Viscerafest News

Howdy one and all and welcome back to another Viscerafest Development update!
We hope you had a wonderful season remembering our Lord's death, burial,
resurrection, and ascension. Now you may have noticed that despite our expectant
comments from last time, we did not post an update in the throws of March
and there is a good reason for that...


In the opening weeks of March, yours truly was not only job hunting for part-time work but got sick and was bedridden for a good two days. Following this I did get back to working on the game, however, progress was demoralizingly slow as I felt like garbage for about a week. In addition to feeling like freeze-dried filth, the absolute halt to progress left me feeling very burnt out which meant that by the time we finally started moving again, I was feeling positively out of it.


In essence, development felt like a process of wading through deep mud, a fact that would not be rectified in the latter half of the month. On the 19th, I received a call from my mother letting me know that the 8-year-old daughter of my would-have-been In-Laws had passed away under rather harrowing circumstances, following which that Thursday I attended the funeral. It was a distressing and emotionally draining few days not helped by everything going on before it, and everything happening in the midst of it, as yes, more indeed happened that I will not mention here.

So that is in short why you have been left bereft of a development update until this day, progress has been slow, as unfortunately, life keeps happening. But with that said, I'm not posting this to inform you that no progress has been made, as in Marches wake, quite the opposite is true.

So after that just... real downer of an opening remark, let's get to the more fun part of this update.




So amid March's madness, I had hit a brick wall of burnout and I needed something I could
quickly pump out to get my spirits up and just... feel like I had accomplished something of tangible substance. I had some Icarusliv3s videos playing in the background as I cobbled together a lunch for myself and as the autoplay cycled videos one in particular popped into my cue. The video "Dukes Nuts" popped into the video player and it got me thinking...
You know... making a Viscerafest Nuts map would be pretty easy...
and I wonder what it would play like...


Thus between working on things that I actually needed to try to get done, I pumped out "Nuts.Blend" over the course of about 2 days... and it was magical. I still have some work I want to do on this map to visually polish it up a bit, but I'm planning to stick this map into the full game as a secret for all of you who wish to torture yourselves and your PCs.

Aggregious framerates have never been so colorful.




The third map of Viscerafest's third chapter still needs a bit of visual cleanup, on the whole, the map is a bit more visually rough right now than I'd like and as a consequence, I won't be showing you too much of it. Gameplay-wise though, the map is pretty much done! So let's talk about it a little.


C3L3 - Virile Vanity picks up where C3L2 left off with Caroline arriving at a massive elevated plateau in the midst of a hedge maze. The level primarily sees you diving below and above ground to navigate this maze before finding your way to the level's finale amidst a courtyard that features a massive pit.

The level also introduces a new fun little puzzle mechanic, one that gets a fair bit more use toward the end of the chapter, and one that will be quite familiar to those who have a bit of Quake under their belt. The level also builds upon the new Chapter 3 roster of enemies with a good 3 or so new enemy types added to the fray, two of which you'll be familiar with if you've been following our updates for any significant period of time.




Now C3L4 and onward is where I'll be getting more tight-lipped about a level's given contents. Obviously, I don't want to give you guys a thorough rundown of every little thing that happens in every chapter 3 level but C3L4 is where we begin to breach into territory I would consider downright spoiler-ish.


As a matter of fact whilst I will tell you about C3L5 likely in the next update I probably won't show you anything past its opening room as that level is... particularly special...


But that doesn't mean I have nothing to say about C3L4 as there are a few things I can let you in on. C3L4 introduces the last of the chapter 3 enemy roster, and by this point in the campaign, it's quite a star-studded cast of foes.


This is when the combat in chapter 3 really starts to take off in my opinion and the level features some of the most fun and also most intense combat encounters in the game's campaign. Viscerafest becomes basically borderline bullet-hell at this point and it is downright glorious.




We frequently get requests to tweak, add, or adjust certain things within the game, and every once in a while, (should we deem them good suggestions) we finally get around to adding some of those requested features or making some of those requested tweaks.
Now is indeed one of those times!

Many players have requested an option to disable the difficulty warning that pops up when you boot up the game. Now you can already skip this by holding the escape key, but yes we have indeed added an option to turn it off completely.


A fair few folks have requested the option to adjust the frequency of Caroline's One-Liners, some because they want to hear them more frequently, some because they want to hear them less frequently, and worry not! We've got you covered on both fronts as we now have a slider that allows you to adjust said frequency.


A small few have asked for the option to disable the little camera bob that occurs when you fall and land on the ground, a toggle button has been added for your convenience.


And then finally we know some folks don't like being told they've died 300 times, so there is now an option to disable the game's death counter as well.






So in the developer update "Known Issues and Stuff" we went through and talked about some of the content in Viscerafest that we felt was lacking. Since then, most of the issues we brought up have been, or are being addressed, but there was one issue we have had in the cards to deal with for a while now that we just hadn't gotten around to yet, and that was the game's tutorials.


For those of you not in the know in the current version of the game Viscerafest's tutorials are little more than walls of text that abruptly pop up on screen when you bump into an invisible wall. They're kind of annoying, feel designed in a way that encourages players to skip them, and more importantly, because it's an uncontextualized wall of text they do a poor job of giving players a solid idea of how to really make use of the mechanics they are trying to teach the player about. The old tutorial level itself didn't really help with this either to be honest, it was rather lackluster and didn't really do a good job of providing scenarios that would allow the player to adequately learn.

The consequences of this were that despite how skilled someone might've been at FPS games in general they were often given a poor idea of how to play Viscerafest. I've seen people who suck at shooters do wonderfully at Viscerafest just because they stumbled into the right way to play, and conversely, I've seen decent players bang their heads against a wall just because they didn't really grasp what they were supposed to be doing. Now some of the latter was admittedly self-inflicted in certain circumstances, but I can't help but feel that the poor tutorialization contributed to it.


So a while ago we completely remade the game's tutorial level. Shortly after we decided to make the tutorials triggered by pickups to avoid the annoyance spawned by invisible walls initiating them. But now we have added the final ingredients.


The tutorial popups now contain video footage of yours' truly doing the action described in the tutorial contents in an effort to better contextualize what's being said, giving you a visual example of the action being asked of you. But this way you're being shown what to do, not just told. Certain mechanics that were formerly never tutorialized (Such as Melee Resistant enemies) now feature their own tutorial sections. Tutorials are also broken up more now with several being multi-part to avoid vomiting an abrasive wall of text onto your screen.


With all of this, we're hoping to do a better job of equipping you all as players to enjoy our game. As a developer, it's never fun to watch new players bang their heads against a wall and find themselves bouncing off our game because of *our* failure to teach them. It's one thing if players just don't enjoy the game we're making, or another if players ruin the experience for themselves, that's fine, I don't like those scenarios but I can stomach them. It's a whole other issue when they might have genuinely enjoyed what we made, but we just did a poor job of equipping them too.




As with almost every update now there have been a host of updates to the game's sprite and texture work, however, there are a couple I would like to address this time more specifically. For starters the armor pickup sprites. Whilst editing C3L4 I noticed the scaling for said pickups was a complete mess, and in fixing the object scaling in the editor I realized that 3 of our armor pickups were too high resolution, and one of them was too low resolution. So I quickly went through and redrew the sprites, and since our protagonist is female I figured I would aim for a more feminine look with the pickups than I had originally gone for.


As is per usual now several Chapter 3 textures have been updated and polished up, as well as the sprites for a few props. Some pre-existing props have received tweaks to better situate them within the context of outdoor environments. Several of the game's older liquid textures such as blood, Milk, and the various Liquid "falls" have finally been updated and given the proper pixel scaling. One special little enemy I can't talk about has received a great deal of artistic love put into his fun little hives.And now finally, the Sacrifices have received some sprite sprucing up! Speaking of which...


So when we were in the midst of readying Viscerafest for its early access release back yonder
in 2021 we were, to be frank... rushed. A lot of hardcore crunching and all-nighters were pulled to
hit our release date, which... we didn't... the early access was delayed by a month but... that's beside the point.


Being rushed there were several areas of the game where for the sake of simplicity we said "we'll work on it later" and we slapdashed a quick and easy solution for the time being until we had the time to do the job right. The sacrifices are by far the most notable example of this. The A.I. of the Sacrifices is basically just the A.I. of the game's enemies tweaked and repurposed for your little NPC pal, and this creates some problems...

Enemies utilize a navmesh to do things such as avoid obstacles, navigate around hazards, etc... Because of this enemies don't really have physics... enemies can't fall, jump, or really do all that much vertically, and the one enemy in the game that does have physics works completely differently from the rest. Not only are the... shall we call them benefits? Of using a navmesh not things we wanted the Sacrifice to be able to do, but the lack of physics poses a problem for some of the puzzles we planned to design with them.


The Sacrifice puzzles were meant to have your A.I. partner just track the player. As a consequence,
it would be up to said player to keep their little buddy out of lava pits, out of the way of blade traps,
and away from the fire of unfriendly foes. Upon falling prey to a trap or acid pit, your little buddy would
respawn back where he started, and you could try again. Now this mechanic is not used very often in
the game, it's used most in chapter 3, but only once in each of the chapters before it. We were able to effectively cheat the puzzles somewhat in chapters 1 and 2, but for 3...
we needed to finally implement their A.I. proper.

This is something we've actually had on the docket of tasks for ages...
It's just that more important tasks have frequently gotten in the way, but with chapter 3 being the primary task at hand, it finally found itself at the top of the tasks pile.


Ok so this is not actually something we've worked on yet but it's something I thought
I would address it because it keeps coming up. Yes, Viscerafest will have achievements
and they will be coming with the game's full release. Currently, we have about 80-90
achievements planned some will likely be cut from that list, and others added, but I
suspect that's roundabout the number we'll be sticking with.

So here's a quick sampling to give you an idea of the achievements we have planned.

• Participation Ribbon (Beat Viscerafest on any difficulty)
  
• Back in My Day... (Conquer an entire chapter of Viscerafest never once using a save beacon)
  
• Shawn's got the Shotgun (Find the Bunker Buster early)
  
• You Can't Evade Me Forever (Find 20 secrets)
  
• Maximum Overdrive (Overstack your health pool to a value of 400)
  
• Non-Copyright Infringing Band Name (Find the MIM ammo pickup in Wayward Watchers)
  
• AAAAAAH SHADDAP!!! (Interrupt Mortice's Monologue in Evanescant Evacuation)
  
• I Love Sweet Baby Rays (Kill 8 Maledicts with the BBQ Belter)
  
• Just had to make sure... (Toggle the does nothing button)
  
• Feeling Lucky? (Waste ammo by shooting a scientist)
  
• Somebody Beat you with the Ugly Stick (Conquer - REDACTED- on Brutal Difficulty or higher)
  
• You're Going to Hell (You know what you've done...)
  

Now in copying and pasting this list from my notes there is one change we made a while ago that I never mentioned in any of the dev updates, at least I have not to my recollection... So let's talk about that change real quick too!


So in the current Steam version of Viscerafest, you're able to overstack your health and armor. As is typical in retro shooters your health and armor caps out at about 200. However, in our current dev builds, you can overstack your health and armor to a value of 500.


Now you may be wondering... why did we make this change? And that is a wonderful question that I wish I could remember the answer too. I do recall there being some generally well-informed design reasoning that went into this decision, but I never wrote it down... and this was a decision made ages ago that we didn't pull the trigger on until a good few weeks after the decision to make this change was made. Silly me.

Regardless, I can tell you that being able to frequently surpass the 200 HP cap that used to exist feels very fun for some reason and comes in rather handy for chapter 3.

But!...




As always thank you for all of you who take the time to actually read this stuff, and by extension thank you to all the wonderful folks who have been supporting us throughout the game's development. You are all a wonderful blessing, and we couldn't do this without you! But as the day doth end so must my rantings about the game's development. But before we close I thought you might want to know...

We've added randomized sprites of Caroline crying to our Quit to Desktop prompt so you can feel like the monster you truly are...


We love ya'll, and we pray you have a wonderful day!

Hello everyone!

Work on Viscerafest is in full swing and we can't wait to show you more of Caroline's story! For now, if you've already killed all the enemies and discovered all the secrets in the current content of Viscerafest, maybe you have a hankering for a different boomer shooter experience?

If that is the case, it might interest you that WRATH: Aeon of Ruin, a brutal hardcore FPS inspired by Quake, is leaving Early Access today. It offers an epic experience full of lethal weapons, blood-thirsty enemies and a unique "90s" look that will take you back to a time when the FPS genre shone the brightest; while maintaining a modern approach, including original gameplay elements.

You can now get WRATH: Aeon of Ruin here on Steam.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1000410/WRATH_Aeon_of_Ruin/

And if you want to get yourselves a really sweet deal, check out these bundles where an additional 10% discount applies - this is especially handy if you already own some of the games, since you will only pay for those you don't have yet!

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/12693/

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/39216/

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/39215/

Shalom Ladies and Gents!
We hope you've had a wonderful opening to the new year, it's certainly been a productive one on our end. Thus, in the wake of February now being in full swing, Valentines day being right around the corner, and the birthday of yours truly being the 12th, (which by the time this update was released may have already passed...) I thought it was high time we gifted you with another Viscerafest Developer update!


So without any further ado...




The rough draft version of Viscerafest's final level is complete! A lot of the loose ends have been addressed, and the level is now playable (though in a very rough state) from start to finish. There's still a lot of work to do on the Finale to get it ready for release, but as was mentioned last time, I'd begun the work of finishing and polishing up the rough draft version of chapter 3. Now that the Finale's first pass is done, we're full steam ahead on the cleanup work.





Speaking of cleanup... there's a pinch more work I need to do in wrapping up Chapter 3's second map, but with that said, it is very much on the verge of completion. So let's talk about it!


C3L2 - Blighted Babylon is the player's first venture into the world of Rhanak Zethir, and with that, there's a host of new foes awaiting you therein. There are roughly 4-5 new enemies introduced with your foray into this new world, and a few of them bring some nasty new tricks to the table.


The level itself is very free-form in its overall structure, and with the exception of a few bottlenecks that act as funnels between the major sections, you have a fair amount of freedom to roam around and putts about.


But hey what about those enemies I mentioned? Surely there must be something interesting to talk about there...


A fair few of the new faces introduced in C3L2 are enemies that I've given you all a peak at in prior updates. However, there are 2 introduced in the map that I've not revealed to you as of yet. One of which I'll be leaving for the game's full release, but the other... We can talk about him...




You may have spotted this little blight in the promotional art for Viscerafest's final chapter. There's a couple of them floating yonder in the background being silly little goobers. But make no mistake these lads are mean.

The Adopted Mage is a flying enemy that fires a full auto barrage of slow-moving projectiles which they lead their aim with, but the fun does not stop there! Adopted Mages have yellow shields! 
Yellow shields, as opposed to red ones, can deflect projectile attacks, but only moderately reduce melee damage. And on that note! These little stinkers are weak to melee attacks.
Similar to the drones these lads drop their shields when going to attack you, but unlike the drones, they don't have any defense mechanisms against melee attacks. So if they get low enough to the ground for you to throw hands with them, it's worth doing!




As always we're constantly refining the game's art, updating refining, and polishing up old stuff to make it look as nice and purty as all the new stuff.






With Markie back on the team the first big thing we've been cracking down on is getting a fair chunk of the game's story content ready for implementation. Whilst we've had the dialogue recorded for months, a lot of that voice work needed to be cleaned up and given its fair share of sound design before it could be added to the game proper.


Most of the VA work is done with but a few exceptions, and because of that both C3L1 and 2 have most of their story dialogue and narrative events implemented already.
There's only one more character whose content we're working on dealing with right now, and... Well... Speaking of which...




Cinematic 6 is finally getting its sound pass! Wew!!!
Not much more to say about it other than that, don't want to spoil anything...


But you know what I do want to spoil?




Well my dear sweet summer child I am so glad you've asked...

This last month we have been finalizing our plans for the purchaseables present within the hub's shop. Whilst we've known the *kinds* of things Viscerafest's shop would contain for you to purchase, what *specifically* has been slightly more up in the air, as we've been throwing ideas back and forth for quite some time.

The short answer as to what exactly the shop will contain is...
Cheat codes.

Well... Cheat Codes and Gameplay Modifiers. Basically... Lots of ways to spice up repeat playthroughs of Viscerafest's campaign. Now if that doesn't sound appetizing to you... Just wait... With the 30+ we've got planned there's bound to be something you'll like. Heck let's talk about a few shall we!!!

[h2]- The Basics -[/h2]
As I said, Cheat codes are on the docket of purchaseables, and with that comes the fairly vanilla stuff you'd expect. There's Invincibility, infinite ammo, Regenerating Health and or Armor, Berzerker mode, all your fairly standard fair to mess around with.

[h2]- Viscerahot -[/h2]
Oh, but this... This is the premium stuff right here...
Ya'll know what superhot is? Time slows down when you're not moving? It's fun stuff! But with Viscerahot time slows down the faster you move! So as you enjoy bunnyhopping through the air blasting foes left and right you get to enjoy the sweet songs of slow motion along the way!

[h2]- Blitzkrieg -[/h2]
Is Viscerafest just not fast enough for you? Why... Just try Blitzkrieg! And increases the overall game speed of Viscerafest!

[h2]- Instagib -[/h2]
Your arsenal gets replaced with a railgun that one-shots enemies...
Also, all the ammo pickups are replaced with ammo pickups for said railgun.


[h2]- NC-17 -[/h2]
So in older versions of Viscerafest, the names for the game's difficulty settings were effectively based on the Motion Picture Association's film rating system, easy was "G" medium "PG" and "NC-17" was the hardest difficulty. On NC-17 every enemy in the game could one-shot you. So you could probably guess what this modifier does.

[h2]- Oops, All cultists -[/h2]
All the enemies in the given level you're playing? They're cultists now.


[h2]- The Minus Touch -
[/h2]If an enemy touches you, it dies.

[h2]- Dope Mode -[/h2]
Ok, but kids we've had our fun...
There are genuinely many more I've not mentioned here but we just...
We just can't leave today until we've talked about Dope Mode...

In Dope Mode... You get to play as Dopefish... Instead of punching enemies, you slap them with your big tongue...And you're Dopefish... And you make farting sounds when you dash because Markie is pissed I wouldn't give Caroline Dash boots so he could make an interesting dash sound and threatened to blackmail me by sneaking fart sounds into the full release with a 1/1000 chance that a fart sound would play instead of the generic dash woosh sounds so I offered to let him add the fart dash sounds to dope mode instead... And you're dopefish...

[h2]- And Many More -[/h2]
As I said we currently have more than 30 planned for the game's full release. Some of them may or may not make the cut depending on where we're at, but there'll a lot of fun stuff tucked away in the shop for you to experiment with. And hey who knows! We may even add more after launch...




Some of the tasks that I have been far less intimately involved with, but nonetheless have very much been getting done is some more technical cleanup work. My lead programmer Elijah has been applying some hefty elbow grease to optimize our backend in the name of improving performance, collision detection, culling some tech debt, fixing minor bugs, etc...


Basically, he's been tackling a lot of the less flatteringly interesting stuff that often gets taken for granted but should amount to the game running better and smoother for you all in the end.




As I said it's been a rather productive month give or take, and as I write these final sentences I'm about halfway done with the cleanup work on C3L3. I don't have anything quite ready for public display on that front, but I most definitely will come March, and heck... I may even have some C3L4 stuff to show come that time.

But as with all our updates, they must eventually come to an end... That way I can get back to work.
For all those who bothered to read through my goofy ramblings, I appreciate it! And I hope you enjoyed it. We hope and pray you have a wonderful day, and that God might bless you!

Adios!

Happy New Year, Everyone!!!
We hope you've had a wonderful holiday season! 
You may have noticed there has been a gross dearth of updates from us as of recently.
That is because whilst we have indeed been working this whole time, there's not really been much to show or update you on...

The last few months have been spent working on the game's finale and polishing up its third chapter.
These are time-consuming tasks that involve either heavy spoilers, or stuff that's just not really interesting to showcase until the work is actually done...

As it stands currently, we are still knee-deep in the midst of both these tasks. Thing is now we actually have something to show for them. There have also been a number of other important changes and tweaks that we can talk about along the way.
So without any further ado...





The opening level of Viscerafest's third chapter is almost completely done! There's some sound work it needs yet, its OST and several small bug fixes. But otherwise, the level is playable front to back! So let's talk about it a lil' bit.


In the wake of Viscerafest Chapter 2's ending Caroline once again steps through an archegate into the Great Divide, the primary difference now being the route this takes her through has a formerly well-established U.S.C. presence.


Various U.S.C. Checkpoints bridge the gap from this entrance into the Great Divide through to its exit into Rhanak Zethir, which resides in the realm of the Elder World. This will be Caroline's final goodbye to the U.S.C. before she steps into territory they have lost.

Unknown forces have removed the conglomerate's presence from Rhanak Zethir, and this will mean that soon Caroline will be fighting more than mere flesh and blood.


C3L1 in a similar vein to C1L6 and C2L5 is one of Chapter 3's more story-heavy maps. But unlike the prior Great Divide levels, it is also more elaborate, and combat-heavy. Honestly... as of writing this, it's easily one of my favorite levels, and I can't wait for you guys to play it!




On a much less significant note, I've effectively completely reworked the physics and behavior of the Grenadiers'... well... grenades.


In my humble opinion, they were a bit too chaotic in the midst of combat, often flying around and ricocheting off the environment at borderline untrackable speeds, thus I felt the need to reel them in a bit. They no longer fall as quickly and generally have a slightly slower, more floaty presence to make their movements easier to visually track and deal with. It's a relatively minor change all things considered but one that I feel makes this enemy a bit nicer to go up against.





Viscerafest's first flying enemy has just received some rather notable changes and updates.
The Nomad Priest was one of Viscerafest's final enemies that needed a sprite update, so I
gave the kind lad a pretty new paint job.

In addition to this though I felt like amongst the Chapter 3 enemy roster his old set of attacks
meant he didn't have as firm a footing in that part of the game. Other enemies did his job
better and were more interesting, thus I felt the need to spice him up a bit in order to set him
apart from the crowd.

I won't say what these changes are, I'll let you find out with time, but I feel he has a stronger place on the roster now as it stands.





This isn't necessarily entirely new but slowly more and more work has been being
done to refine the look of our menus further. Not anything too exciting, but ya know...
it's stuff we've been working on... So I thought I would mention it.






As I mentioned in the intro my big focus of late has been polishing up Viscerafest's third chapter,
and a big part of this is refining the look of all these maps. You may have noticed I've been... stingy...
about showcasing Viscerafest's third chapter until now, and there's a good reason for that.


The levels for a long while now have been in a... "Rough Draft" stage, and as a consequence,
they're quite ugly and rough around the edges. Not only were/are there missing props and gameplay
elements that have yet to be added, but the lighting is... *oof* and the texture work is especially rough
and sloppy.

This "Rough Draft" stage is something we've done with all of Viscerafest's levels in the past. Prior to release, most of Viscerafest's levels were pretty rough, but the rough drafted-ness of chapter 3 has been particularly egregious until now, and that's why I've been very picky and hesitant to show ya'll any of it. If I was going to show you guys a glimpse of the chapter, I wanted it to leave at least a somewhat positive impression upon you all, and I just knew that most of the third chapter was not ready for primetime.

Being able to finally go through and "clean house" so to speak, is immensely satisfying, and I can't wait to show you all more and more as the rest of these maps hit their final stages!





For those of you not aware toward the beginning of this year we lost our Composer Michael Markie. In the wake of life's craziness, he was effectively forced to step away from the project as he no longer had the time to work with us.

Into his place stepped Geoffplaysguitar who you may know did the OST for Viscerafest's second chapter. But whilst I am eternally grateful for Geoff, Markie did far more than make the game's music.
Markie was our sound designer, he mixed audio, polished up VA recordings, made the entire game's audioscape, did the music and sound for the cutscenes, and then some. This was by far the more damning aspect of losing him, which is why I am happy to say that HE IS BACK BOIS!!!

In the wake of recent events, Markie has been able to hop back on board the project to help us finish up the game's audioscape. As you may have surmised I am overwhelmingly overjoyed regarding this fact, and I'm very excited to finally be able to start making progress on that side of things once again.




With Chapter 3 in its cleanup stage, it's safe to say that you'll be seeing much more of it here in the coming months. With that, we may even start showing some gameplay soon here to give you a taste of what the chapter will be like. It's also worth noting in addition to the above a whole host of balancing changes, optimization tweaks, and other more minor stuff has indeed been accomplished as well, but it's all stuff not really worth explaining here.


But that is all for now. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to catch up with us! It's always a pleasure. As always we hope you have a wonderful day and a very happy new year!

Shalom one and all! It has been about a month since Realms Deep and thus as promised
we are back with yet another Development Update! First things first though, we dropped
a new trailer at Realms Deep! Which you've probably already seen, but in the case you've
been living under a rock you can check it out right here!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

In addition to the new trailer we also showcased the updated opening cutscene we mentioned
in our "Birthday Cruisin" Devlog. That of course you can check out right here!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

And as if that were not enough I've also started doing a series of YouTube shorts in which I'll be breaking down some of the game's mechanics, enemies, weapons, etc... and you can find those in this playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJg0WI2Gczzm-UAa_AhETu7BVErHGkT0l


But let's not waste any more time, and jump right into what we have been working on these last few months!!!



[h3]The Warhound[/h3]
A few updates ago we made mention of a whole suite of changes and tweaks being made to Viscerafest's arsenal and the accompanying reasons as to why said weapons were getting a facelift. But there was one more weapon I wanted to make changes/adjustments to, and that would of course be the game's grenade launcher, The Warhound.

The Warhound was a weapon that originally took a great deal of inspiration from one of my favorite weapons of all time, the Grenade Launcher from 1997's original Shadow Warrior. It was an absolute beast of an explosive weapon, with splash damage so stupid you were just as likely to kill yourself with it as you were your foes. And our little spin on it with The Warhound was... underwhelming.

Admittedly... I personally feel that in both function and presentation, our rendition of the beast was rather forgettable and often fell to the wayside in the wake of more immediately useful weapons. Because of this, I knew the gun needed an update, but what that update would be was something I hadn't solidified yet.

During the process of Chapter 3's development, I also stumbled across another little problem that I had
with our arsenal. Viscerafest has 9 weapons, and whilst functionally they all contribute and play an important role within the game's combat suite, juggling 8 different ammo types in the game's last 3rd honestly felt like slightly too much, I really felt as if we needed to cull one of our ammo types in the name of streamlining the resource management a bit.

Thus the first major change I decided The Warhound would need is that it would share ammo with The Pung Cannon, and accompanying that would be a design change to both reflect the new ammo type and to hopefully make for something more visually memorable.


But accompanying this change, I had a truly wonderful and stupid idea... What if I made the Warhound's Clusterbombs functionally behave more closely to sequenced explosions of Rise of the Triads Firebomb?


So functionally the Warhound is now one of Viscerafest's most powerful weapons, firing a bundle of 3 pung canisters that detonate into a massive cross-shaped sequence of explosions. It's also been bumped up from the 7th to the 8th weapon slot, meaning you'll be getting it after the BBQ Belter in the main campaign now.


[h3]Player Movement[/h3]
Movement is something that I kind of obsess over when it comes to Viscerafest. It's something I'm always trying to improve and fine-tune. This is because, in First Person Shooters, the one thing you do more than shoot is move. Thus if your movement is bad/mediocre, I would personally consider that to be a really big problem.

Lots of little tweaks and refinements have been made to things like player speed, the ease-in/ease-out of the player's motion, the player's friction against the ground, and basically just... all of the important stuff to take note of when finessing your player's movement. But in making these changes there was one major complaint I was also taking aim to address, and that my friends, is the platforming. Personally, I've always considered platforming in Viscerafest to be rather easy, but a lot of folks do not share this sentiment, and there are a number of factors that I think contribute to this.

1. - The Jump Arch -
   The Arch of a jump is effectively the curve the action follows as you leave and eventually head back toward the ground. It's dictated by a number of factors, the force with which you leave the ground, movement speed, the force of gravity, player mass, air friction, etc...
   
   Viscerafest's jump arch didn't quite get the level of attention that I think it necessarily needed in order to be fine-tuned for platforming. Thus more time has been spent trying to find the right balance of all the above.
   
   
2. - Bunnyhopping -
   In Viscerafest repetitive jumps made in sequence whilst moving in a given direction cause you to build up speed very quickly, a little too quickly in some cases. As a consequence of this, if you were a little too trigger-happy with your bunnyhopping you could very easily see yourself gaining enough speed to grossly overshoot a given jump. And whilst you have the air control necessary to correct a mistake like this, most players aren't particularly movement literate when it comes to fps games, thus they lack the muscle memory to do so consistently.
   
   This is an issue somewhat exasperated by how the platforming sections in Viscerafest are designed.
   Platforms are often small surfaces tightly bunched together in clusters, and because of this, it's very easy to jump straight from one to another in an effortless chain. This effectively causes players to inadvertently bunnyhop and subsequently gain enough speed that a single jump overshoots the platform they were aiming for.
   
   
3. - No Forgiveness -
   Many games that prominently feature platforming as a core part of their loop typically have mechanics set in place that act as buffers should the player make a mistake. Air control is a great example of this, being able to make minor adjustments to, if not completely change your trajectory mid-jump greatly relieves the burden of faulty decision-making beforehand, and it's one of the reasons why Viscerafest has always had it. But there's one mechanic most games with platforming have that I've only recently been made aware of, and I think it may have helped ease the platforming burden a bit had I both known about and seen it implemented sooner. That mechanic, of course, is coyote time.
   
   Coyote time effectively gives a brief window of forgiveness. If say you fall or slip off an edge whether
   because of negligence or attempting to jump too late, rather than being doomed to your fall you can still jump if you attempt to do so soon enough.
   

All of the above are factors we've put under consideration when attempting to address and refine the game's movement. Thus all of the above have been tweaked in order to find that sweet je ne sais quoi between movement for combat and movement for platforming. And with all these changes I think it's an issue we can confidently say has been addressed.



[h3]Hud Faces[/h3]
Throughout the course of Viscerafest's second and third chapters, various narrative events take place
that somewhat alter Caroline's demeanor, as a result, though Caroline's signature grin is always a welcome sight, new expressions have been drawn up to allow Caroline to more adequately express what she's feeling when these moments roll around.


[h3]Blood Updates[/h3]
So for starters, I recently discovered that the sprites we were using for our blood effects were scaled incorrectly. They were way too small, and thus I had to go in across the board and tweak the arts scaling. This realization and its accompanying tweaks also allowed me to cut back on the amount of effects needed to adequately convey a big bloodsplosion when gibbing enemies without having to cut back on the overall feeling of its volume, so that's cool.


But more importantly, there were a few enemies in chapter 3 whose blood effects created visibility problems and this called for the creation of a new smaller blood sprite set along with adjustments to the blood visuals in general.

There are also new sounds for blood, little sploshing sounds as the blood trails and puddles hit the ground, along with some improved effects and visuals for when that happens.


[h3]Sprite Updates[/h3]
As with literally every development update, I have to inform you that more improvements have been made to old sprites, textures, and assets to further improve and refine the look of the game. 

I don't know how to categorize the rest of this stuff so... :P

[h3]Voice Acting[/h3]
With the Script finalized I've been making the rounds with our voice actors, directing and recording
the bulk of the remaining dialogue we'll need to round out the game's story. We're not quite finished as of yet, there are a few remaining things we have yet to record, but the end is very much nigh...



[h3]Cinematic 6 - Relent[/h3]
In the wake of us rounding up the VA stuff Viscerafest's 6th Cinematic has finally been fully animated, it still needs a big sound pass (something we are not able to accomplish at the moment) but progress is progress dagnabit, and seeing what in my opinion is both one of the most important and exciting cutscenes of the game finally come to life is a real treat.


[h3]C1l4 - Remake[/h3]
Currently, I spend the bulk of my weekdays working on the game's ending and Finale, but I've decided to allocate my weekends to more unimportant side tasks. Because of this, I've been able to pick up progress on the remake of Viscerafest's first chapter once again. Thus I thought I might share some screenshots of the old version of C1L4 compared to its WIP update. The newer shots are not in engine yet, so they do not feature any fun colorful lighting, but I do feel the improvement to the geometry and texture work speak for themselves.

Old - 1

New -1


Old -2

New - 2

[h3]The Finale[/h3]
Well, this has been a pain...
As with prior updates very little I can actually say about this one.
But the bulk of my time on this front has been consumed by mapping.
Currently, as of writing this, I'm working on the final boss arena, and as with the rest of the map it's been a bit of a time sink. Whilst the game's ending level is not particularly elaborate in layout it definitely has some of the largest setpiece areas in the game, and as a consequence yeah... It's been a bit of work...

But in other news, progress has also been made on the game's final boss, again not something
I can say too much about... other than I think you all will like it. :>


That however is all from me for now!!!
There have been other things I've been working on as well but it's either stuff I can't talk about or stuff not worth bringing up here. For example, I don't think you guys need to read 30 paragraphs of me explaining why I lowered the Blitzer's health pool from 800 to 750, or buffed the shredders' damage from 20 to 22. I'm sure just mentioning those changes makes you feel as if you are being robbed of some truly riveting reading, but trust me it's not worth your time.

Once again though if you read all the way through, or just stopped by to check out the funny pictures I appreciate it! And as always we thank God and you for the wonderful support and encouragement ya'll have lent us throughout the course of the game's development. As much as we enjoy it, development has been a real grind at times, but seeing all the fanart, playthroughs, streams, and kind comments you all have lent us throughout the game's life cycle never ceases to make us smile.

As always we hope you have a wonderful day, and as of writing this, I hope you have had a very spooky Halloween!!!