Octbuster: Video Rental Store Cleanup

Octbuster is a physics sim meets a tidy-up game, and you're the octopus. Over 10,000 VHS tapes sit in real piles on the floor of an 80s video rental store, and every title and cover on them was made by code I wrote, no generative AI. Getting them back on the shelves is your job, but you've got tentacles, a cart buddy, and a whole bunch of kittens to help.

Don't worry, you have 8 arms

Every one of those tapes is a real physics object, and grabbing them one at a time would take forever, so you don't. Each tentacle is a real arm you aim and reach with, so you scoop a whole pile at once, dump it in your cart, and slide tapes home while the shelf shuffles over to make room. Plop, plop, plop. Four arms carry tapes at the start and the other four are legs, so every new arm costs a leg. The legs stick to walls too, which is how you discover the rest of the store.

Kittens. So many kittens.

Earn a whole kitten army as you go. They wander the store, sit on the props you place, and once you put them to work they carry tapes all the way to the right shelf. Play some music and they dance. You can pet every one of them, as many times as you want, even with your arms full.

Every cover is made by code. No generative AI.

There are 600 movies across 16 genres, and the 10,000 tapes are rental copies of them. Every title and cover comes out of a pipeline I built from scratch, using open-source word banks. There's an in-game tape editor too, so you can retitle any movie you want.

10,000 tapes sounds like a lot. It isn't scary.

You can tell the genres apart at a glance, so you don't have to read every title unless you want to. The cart sweeps up whole piles and hands back just the genre you're working on. You're never running laps looking for the one tape you misplaced, and if a tape ever falls somewhere you can't reach, it turns up in the Lost and Found.

Every series has a row waiting for it. If you'd rather lay the store out yourself, there's an Unsorted mode where any tape on any shelf counts.

The store comes back to life as you go

• One-of-a-kind display copies are hidden in the piles. Pick one up and it lights up and flies to its spot on the wall. There are 600 to find.

• Finish a genre and your reward goes up under spotlights in that genre's color.

• Find tokens in the piles and spend them on a real claw machine full of tiny versions of decorations you haven't found yet. No rigged claw: line it up right and it holds.

• Cassettes under the mess add songs to the store's speakers. Or play your own music, turn on party mode, and watch the lights sync to it.

• Achievements print as posters you hang on the walls, stamped with your stats from the run.

• Dig props out of the piles and place them anywhere. Your posters and decorations carry over to every new store.

The arcade is filthy

Clear the dark patches on the floor and arcade cabinets turn up underneath. They've been buried for a long time, so they come up covered in dust and grime. Point at one, hold grab, and every arm that isn't holding a tape starts scrubbing. It works like a power washer, so the dirt comes off right where you aim and soap bubbles drift off as you go. There are 16 cabinets to clean, one for each genre, and finishing a genre turns that cabinet's screen on. There are minigames to play in there too.

Upgrades that change how you play

More arms, more tapes per arm, a roomier cart. Floor Sort turns a sweep into neat little piles by genre. Shelf Sense makes the right shelf glow. Juggler's Hands sorts your armful alphabetically. And there's a whole section of the upgrade page labelled "Curios - these do not help," like giant googly eyes for your cart.

Streamers: let your chat into the store

Twitch chat commands and channel points. You pick which ones are on and what they cost.

• !kitten A kitten wearing the viewer's name moves into your store.

• !kittensayhi / !allkittens Their kittens, or all of chat's kittens at once, run over and say hi to the octopus.

• !derby Every kitten in chat races across the store. Viewers boost their own kitten with !gokittygo, and the winner wears a little crown.

• !grump / !grumpyarmy One grumpy cat, or a whole gang of them, goes after your tapes. Petting stops them.

• !party Disco lights and a random cassette on the PA until the song ends.

• !tape A tape in your store takes the viewer's name as its title.

• !cart The cart does a backflip and spills everything.

• !drop Every tape you're holding pops up in the air.

• !dance The octopus drops everything and dances.

Mods and Workshop Support

Browse and add Steam Workshop packs right from the main menu. There are already official packs up: fan art from the community, funny patent drawings, dusty old sports and western photos, animals drawn by people who have never seen them, and real NASA photos that run across the Sci-Fi spines, so a finished row shows the whole picture.

Made so anyone can play it

Plays great on mouse and keyboard or a controller. Genres are told apart by shape and brightness, not just color, so the game stays readable for every kind of color vision. You can tune the size and font of the text (including a dyslexia-friendly font), and every single sound has its own volume slider, so turn the plops way up and the music way down, whatever your ears want. There are comfort options for motion and screen effects too.

Speedrunners

A built-in split timer with personal bests and gold splits, plus Steam leaderboards.

There's a lot more in here that I couldn't stop adding. The demo is out now if you want to try it first. Take as long as you want. The tapes aren't going anywhere.

Have fun!