Concept
A casual solo or co-op sci-fi mech game about cleaning up the galaxy's worst messes — one bolt at a time — for a real-estate megacorp that does not care about you.
The pitch
You play a crew of disposable cleanup robots working for Omni Estates temp, a galactic real-estate and reclamation megacorp. Omni buys ruined worlds for nothing because they're disasters — war zones, dead planets, abandoned cities — sends in the cheapest possible labor (you) to strip and clear them, then redevelops and flips the cleared land for a fortune. Money over morals, top to bottom.
You start as a beat-up Janitor-tier bot picking up cans and scrap and work your way up to a 40-foot mech that can flatten a debris field. But bigger isn't strictly better — only the little guy can reach the small stuff. Every tier has a job and none ever truly retire.
Tone
Light-hearted satire. Corporate comedy. Funny without being cutesy — the humor comes from the situation and the corporate doublespeak, not cartoon mugging. Kept consistently light; no swings into melancholy. Wall-E is a visual / robot-design reference only — we don't borrow the sadness.
Core Loop & Progression
The Need-for-Speed itch — a Corolla to a Ferrari — except your Ferrari is a 40-foot vaporizer mech.
The loop
- Select a job from the big Job Board screen at the Annex.
- (Co-op) gather the crew in the ready-up lobby and deploy together.
- Land on a world; clean and strip debris, waste, and hazards with your current bot.
- Deal with the Gewops and the salvagers underfoot.
- Resupply at the in-level ship when energy or ammo runs low.
- Return to the Annex; progress unlocks the next tier of bot.
- Re-select worlds — bigger bots reach what smaller ones couldn't; the Board lists new phases and contracts.
The progression bounce
Your garage of bots fills out and upgrades over time. You're never meant to finish a world in one sitting — you scratch at it with what you've got, leave to progress elsewhere, and come back more capable. The cross-world bounce is the game.
The moment to design around is the return: coming back to the Rich City you first picked at with a Janitor, now rolling in with a Demolition bot to rip open the underground nest you couldn't touch before. Returns have to feel like an upgrade flex, not a chore.
Loadout
You bring whatever you've currently unlocked — early on that's one or two small bots, so you naturally do a bit and leave. Swap among the small/mid bots freely in the field; the world-scale tiers are dedicated big-job deployments. Tier-gating is what creates the bounce on its own.
The Bot Fleet
Six tiers, each a distinct gameplay verb — not just "bigger." Bigger robots can't do small work.
The six tiers
- Janitor — small litter, pest mess (vacuum/grab)
- Recycler — sorts scrap & electronics for bonus rewards
- Heavy Lift — hauls cars, machinery, robot corpses
- Hazmat — contains toxic goo, byproduct, live ordnance
- Demolition — breaks structures, digs new paths, cracks big wrecks
- Planetary Platform — world-scale final clear
Tier names remain temp. You're a fleet operator, not a single upgrading unit — none retire.
Coverage check — every bot has a job in every world
The rule: no empty cells. That's what makes "return with a different tier" function.
| Bot | Rich City | Debris Field | Factory | Battlefield |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Janitor | Pest litter, husks, cans | Loose floating junk | Product litter, drone parts | Small debris, crawl cockpits |
| Recycler | Luxury electronics, designer junk | Dead satellites, salvage | The undeployed drones | Weapon electronics, materiel |
| Heavy Lift | Luxury cars, fallen masonry | Hull sections, ship chunks | Machinery, conveyor rigs | Destroyed war robots |
| Hazmat | Pest goo, biohazard nests | Leaking fuel, reactor cores | Toxic byproduct (big role) | Live ordnance, reactor leaks |
| Demolition | Dig into the underground nest | Crack the central mega-wreck | Shut down production lines | Break the crashed capital ships |
| Platform | Level it → data center | Clear field → space highway | Level it → new Omni factory | Clear field → the shrine |
Tools & energy
Core tools: vaporizer (disintegrates small debris), drill (breaks compacted/embedded waste), rack/grabber (hauls large items), plus tier-specific gear. Bots run on a battery system; some tools use ammo separately. Resupply is in-level — a rhythm, not a punishment.
Worlds
Four worlds, four independent disasters. Each gets cleared, then redeveloped into whatever Omni found more profitable than the people who used to live there.
1 · The Rich City
An affluent, gated luxury city, abandoned and infested. The intro / tutorial world. Surface is Janitor work; the source is an underground Gewop nest you return for with heavier tiers.
Redevelopment: levelled flat for a giga data center.
2 · Deep Space Debris Field
The junk-choked orbit of a dead planet — the sector's landfill. Zero-g, big-wreckage, satisfying "watch the field empty out." Where the salvagers debut.
Redevelopment: cleared into a toll-relay space highway; goes "live" and generates a maintenance contract.
3 · Industrial Factory
A defunct delivery-drone maker, still running on autopilot — churning out never-deployed drones into a dead market, burying itself in product and toxic byproduct. The active lines are the twist: shut them down or shovel forever.
Redevelopment: levelled for Omni's own bigger automated factory.
4 · Space Battlefields
A war-torn planet surface — capital ships half-buried, fields of destroyed war robots. Every soldier was a machine, so it's spectacle, not tragedy. The endgame world; live ordnance and still-armed derelicts make it the most hostile.
Redevelopment: a static Omni memorial shrine — which also houses the dev credits as three founder statues.
Enemies
Cleanup is the focus; enemies add tension and personality. Three categories.
Aggressive — Gewops
Ground-dwelling, bug-like vermin. Mundane in origin — they just bred out of control. Gross and relentless, not fearsome. They generate organic mess (nests, goo, husks) that feeds the cleanup loop, and make a perfect low-threat starter enemy. Scale varies by world.
Passive — Hazards
Obstacles, not enemies. Unstable debris, toxic pools, live machinery. Get in the way; don't attack.
Salvagers
Freelance scavenger-pirates and copper-strippers, in the world for themselves. They don't touch your cleanup objectives — they dig for valuable salvage, and you're the threat to them: your cleanup will haul off and vaporize the good scrap before they grab it. So they swarm, dig, and get underfoot. Pure swattable nuisance, never required.
The Annex
Omni Estates Clean Up Annex — the dingy cleanup depot bolted onto a real-estate empire. The afterthought division nobody from Omni proper ever visits.
Rooms
- Job Board (big screen) — dispatch + persistence interface; also how Omni "talks" to you, impersonally. (This terminal you're reading is basically it.)
- Garage / Bay — maintain, upgrade, tune, and swap your fleet. The one room that feels used.
- Training Bay — onboarding as corporate orientation; a years-old "Welcome to the Team!" video.
- Launch / Ready-Up Lobby — co-op staging; doubles as the sad break room (decorative coffee machine for robots who don't drink coffee).
- Trophy Room — collectibles & easter eggs from levels, flavored per world. A museum of everything Omni told you to throw away.
Resupply is not here — it's in-level.
Co-op, Tone & Tech
Co-op
Fun solo or with friends. Player count open — likely 2–4. No strict roles; different players cover different tiers on the same world. Casual drop-in/drop-out.
Engine & structure
Unreal Engine. Third-person (first-person planned later). Hub-and-spoke, not open world — select jobs from the Annex. Platforms open.
Open questions
- Final co-op player count & platform targets
- Monetization / release model
- Zero-g mechanics for the debris field
- Final names: tiers, the defunct drone company, the codex voice
Premise
The galaxy runs on disaster economics.
The fiction in one paragraph
Worlds get ruined — by war, by neglect, by pests, by sheer corporate carelessness — and once they're worthless, Omni Estates buys them for nothing, sends in expendable robot labor to strip and clear them, and flips the cleared land for a fortune. You are that labor. You don't restore worlds; you prep them for sale. The job is endless because Omni never considers anything truly finished — there's always more to extract.
Omni Estates temp
The company
- What it is: a distressed-asset reclamation and real-estate megacorp. Real estate is the flagship — "we don't build neighborhoods, we build capacity" — but it reclaims anything cheap-because-ruined.
- Model: buy ruined cheap → clear with disposable robots → redevelop and flip. The land is the money; salvage is a side hustle.
- Personality: startup-bro / prop-tech. Relentlessly upbeat, euphemistic, extractive.
- Voice: never addresses you directly — you're an asset, not an employee worth a phone call. Everything arrives through impersonal channels, the way a gig app talks to a delivery driver.
What We Are
Omni-built, Omni-owned
Omni develops its own robots — purpose-built cleanup units. We're not employees. We're property: cheap, disposable equipment. That single fact explains the unmanned Annex (we're not worth supervising) and the gig-app dispatch (we're equipment, not staff).
Loose thread open: a decommissioned, contract-wiped Omni bot could go rogue and become a salvager — "one wiped contract from being them," if we want it literal.
The Reclamation Web
Omni's actual product is disaster. The arsonist who owns the cleanup company.
The thesis
Omni doesn't only scavenge ruin — sometimes it causes it, then buys the corpse cheap to flip. This stays background: the Job Board briefings give Omni's cheerful, sanitized official version, and the truth lives in the gap between that and what you're actually cleaning. Never spelled out; inferred by attentive players, fed through breadcrumbs.
The escalation
World 3 — passive. Omni's space highway and logistics network killed demand for an independent drone maker, bankrupting it. Its factory was left running unsupervised because the parent corp that owned it was destroyed in the war Omni secretly started in World 4.
World 4 — active. Two corporations sat in a cold war. Omni, a third party, fed lies to both sides until the cold war went hot and they annihilated each other — purely to manufacture a fresh distressed asset. It didn't care who won; it just needed the rubble.
World Fiction
An affluent enclave overrun by Gewops that bred out of control. The residents covered up the infestation to protect property values, and that denial is what let it spiral until even the rich got run out of town by bugs. Death by city oversight. Omni flips it into a giga data center — something not even the former rich could afford. The food chain: pests humble the rich, the corporation humbles everyone.
The planet was used up and written off; once worthless, its orbit became the sector's free dump. Omni clears it and reopens it as a paid toll-relay space highway. The only thing more profitable than a free dump is the same thing with a paywall.
A defunct delivery-drone maker — driven under when Omni's highway killed demand for independent fleets, then orphaned when its parent corp died in the World 4 war. The automated factory never shut off, so it still churns out drones for a dead market. The drifting drones in the Debris Field are the same model. Omni builds its own bigger factory on the grave.
A corporate robot war Omni secretly provoked. All combatants were machines, so it's spectacle, not tragedy. Omni clears it and erects a gleaming memorial shrine telling a sanitized version of the war it started — visitor center, false plaques, and three heroic founder statues (the three devs, immortalized as Omni's fabricated saviors). Cleaning the battlefield quietly erases the evidence. The dev credits live here.
Salvagers & Gewops
The Salvagers
Freelance scavenger-pirates — garbage pickers, copper strippers — trying to make a few bucks. They don't take what you're there to clean; they dig for valuable salvage, and your cleanup is about to erase it. So they race you, get underfoot, and bug the big corporate bots. Faintly sympathetic, never villainous: broke independents losing to the machine by sheer scale. The "we're the same stock with a badge" irony, made visual — cobbled-together junkyard bots against your clean Omni units.
The Gewops temp
Ground vermin. The name is dumb on purpose — "the city fell to the Gewops" is funnier than any fearsome alien. Optional texture: Omni's codex files them under a sterile clinical designation while everyone just calls them Gewops.
Tone & Glossary
Writing guidelines
- Keep it light. The bleakness lives in the jokes, not the mood.
- Humor from situation & doublespeak, not quips.
- Personality through props, not narration — signage, video, UI microcopy, what the bots collect.
- "There's always a bigger predator" recurs: pests beat the rich, the corp beats everyone.
- Avoid: real melancholy, pop-culture references, fourth-wall winks, making enemies the focus.
The codex
The big-screen menu carries a codex — brief, optional entries on worlds, companies, species, and salvagers. Nobody's forced to read it; it's where attentive players go. open Written in Omni's spun voice, or neutral reference?
Placeholder glossary
- Omni Estates — the megacorp; committed working name, still changeable
- Clean Up Annex — the hub / depot
- Gewops — the ground vermin
- Tier names — Janitor → Planetary Platform, all provisional