Behind the Build | The Mean Greens

Some of the best battles ever fought were staged with plastic toy soldiers. The Mean Greens turns those battles into a fast, friendly multiplayer shooter. You play as a tiny plastic soldier in a larger-than-life world. First released on Steam, the game now plays instantly in your browser on VIVERSE. In this Behind the Build post, lead animator Jamie Krautkremer shares tips and a few stories from development.

Meet The Mean Greens

The Mean Greens is a third-person shooter played from a toy soldier’s point of view. Join one of history’s oldest battles: Green vs. Tan. Every map is larger than life, so everyday places become huge battlefields. Ride rubber ducks across a bathtub or capture flags in a fish tank. On game night, fight over a paper-craft city.

Team matches are 5v5 and can expand to 8v8, or you can jump into free-for-all battles. Short on players? Bots fill open spots, so matches stay full.

How to play

Controls

If you’ve played a third-person shooter before, you’ll feel right at home. Use WASD to move and your mouse to aim and shoot. Prefer a controller? That works too, and the game also supports Steam Deck. You can play in your browser on desktop or mobile, or in the VIVERSE app for iOS and Android. Thanks to cross-play, you can match up with players on Steam too.

Maps and modes

The demo gives you five maps, each with its own mode:

The full version includes all 37 maps. You can buy it directly or play it at no extra cost with VIVERSE Plus. Many maps can be played in more than one mode, like team deathmatch or free for all.

It also brings some unexpected modes. Barnyard Ball turns the battle into soccer, and Jurassic Plastic pits soldiers against raptors. Elsewhere, you’ll free a frozen dinosaur, light birthday candles, or race to the cup.

Playing the demo with friends? If anyone in the server owns the full game on VIVERSE or Steam, every map unlocks. The maps stay open for everyone while you keep playing together.

Tips for new players

Here’s a tip I always give new players: don’t forget your grenade. It’s a powerful weapon that can win a close fight, as long as you have time to throw it.

Also, keep your eyes open as you explore. The maps are full of little easter eggs, and the Teddy Bear shows up somewhere in almost all of them. Can you spot it?

Behind the Build

A battle through a kid’s eyes

We wanted to build a game from the view of a child playing with their toys. That’s why some things look exaggerated, the way they might in a game of make-believe.

We were an extremely small team. Most of the time, only one person worked in each area of development.

Fun from the first match

The game also had to be easy for anyone to pick up and play. You shouldn’t have to grind for hours with starter gear to unlock the weapon that’s actually fun. In The Mean Greens, every player gets the same weapons right from the start.

Building on Unreal Engine 4 before the manual existed

One story I like to tell is about the engine. When we started on the original game, we got access to Unreal Engine 4 long before other developers did. Game engines weren’t nearly as easy to get back then as they are today.

Getting in early was amazing, but it came with a ton of challenges. The biggest was a complete lack of documentation. It was a bit like building a toy set with no instructions in the box. We had to figure out everything on our own. That gave us a great understanding of how the engine worked and what it could do.

The train that never moved

One obstacle in particular came from the Off the Rails map. Players battle on a moving toy train that circles a Christmas tree. We couldn’t keep each player’s position in sync over the network while the train was moving.

So, we flipped it around. We made the train stationary and set the entire room to rotate!

Bringing The Mean Greens to VIVERSE

The Mean Greens first launched on Steam in December 2015. More than a decade later, it’s ready for a new wave of players on the open web.

To bring the game to VIVERSE, we ported the entire thing from Unreal Engine 4 to Unity. Switching engines was a major undertaking, and the hardest part was the look. Each engine draws graphics a little differently. More than a million players already know how The Mean Greens should look, so we had to match it.

The result is the same Green vs. Tan battle, now playable in your browser. It even plays alongside the Steam version through cross-play.

Byline, bio and links

Byline: Jamie Krautkremer, lead animator

The Mean Greens was developed through a partnership between Virtual Basement and Code Headquarters, and published independently by Virtual Basement. The game’s leads were Andranik Aslanyan (lead programmer), Ashton Andersen (lead designer), and Jamie Krautkremer (lead animator).

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