Viscerafest - Dev Update: Post March Madness
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.
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!
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...
March sucked.
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.
Nuts.Blend
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.
C3L3 - Virile Vanity
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.
C3L4 - Nihilistic Necromancy
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.
Fan Requested Options
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.
Tutorials
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.
Art Updates
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...
Set Yoth - The Sacrifices
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.
Achievements
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!
Health and Armor Pools
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!...
Tis Goodbye For Now
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!