Gone Viral went quite viral last weekend during Gamescom Online. After making a debut at PAX EAST this past March, Gone Viral has officially announced plans to launch for Steam Early Access on September 24th. We are awarded the Gone Viral team as one of the very best indies showcased at PAX EAST, lauding it for its excessively entertaining combat, entertaining setting, and innovative integration with Twitch.
With Gone Viral ready to evolve, Editor-in-Chief Andrew Peggs had an opportunity to catch up with Gaffer and The Skullbottians as they prepare for their huge leap into Steam Early Access.
Gone Viral Interview:
For our readers who don’t know much about Gone Viral, what is the game Gone Viral about?
Gone Viral is a very over-the-top roguelite – you’re a gladiator on a post-apocalyptic game show, and the Fans are trying to kill you! The more you can pull off slick moves with physics combat, the more Fans you can win over – and they’ll airdrop gifts of Mutations and other goodies.
What kind of improvements have you made since Pax East on the game Gone Viral?
Ermagerd, tons – we completely overhauled the game graphics and UI. We added more content. We added difficulty levels called Insanity Modes, which allow you to unlock craziness (The entire game speeds up! More wacky events! More Fans, rooms, mutating enemies….even more!) as you gain skill. We’ve been busy little mutated beavers.
What have been some of the challenges in prepping the game for Early Access?
A ton of it is just making sure everything works together in a polished fashion – having people play at shows and during beta when you have a bunch of combinatorial content, you’ll always learn new things and new ways of playing the game. We thrive on feedback and from seeing folks play; we polished a ton of things after watching folks play at PAX and on streams because we want Early Access to feel as polished as launch – then our early adopters can enjoy the game, be seeing new content added constantly, and have a solid base to give feedback on as we go through EA.
While you are bringing Gone Viral to Steam via Early Access, was there any thought to bring it to Epic Games Store as well?
We considered it! And Epic’s been a great partner to us – they’ve awarded us Epic Megagrants as we’ve developed. But as a small, scrappy team it makes sense to keep our focus as much as possible as well, and since we built up our beta on Steam (which grew to thousands of folks) it makes sense to do Early Access there as well.
Where and how did the concept of Gone Viral arise?
We’re huge roguelike/roguelite fans! And doing something that was heavily Twitch-enabled (and maybe pokes a bit of fun at streamer culture in a loving way) was something that seemed like it would be a lot of fun technically. We wanted to do something that we thought we could do something really top-notch while keeping a tight team; where we’ve worked on multi-hundreds-of-folks projects before, the question of what is the coolest thing we could do while working with a tight group of friends, based on our loves and strengths, led us towards roguelikes.
The fact that the game takes place in a crazy virus-ridden pandemic where everyone is in their bunkers watching streamed entertainment is PURELY coincidental – we started a few years ago. 2020 wasn’t us, we swear.
How has COVID impacted you and the game’s development?
It’s been tricky adjusting to working in our respective bunkers! But we’ve managed – it’s always been a small operation. We check-in and do a “show and tell” multiple times a day to keep focused, and it’s always a boost and a motivator seeing what everyone’s been up to.
What are you hoping to add in Early Access? Are you considering having more application integrations, such as TikTok, Twitter, and so on?
For us, it’s content, content, content! We feel like (and our players say- thanks testers!) we have a solid base game, with 10+ hours of content (yay combinatorial game). But we want that to be hundreds by the time we’re done, with more mutations, levels, bosses, rooms, and classes. We’ll definitely be adding to our integration – with more goodies to vote on, and we’re looking at systems where streamers can let donators, regular viewers, and mods have access to some of the goodies we test out as dev cheats (highest donator gets 3 nukes to drop at whim!).
As a reward for folks joining Early Access, we’re also looking at monthly freebies for long-time GV fans – more to come on that! For other platform integration – depending on how well Early Access goes, we’re really interested in doing more – letting folks vote for runs in polls on Twitter or YouTube would be awesome, or taking advantage of other streaming platforms. We’re always trying to balance “this would be awesome!” with “keep it sane for a small team” – but EA has the potential to let us spread our wings a bit team-wise as well so we’ll see how that goes.
Where could our readers find you on social media?
We’d like to thank you here at Marooners’ Rock for taking the time to inform our readers more about Gone Viral!
We’re on Twitter at https://twitter.com/
Thanks so much at Marooners’ Rock! Y’all kick butt –
Gaffer and the Skullbottians
