The Steam Awards - PowerWash Sim for Labor of Love
Hello Washers!
It's that time of year again, The Steam Awards! It has been a great year for PowerWash Simulator and we'd love for you to nominate us for Labor of Love.
The FuturLab team put their heart and soul into giving you all the best PowerWash Simulator experience you could have, and since full release in July 2022 we've had the pleasure of adding:
Calling all brave Washers! Prepare yourselves for a chilling new seasonal job for PowerWash Simulator.
This Halloween themed seasonal job we're plunging you into a haunted house covered in grime and slime. Complete with spooky tombstones, ghoulish pumpkin patches and plenty of dirt to bust with your new Halloween fitting washer, suit and gloves
This new Halloween Seasonal is available for everyone to trick-or-treat themselves to for free right now
From October 10th until October 14th you’ll be able to wash away your worries with a Steam Free Weekend.
Been looking to blast away the grime solo, or flow through Muckingham with a friend? Now is the perfect chance!
During this free weekend you’ll be able to perfect your PowerWashing prowess with:
- 38 career jobs - 14 bonus jobs - 2 seasonals - Tomb Raider Special Pack - Midgar Special Pack
If you decide the cleaning life in Muckingham is for you, you’ll also be able to continue where you left off after purchasing PowerWash Simulator, which is currently 30% the base game and 25% off a bunch of our special packs!
SpecialEffect are a gaming charity that look to transform the lives of physically disabled people right across the world through the innovative use of technology. At the heart of their work is the mission to maximise fun and quality of life by helping people control video games to the best of their abilities.
To support SpecialEffect’s big charity fundraiser, One Special Day, FuturLab will be streaming over on Twitch for a day filled with dev talks, giveaways, gaming, and sharing the importance of the work SpecialEffect do.
You can follow our Twitch page here to watch our stream live from 2pm BST/9am EDT, Friday 4th October. We'll have game codes and merch for giveaways, as well as a few other big prizes! The more we raise, the more we'll be putting into giveaways, starting with game codes throughout the stream & PowerWash Sim plushies coming on socials!
If you would like to donate, our fundraising link can be found here, or scan the QR code below. We will be giving away game codes, PowerWash merch and more as we hit targets throughout the day, so every little helps support the incredible work that SpecialEffect do.
You may remember a little while ago we had the opportunity to take part in the PowerWash Simulator Research Edition. https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1290000/view/3409807423269852954?l=english
We would like to start off by thanking everyone that took part and helped us with this 💙
The results of the Oxford Research study have come back and this study found that while playing PowerWash Simulator, 72% of players had an uplift in their mood
The PowerWash Simulator Research Edition was created in collaboration with the Oxford Internet Institute, part of the University of Oxford, to study the effects of playing video games on the mental health of players. Many people in our community have shared with us anecdotes about how relaxing and calming they find PowerWash Simulator, and this study was an exciting opportunity to gain some further insights into how our players feel while playing one of our games.
In this first-of-its-kind study, players volunteered to participate in research by donating their PowerWash Simulator play data and regularly reporting their mood in the game. The study concluded in March 2023, after an overwhelmingly positive participation rate, with over 8,695 players from 39 countries worldwide.
The final paper is now available and the researchers from Oxford have found that a predicted 72% of players experience an uplift in mood while playing PowerWash Simulator, based on statistical modelling of player data. Across 162,325 in-game mood reports from our players, the average player reported a more positive mood during play than at the start of each session.
Players consistently reported a higher mood after the first fifteen minutes of the play session compared to the start of each session, this change is comparable with changes seen in other leisure activities such as reading, shopping, or listening to music.
The research team from the Oxford Internet Institute carried out the study to understand more about the short-term effects of playing video games.
Lead author Assistant Professor Matti Vuorre, Tilburg University and Research Associate, Oxford Internet Institute said: “At present, short-term changes in video game players’ moods are poorly understood. Gameplay research frequently relies on artificial stimuli, with games created or modified by academic researchers, typically played in a lab environment rather than a natural context. Instead, we wanted to know how real play in natural contexts might predict player mood on short timescales.”
Unlike other studies in this field, the Oxford study is the first of its kind to examine changes in mood during play sessions in a minute-by-minute resolution. The research edition was nearly identical to the main game, with the addition of in-game pop-ups asking players to report their mood, delivered by a newly created character called ‘The Researchers’ making them part of the game lore, ensuring minimal disruption to the player experience.
James Butlin, one of our Lead Programmers here at FuturLab, led on this project and said: “Working with the team at Oxford Internet Institute was incredibly insightful! They were very supportive throughout and actively engaged with our challenge of designing a user experience that could deliver the study questions with minimal impact on the gameplay.”
We’re really proud to have been a part of this study and excited to see such positive results come from it. It has given us an insight into how our games affect the wellbeing of players and we hope to continue making games which provide our community with a satisfying, soothing experience. Thank you to everyone in our incredible community of players who took part in the research and volunteered their time to play the Research edition of PowerWash Simulator.
At FuturLab we’re always trying to implement more ways to make PowerWash Simulator more accessible to everyone. An example of this is our Aim Mode feature, which has been shown to help with the effects of motion sickness, which you can read more of here:
Today we’d like to show you more about an upcoming change to the dirt highlight!
This will be included in our next update and will change the highlighting in two ways
Firstly, you’ll be able to switch between 7 colours:
Orange (Default)
Red
Green
Blue
Yellow
Pink
White
The second change will be the duration of the highlight. This will have a sliding scale from 0.9 seconds up to 5 seconds long, which should decrease the need to spam that highlight button
Will, FuturLab Multiplayer Programmer, had a lot of input in prototyping these changes. He says a couple of his reasons for working on this were "the community requests and seeing content creators struggle to find some dirt due to the colours. The second was because playing games with people that have some form of colour vision deficiency made me realise how easy it is to be a barrier to some things in games."
These changes will only affect the highlight colour, the pulsing when picking a subtask in the tablet menu will remain the same as it has been.
We’ll have more news soon on when this will be coming to PowerWash Simulator, along with our Shrek Special Pack, but you won’t have to wait too long!
We also have an updated roadmap for you all, more news on our seasonal specials coming in the not too distant future!
Do you have any thoughts on our highlight changes, or other accessibility features you'd like to see added to PowerWash Sim? Let us know in the comments ⬇️
