As of November 2024, The WereCleaner, a game straight out of USC’s Advanced Game Project (AGP) class, has over one million downloads. It has been named “Best Student Project” at the 16th Unity Game Awards and is a finalist for Apple Store’s iPhone game of the year.
Every year, USC Games allows a limited number of students from the USC School of Cinematic Arts’ Interactive Media and Game Divisions (IMGD) program and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering to create a game concept for AGP. In this capstone class, students form groups to mimic a small developer team and bring their creative visions to life over two semesters.
Meet Kyle
The WereCleaner follows a janitor named Kyle who has to work the night shift in an office building. The twist? Kyle turns into a werewolf at night and automatically eats anyone that catches him in his werewolf persona.
Armed with his trusty vacuum, his task is to clean up the different messes throughout the office--each more ridiculous than the last--while not getting caught in his werewolf form. Daryl, the attentive security guard, gets more and more suspicious as the week progresses.
When a night employee catches a glimpse of werewolf Kyle, he pounces to eat them, which creates a bloody crime scene that he has to clean before exiting the level. If someone finds evidence of murder in the office, it’s game over.
The mix of a cute, innocent art style with the gore of Kyle’s kills, alongside the absurdity of the game’s humor, creates a joyous cocktail that has earned the game a Steam « extremely positive » rating and 4.9-star rating on the App Store.
‘Flipping stuff on its head’
When Mason “Moose” Sabharwal, a former senior in IMGD, pitched The WereCleaner to USC Games faculty in 2023 for AGP, it became apparent that the game had the potential to be a success.
“Whenever I see something that mechanically and narratively is doing something that I’ve never seen before, I jump on it, right? And that was very much the case for The WereCleaner,” Andy Nealen, Associate Professor of Cinematic Arts/Computer Science and the current director of AGP, said. “It’s just so comical that you would have a game that’s a stealth game, but it’s not like the enemy jumping you, it’s you jumping them.”
The WereCleaner’s uniqueness seemed apparent from the start. Even without playing, one can tell that The WereCleaner delivers on a premise that is not commonplace in other gaming titles.
“One thing that I think made me stick with the idea of The WereCleaner was that idea of: ‘okay, we’re flipping stuff on its head,’” Sabharwal explained.
Charlie Heatherly, a USC senior majoring in Game Development and Interactive Design as well as lead producer on The WereCleaner, explained that on top of changing the stealth genre and its mechanics, absurdity was at the core of the game’s universe and development.
“[Moose] advocated to have all these weird rooms in the game, like a moonshine room, a train room and one that’s basically filled with plants and a pond. And every time he pitched it to me, I was like ‘This is ridiculous,’” Heatherly said. “I pushed back a lot of the time because I was like, ‘I don’t think players are really going to understand this.’ But, he was like ‘You have to trust me.’”
While there might have been some doubts at first about the potential reach of the game and its zany mechanics and humor, this is what ultimately made it stand out to the players. Abby Farhat, marketing lead and IOS developer for the game, recalled that, while never expecting the game to reach this level of popularity, there were some signs that it could garner some success due to its eccentric nature.
“Play tests alone showed us that, ‘okay, we’ve made a game that’s pretty fun,’” said Farhat. “When you watch people play and they simply kill someone for the first time, there’s a moment there. That was the exact moment that we wanted to get from the game. They’re rushing to clean up all the mess that they made and everything’s going crazy. It totally is that moment that always gets a response when people play it online, which is awesome. So I think that really kind of validated a lot of [the concept].”
On top of the crazy humor and gameplay, an endearing main character ties the whole game together. Ultimately, Kyle is simply a werewolf just trying to do his job without hurting anybody, seemingly just as lost as the player in this crazy office, but continually coming back night after night to accomplish his cleaner duty.
“I think the biggest thing that people really latched onto is Kyle,” Heatherly pointed out. “[Moose] designed him in partnership with the narrative lead and the art lead. I think they crafted a super interesting world.”
A last minute decisive shift
While the game was originally only planned for PC release on Steam, it seemed like The WereCleaner’s gameplay could also fit other platforms.
“The initial thing got sparked by one of our professors,” explained Farhat. “He was just playing the game in a faculty review one day and he just said, as a throwaway, ‘Oh, I bet this would play really well on mobile.’ I heard that, and I was like, ‘oh wait, he has a very good point there.’”
At this point, the team was in the final stretch of development. To say the least, creating a mobile build at this stage was an enormous responsibility.
“I hated it,” Levi Pinkert, design lead and USC senior majoring in computer science games, stated. “I was like, ‘Guys, we cannot do mobile. It will kill the game.’”
“That was going to be a huge problem for the team, because I think in their minds, they didn’t want to add a really big scope thing,” Heatherly said. “Typically, as a producer, I wouldn’t either, but I was very confident in the skills of Abby [Farhat], who was going to be the one engineering the whole mobile version of the game, and I was confident that it could fit within our timeline without disrupting other processes.”
With that, Farhat went ahead and prototyped for two weeks before it was presented to the rest of the team. Once it hit the team’s objective measure after a month of QA and usability testing, the mobile version of the The WereCleaner was greenlit.
“Thank god that we did mobile because we have 600,000 players on mobile,” Heatherly noted. “Probably 800,000 players right now in total. Mobile is by far the most popular platform that the game is on.”
Welcoming furry friends
With a zero dollar marketing budget and no established brand identity or fan base, The WereCleaner’s marketing team, spearheaded by Farhat, certainly had their work cut out for them.
The team benefited from an organic boost in discoverability after the game’s initial release at the USC Games expo. During this wave of initial downloads, the team noticed that their game was being streamed by a furry VTuber to 1,000 people on Twitch. While this did not spark a huge amount of attention for The WereCleaner, it did inspire another idea for Farhat.
“It was enough for us to be like ‘Okay, this is interesting.’ So, I literally just started going into a bunch of Discord servers, subreddits and even YouTubers in the furry space and honestly being like, ‘hey, we made a game, check it out.’ That worked, like really, really well,” Farhat said.
The game has since surpassed its initial core fanbase, but Farhat’s initial adaptation in marketing strategy allowed the game to surpass its status of “student game” to becoming a mainstream classic.
“I don’t think [the furry space] is like the majority of our audience, but they definitely have been really passionate about the game and have simply talked about it in a lot of places,” Farhat noted. “Most of the organic places where I’ve seen it pop up, I think that community has helped push it along. And honestly, it’s been great, because it’s amazing to have people play the game.”
An expanding universe
Following its release, the team has been able to build a strong community around The WereCleaner and its universe.
Their Discord server, where people come in daily to chat about their love for the game and talk to the development team, has more than 5,000 members. The team is rallying together the game’s supporters to secure a nomination for the Steam Awards.
As the game’s popularity has grown, the team, and especially Sabharwal, have expanded the universe surrounding The WereCleaner. Both Kyle and Daryl have their own plushies now and comics are posted on the game’s Youtube channel, X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram.
While no The WereCleaner 2 is in the works, only time will tell what is in store for the team behind this classic, straight out of USC’s AGP program.
“I don’t want to promise anything, but we might have some stuff cooking in the oven,” Farhat said. “That’s all I’ll say.”
The WereCleaner is available for free on Steam and on iOS. An Android release is planned to release soon.