changes of the week. An update for the most pressing problems in VCD: Santa’s Rampage is scheduled for the end of this week. VCD: Shadow Warrior and full VCD will also be getting updates of course.

The next major step is getting VCD on Steam Early Access. It will involve a general polishing and sanding off the worst rough edges of what we already have – maybe there’ll be some new content too, we can’t seem to resist feature creep! That’s aimed at mid February.
Alongside VCD, we’re also going to be bringing RooksKeep to Steam now that it has been greenlit. The biggest change will be using Steamworks for the multi-player matchmaking and other online jazz. There’ll also be the usual raft of fixes and improvements.

All that has to happen at the same time as setting up some super serious business funk to vacuum up time and generate disruptions. Oh, and also experimental prototypes.

 

As for the finger puppets, we’re keeping those plans secret until the time is right to unleash the devastating fury on an unsuspecting world…

--------------------------------------------------------------

The way we have been working is not sustainable, especially the crunches just before release. Several days on my work log peaked over 15 hours and that is not really sane. …And that log doesn’t count lunch or any other breaks as work time (unless lunch is eaten with the other hand on the keyboard)

There has been a lot of this crunching because there have been many releases.
Going back to June, we finally pushed through to get Rooks Keep released which was met with a pretty depressing reception. That was not really surprising. We realised as development dragged on that it was a mistake to make such a big game with no clearly communicable hook, but we wanted it done.

Very shortly afterwards, born from a thread of otherwise rather cynical contemplation, inspiration struck and we dove into Viscera Cleanup Detail.
After that we had the deal to do VCD:Shadow Warrior and that took longer than expected. Following that a major update for VCD and the insane idea of VCD: Santa’s Rampage came up. We could either cram it in before Christmas with a very tight deadline or wait a year (yeah, that’d work…)

We crunched to get VCD v0.2 on the date we’d set for the end of November and went straight into VCD:SR for 2 more weeks. Arn started working on Santa after regular VCD work and I gradually started as VCD v0.2 neared its target. It wasn’t all *gruelling, but it was not healthy and the team needs a break.

All in all, it has been a pretty punishing schedule and it was all compounded by my eye surgery and subsequently complicated recovery which devoured lots of time before and around VCD:SW.

However, time management has been steadily improving – we somehow got 5 significant releases out on schedule in the last 6 months – but it’s not nearly good enough.
Getting this right is a major focus of mine for the coming year. Properly spacing out milestones and being disciplined about feature creep is going to be challenging, especially since ‘feature creep’ introduced some of the most interesting elements of VCD. Allowing space for unexpected changes and time to experiment will need to be done. This is challenging because it is planning around the unknown, combined with the perpetual certainty that there is not enough time to do everything already on the list.

It is also vital to make sure there is time to continue experimenting with new prototypes. Game jams and experimental projects are not just a way for studios to possibly scoop a new hit, for indies, I feel they are essential to long term survival, because the ability to produce crazy, unique and unconventional games is one of our best edges compared to big studios with massive production capacity. Making one new crazy game that stands out is great, but once that becomes old and done, we need to have something new up our sleeve and it better be damn good and it better not be the same as everything else. In order to reach that, many prototypes must be produced and discarded in the process. Somehow, those have to be produced while still developing the main, proven games.

That will be an interesting challenge and it won’t happen at once. It will be a continuation of the process that has (I think) been evolving and improving. I will just put more concious effort into it and try to push myself to better understand where the limits of the game development process are for us.

TL:DR – Less burnt-out devs, more crazy stuff, time will kill us all – don’t say I didn’t warn you!

 

 

*some of it really was; fucking physics, yeah you!

--------------------------------------------------------------

Greetings custodians of the galaxy!

It’s time for another proper ketchup for VCD. What follows is an update of where VCD is now and some of the new content, and our thoughts on when we plan to get onto Steam.
So then, to the data log!

Med-bay:
Work goes on with the med-bay, which nears environmental completion now. Just take a look at the shots!
The med-bay was witness to some pretty evil science, hybrid mutant abominations and similar medical experiments. The map will reflect this story of evil science creating what they shouldn’t have.

 

Read the rest of this entry »

--------------------------------------------------------------

Hail all noble space station sanitation engineers and hygiene technicians, time for a small update on proceedings.

Progress has been a bit slower over the last two weeks with lots of other things going on. ShadowBlade, especially, has been preoccupied so there has not been much change on the maps.
There has been some advancement, though, and we are expecting to be able to get back up to full speed moving on from next week.

In the meantime, here is some work in progress
The supply vending machine:

This new machine (ignore the fugly placeholder mesh) will be able to provide the janitor with all kinds of equipment needed to clean up or repair and replace damaged parts of the facility.
If those pesky marines blew up all the video monitors or stole all the medical supplies, this is where the replacements would come from.
It can also provide new lanterns for working in the dark or anything else we come up with down the line.
In keeping with our design of having minimal HUD and on-screen UI, we have a system for putting the UI on a panel on the side of the machine. These in-world UI panels can be operated using the janitor hands.

Welding Laser:

The laser will be used for repairing bullet holes, scratches and other types of damage or deposits that the mop can’t deal with. It may also have a few other nifty uses and devious traits.

There has also been work on improving the mopping and bucket when cleaning up scorch marks.

As always, there are also many other fixes and smaller changes and plenty more to come before the next version.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Welcome to headquarters. Today we’ll discuss some new hardware our tech division has put into production pertaining to the fields of mess-cleaning.

We present the latest invention, code named the ‘Sniffer’. Its sensitive and specialized nose can detect and seek out messes you’ve left behind, making it easier to reach for that promotion you always wanted, and maybe even that elusive employee of the week plaque!

All the details and more can be found in the release brochure.

Business aside, this is only a small update, as most of our work has been spent on various other features that are just not quite ready enough right now, but will hopefully be in the next update.

As ever, please consider pre-ordering while the price is still $5 kajiliwoppers.
Pre-Order now!

--------------------------------------------------------------

Hail ya’ll!

So, we’ve been plenty busy on Viscera Cleanup Detail since it was Greenlit (thanks again!!). We’ll be getting another update out soon, but in the meantime, here is a progress report on what’s been going down.
—–

We’ve got a bunch of new systems in progress which are functioning already (but need plenty of polish still). These are:

-Bullet holes/scratches/etc and support for repairing them with a laser tool. The laser can also make it’s own holes if you’re clumsy
-Fires. These can breakout when smashing lanterns or overworking your laser tool. This will be expanded as we go.
-Vending machine. Here you can order new pieces of equipment. This is still in it’s infancy, but it’s going well. It even has a nifty “on machine” UI.
-Scanner. This little tool can help you detect shell/bullet casings and viscera.

Other things:

-Radio. Fairly straightforward but adds some atmosphere. Next step is for us to find the right sounds for it to broadcast
-Key bindings. Yep!

On the content side, we’ve been working on the new “medical bay” environment. We’ve got a whole bunch of meshes complete, but more to go still, and plenty of textures.
Here are some shots of it’s basic structure and look, still very much subject to change. Also, there are many meshes not yet added in

And there we go! We’ll try and be more consistent with these progress reports from here on

Thanks everyone!

As ever, please consider pre-ordering it while you can!
Pre-Order now!

--------------------------------------------------------------