There are a lot of shooter games out there right now, but they all have something very simple in common - you shoot things. That's what makes them a shooter, right? Radio Viscera, launched earlier this month by Canadian indie developer Fire Face, is a shooter with a difference. While guns still feature heavily, the game includes zero bullets. I sat down with dev Owen Deery to figure out exactly how that works.
"I've always enjoyed working on these overly violent video games, I just think they are a lot of fun," Deery says. "But at the time when I was developing the concept for this, while I was preparing to pitch it there were a huge number of mass shootings in the US. There are always mass shootings, but there were a huge number of very visible ones at that time. And it felt really gross to make a game with bullets. So it just wasn't something that I wanted to do, but I didn't want to run away entirely from the concept of being sort of violent and energetic like that, so that's where the killing without bullets came from."
Deery adds that, as well as wanting to be sensitive of the current climate, he just wasn't prepared to stare at, animate, and design bullets all day for three years while seeing these tragedies continue to unfold on the news. That didn't mean the game couldn't have violence - it just needed to be violent in the right way.
"I grew up playing shooters in the '90s," Deery says of his influences. "That's where I think a lot of the inspiration for violence in my work comes from. But I really wanted to put a wackier twist on it. Just because then you have to get a huge amount of freedom to go over the top and make things a bit more hyper-realistic, rather than actually genuine or anything. It just sort of explodes into piles of chunks of meat. It's less like Mortal Kombat visibly showing the injuries, and more sort of cartoonish. You can really pin yourself into a corner if you make it highly restrictive. It gave me a lot of freedom to experiment and change as development went on about how much gore I wanted. So that was really helpful, because it ended up being quite a chaotic game."
And chaos is definitely the name of the game. In the top down shooter, you need to repel your enemies using blasts of air, while sawblades, clamps, and gears burst from the walls ready to grind your foes to goo. You bounce across each area with carefree strides, plotting your route to victory. If there’s no clear path, the so🌼lution is simple - make one.
Aside from being a bulletless shooter, Radio Viscera's most interesting feature is its dynamic destruction. Each wall is made up of several layers of tiny grids so that the environment can react to your destruction. Think in a game like Halo or Call of Duty; you can shoot the wall and leave bullet marks on the walls. Assuming the bullet marks don't reset in the game's engine, you could even use the bullets to write a message. Radio Viscera is that except if every bullet - or air blast, in this case - caused genuine structural damage. This means you can pierce smaller holes in certain vantage points, eviscerate walls from the middle outwards, or force them to crumble in a controlled demolition.
"That was actually the first piece that came together with this game," Deery says. "I was working on some ideas after I finished my last title, and I came up with this idea of this dynamic destruction system. It's not an all encompassing system, you can't build a world out of it, [but] it's very good at making walls that are fun to shoot through. Basically, that's where the focus was. I said, 'Okay, this can probably become a game, but it needs sort of something added on top of it'. Wall destruction is great for navigation and picking routes through levels, but there needs to be something else. The destruction was actually the seed for everything."
This destruction is not as simple as just choosing to smash a wall down, however. Each decision shapes your route through the arena, and changes how the AI will approach you. "There's a huge number of these destructible walls in the game," Deery says. "Every wall isn't destructible, just because I tried that in the beginning and it's almost too much choice for a player. So there's certain walls that are destructible and players can smash through them if they want, or there are usually other routes going through the level. But what's interesting is that once you smash through a wall, the enemies can also come through that wall, right? So they don't have to take the long way around, they can chase you through. And that's really interesting because the AI in the game is pretty simple. But the fact that they react to the choices you make makes it a lot more engaging, I find. So that was a happy gift that came out of developing with this destruction system."
One of the biggest struggles of this system was that it required equally complex sound design. "The audio is extremely reactive," Deery says. "All of the destructive choices that the player makes [are] the kind of thing that has to be considered in the entirety when you're thinking about everything that happens in the game. With a game that's as chaotic as this, you might have every sound playing at the same time. You don't know exactly what the player is going to do. You don't know exactly how many explosions are going to be happening at the same time. So there's a lot of effort put into making sure that the sound is not overstimulating for the player. You can still pick out the individual sounds of what's happening, it's not just this wall of noise. That helps make it a lot more understandable. So there's a lot of prioritising which sounds are important, which sounds [need] to be elevated above the music, and everything else. That was a big focus, for sure."
Radio Viscera is out now on Steam.