Viscerafest News

Well! This is somewhat bittersweet.

So, you've likely noticed that it's been a hot minute since our last dev log, and that was no accident. We're very much in the final stretch of Viscerafest's development, and because of that, there's been progressively less exciting things going on. More time and effort has been put toward just cleaning up what exists rather than doing anything fancy or new.

Truthfully, it's stuff that's not particularly exciting to talk about, and thus, I wanted to wait until enough interesting things had accrued to make a brand new post. Well just the other day we dropped a new trailer with a big announcement in it, so surely that means we've got more than enough to warrant a new post, and with that, this will probably be our final Devlog post. That's not to say we won't be posting anything; maybe as we get closer, we might give you guys sneak peeks and whatnot or talk about some fun craziness that's happened, but the posts like this one that we've been doing for the last year or so, are indeed coming to an end.

But before we get into the dev log part of this developer log,
we should tackle some more big-picture stuff first.



[h2]That New Trailer...[/h2]
As I said above, we released a brand new trailer and, in case you missed it, announced that the game would be released in April 2025 (aiming for early April).

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Now, obviously, that is not the 2024 window we stated in the Realms deep trailer we dropped about a year ago, so what happened?

Well, truth be told, we were actually somewhat adjacent to on track for a 2024 release. When we dropped that Realms Deep Trailer, we assumed we would see the game released in late 2024, probably sometime in October-November. With our current rate of progress (ignoring the OST), a December release would've been tight but feasible.

But in August, our publisher approached us and asked us to change our plans, and there are a couple of reasons why.

1. Our publisher has a lot going on during the end of this year, and their marketing, QA, and Translation teams are currently and will remain busy through to the new year with the projects they have in the works. Adding another project to the fray means ours or another project would suffer as a consequence.
   
   
2. There are a host of releases stealing the limelight right now, and that's likely only going to get worse toward the end of the year. The ideal timeframe to release would have been during September, but because that was not possible, business-wise it would be smarter to wait til the new year.
   
   
3. They want to ensure the game is done by the time the release date rolls around.
   Initially, we proposed February, but for business reasons, they felt April would be a better time to drop the game, as well as give us more time to tidy things up.
   

[h2]Console Ports[/h2]
Being so close to the end of development has gotten our lead programmer, Elijah, thinking about one big thing we've been neglecting up until now: console ports! We proposed such to our publisher about a month or so ago, and we can now confirm that, yes, sometime post-launch, Viscerafest will be getting console ports.



Theoretically, development-wise, a simultaneous release could've been possible. However, as we have now been made aware, there is a host of fun, time-consuming legal nonsense involved in porting our game to consoles. Currently, we're mainly focused on the Xbox and Switch, but we'll likely be looking to tackle PlayStation as the other two to pick up momentum.



[h2]A Baby Boy[/h2]
So, a few days after the last major development update post went live, our lead programmer's bride gave birth to another healthy baby boy! Which is pretty cool, but pray my guy gets some sleep.



[h2]A New Composer Enters the Ring...[/h2]
So our boy Geoffplaysguitar was initially slated to do the OST for Viscerafest chapter 3.
However, his schedule was booked until about June-July, so we were left having to wait to start working on it until he was available again. Well... in reconvening with him, unfortunately, he was still working on said projects, which were supposed to be done by now. (Funny how that works :P) Unfortunately, there's not really a solid estimate as to when said projects will be wrapped up. (Funny how that works :P)

Thus (in what will inevitably be misinterpreted as an ingenious creative decision) each of Viscerafest's chapters will now feature the works of their own standalone composers, with Viscerafest chapter 3's OST being composed by Primeval (Aka John S. Weekley) whose body of work you may be familiar with if you've played the stellar DOOM mods composing the Ashes 2063 saga! (also, hi Vosty :>)

For the last month or two, we've been working with John on nailing the sound of Viscerafest Chapter 3's OST, and I'm very comfortable saying he will be more than capable of finishing us out on a strong note.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]





With all that preamble out of the way, it's time to talk about what we've been working on the last few months. To kick things off...





Chapter 3 is done, or well... it's close to being done. Last we talked about chapter 3; we were working on taking the "Rough Draft" versions of the chapter 3 maps and cleaning them up to get them to a place we were more comfortable with.


That cleanup is mostly done, and the levels are in a far better place than they were when we left them. However, there's still more work to be done before they're ready for release. For example, the only playable difficulty in chapter 3 right now is Nightmare (the other difficulties don't have enemy or item spawns set up).


The chapter is missing some story dialogue along with its entire soundscape; there are several progression-blocking bugs, along with some performance issues in a couple of locations present in a few maps; the boss fights need some tweaking, some enemies have buggy behaviors, etc, etc, etc...

Mostly, a lot of minor maintenance work with a few big remaining things to tackle.
But the chapter is playable from start to finish and is in pretty good shape heading into the final polish phase.





With the bulk of chapter 3's work done, the focus has shifted to cleaning up the rest of the game, which is what we're focusing on right now. While we've done a bit of work on Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 on the side, most of the game's levels that you can now play in early access haven't been touched since our last major patch, which was over a year ago.

In working on chapter 3 (and some other stuff I'll talk about soon), a lot of stuff got updated, changed, improved, and optimized in such a manner that it inevitably rippled throughout the rest of the game. For example, we made changes to how explosions work and are triggered, as well as to how explosive walls work and are triggered. This resulted in several of chapter 1 and 2's levels having cracked wall secrets or progression points that no longer work because they used the old systems for these things. Thus, we have to go back through them and tidy them up.


In addition, we want to make changes to address some feedback we received during the early access period. For example, there's an elevator in C2L4 whose switch absolutely baffles and befuddles new players, some areas where players get easily turned around, and that one level in chapter 2 with lots of platforming that was remade mid-development and rushed out the door due to time constraints that has a tendency to really piss people off... You know, that kind of stuff.


But even beyond that, we had always planned to do a major balancing pass in the lead-up to the game's release. With the final chapter playable, we can establish a better throughline with the game's difficulty curve and by extension, implement the planned changes to the game's pacing to improve the overall experience.


My primary focus for the moment is stuff like this, along with making these old levels a little bit prettier.
But a bit more work has been done than just what's been mentioned with the chapter's stuff, so let's get to that.





Welcome to Heuristic Halls! Viscerafest's hub!


The hub that you guys experienced in the early access period was effectively a placeholder;
there was a bunch of stuff that we had yet to add, and the overall visual presentation of the hub effectively used Chapter 1 textures due to time constraints. We've been planning on making these additions and changes for AGES, and it is so awesome that we finally have been able to make them.

This was teased in the game's tutorial screen when you guys reached the hub after the Prelude, but Bestiary and the Lorebrary are finally accounted for. As you progress through the campaign in the Bestiary, you'll unlock little statuettes of the enemies you face. These statuettes feature placards with more details regarding the enemy's species, faction info, etc...


In the Lorebrary, you'll unlock more general info about the world's history, characters, and locations, accompanied by a little companion named VIX, an A.I. character who was actually cut from early drafts of Chapter 2.

Obviously, as implied above, the game's hub has been given a massive visual overhaul to separate it visually from the rest of the campaign, and it's even got a funny little name now. Hooray! There's even more stuff in the new hub I've not mentioned, mostly for spoiler reasons, but to close the hub stuff out...


There's also the shop! With our own little shopkeep! So you'll finally be able to spend all those Skullies you've been collecting! Speaking of which...





As mentioned in one of the prior updates, the content you can unlock in the shop includes gameplay modifiers and cheat codes. This is another big thing we've been working on for the last while.

28 of the 30 gameplay modifiers are now implemented, with most of them being finalized. The last two remaining ones that have yet to be implemented are an enemy randomizer and a pickups randomizer. Also worth noting... Some of the gameplay modifiers (the randomizer included) will feature enemies you will not see in your standard playthrough of the campaign. These are enemies we will be primarily featuring in an NG+ Mode we intend to add post-launch, but we thought we would sprinkle them in for you here.


In tandem with this, the game's save system had to be entirely rewritten to account for how a modifier playthrough deviates from a standard playthrough, and with that, improvements have been made to the game's save system in general.





So, because I hate myself, I decided to add mugshot sprites for every variation of the different combinations of powerups (Even across the OG Caroline and Dopefish skins) that you can pick up at any one time, and with that, you can now stack powerups. There are not too many times in the campaign where you will see this happen (though powerups appear much more frequently than they did in the early access version). Still, a couple of the cheat code unlockables use powerup functions as their base, invincibility, for example, and thus, with being able to mix and match those, you'll be able to see the effects reflected on the hud.






For a variety of reasons, a number of semi-significant changes have been made to the game's weapon, "The Plague Rifle." Without getting into it too much, the two big ones are that the Plague Rifle now has the second fastest player-side projectile in the game, as well as an arching path through the air.





I mentioned the Lorebrary and Bestiary above, and a big thing we've been up to lately, in addition to all that we've mentioned prior, is writing up their contents. With about 30 critters to write up Bestiary entries for and about the same amount of Lore entries, there's been a lot of writing to do.





The art for Chapter 3's final cutscene is done! And it has also now been fully animated!
The only thing left to do for it is a sound pass!





Art updates! So... So many art updates...
This obviously, in part, is due to us revisiting those old levels from chapters 1 and 2.
There were lots of old, ugly textures that needed fixing, but beyond that, there were still 1 or 2 enemies (such as the Watchers) that hadn't gotten an art update yet. Also! A good chunk of props needed a good brand-new lick of paint.






As I said, somewhere overhead? This will likely be the final developer log before release. It certainly won't be the last time you hear from us before then, especially not if you're following us on Twitter or hanging out in our Discord Server. Viscerafest's release is rapidly approaching, and I cannot tell you how excited and terrified I am to say that.

But thank you for taking time out of your day to read this!
May the Lord of Glory multiply and bless your days.
And I pray you have a wonderful morning, evening, night,
or whatever frame of time you currently dwell within.
Adios!

Hello everyone!

The day has finally come! As Viscerafest is a part of the BOOMSTOCK event, we can announce that the game will leave Early Access in April 2025!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We can't describe how happy we are to finally share what we've been working on during the past years. Of course, it would not be possible without your support throughout the Early Access period, we are lucky to have such an awesome community!

We are not there yet though, so, please, keep those thoughts and feedback coming, whether it's here on Steam or on the Viscerafest Discord server where you'll most welcome!

The exact release date will be specified once we get closer, so keep your eyes peeled.

And if you don't have enough, check out the rest of the BOOMSTOCK event participants, as there are many great games showing new trailers, adding new content or even launching!

Viscerafest has been in early access for a little over 3 years now,
and its last patch was over a year ago...


Now when I say that out loud boy howdy am I slapped in the face with just how much time has flown us by. But beyond that, it certainly raises the question "What have we been doing during all that time?" Today we aim to answer that question for the folks who have not been obsessively stalking our every move. 

If you've not been religiously following our every update, then this one will catch you up to speed.





Well for starters, Viscerafest is primarily only worked on by 2 individuals, Me (Noah or Acid Man Games) and Elijah (or Fireplant Games). We certainly have other folks working with us to make the music, sounds, cutscenes, and Voice acting, but the "game" part of the game, the content that most everything else is scheduled around is only being handled by Elijah and I.


Viscerafest is a big game for only 2 (formerly full-time but now part-time) developers, which has certainly contributed to the slow progress. But more importantly, life has been pretty rocky during the game's development, and very little has seemed to go our way.

To give a small sampling of what has taken place since we dropped into EA, I've dealt with sickness, major technical issues that left me unable to work for weeks, unplanned game updates and patches that interrupted our development schedule, I got engaged, had my fiance break up with me, my grandma passed away, my family moved, etc, etc...


Now more could indeed be said on this front. However, I'm primarily aiming to give you a sampling of why things have been slow, not a comprehensive breakdown, which would take much... much longer.





There are two primary reasons for this. The first is that after the last major patch we released, we had a host of changes and improvements we wanted to make to the game. But before publicly releasing these changes, we would have to completely rebalance the entire campaign's enemy and item placement. This is because said changes would alter various aspects of how the game played, and would not mesh well with how the game was balanced at the time.


The big issue here is that once the game is done, we are going to need to completely rebalance the campaign's placements anyways. So if we were to push said changes in an update, it would have meant that we would need to have rebalanced the game not once but twice, which is a waste of time.

The second reason is chapter 3. Our primary focus has been working on the game's final chapter, and whilst yes, in our spare time we have gotten lots of other stuff done (as you will soon see). The time spent getting a patch ready is fairly significant. It can take a good 2-3 weeks just to get an update approved for a public release, and thats time we could instead spend on more important tasks.


Now there are indeed other factors that have contributed to the following choice... But as a consequence of the above, we chose to refrain from updating the game until its full release. This is also why we've been frequently posting development logs to keep you all somewhat in the loop. We didn't want it to seem like the game had died, or we'd fallen off the face of the earth.

But Enough Preamble... 

I'm making this post because far more has been tweaked, changed, and added to the game beyond just the new chapter 3 content. So that of course inevitably leads us into the question...





The answer is a lot... A lot has changed...
So much so that I'm going to structure this as if I were writing up a semi-detailed list of patch notes to keep things simple... ish.

Viscerafest is a much... much better game now. It almost hurts to watch people play the early-access version, and hopefully, as I lay out what's changed below you can get a sense of why...

[h3]The Player:[/h3]

• Updated Spritework for fists and Legs.
  
  
• Coyote Time has been added to the player's move set. Now for a brief duration after falling the player can jump in the air.
  
  
• Hold To Bunnyhop is now by default set to on, many players did not know the option existed, and having it on will make the game more approachable for those with poor muscle memory.
  
  
• Various tweaks have been made to the player's movement physics, speed, air speed, ground friction, acceleration, etc... both to make tasks such as platforming more approachable and add a further layer of polish to the player's movement.
  
  
• The speed and duration of the player's dash has been tweaked and refined.
  
  
• The player's Health and Armor caps have been buffed from 200 to 500.
  

[h3]The Arsenal:[/h3]

• Most weapons have received major sprite improvements and revisions.
  
  
• The visual effects of every weapon have been substantially improved with major art improvements and revisions as well as new art drawn up for some of the effects.
  
  
• Every weapon in the arsenal has received a substantial balancing pass. Weapons that were formerly not very useful are much more so now.
  
  
• The pacing and revealing of certain weapon types has been altered to help improve early-game combat.
  
  
• The Player's starting pistol (The Skull-Piercer) has had its damage buffed from 35 to 150 damage. It now costs 10 ammo per shot to fire, and is now a glorified mini-railgun that can instagib several low-tier enemies.
  
  
• The Shredders now have a small AOE stunning effect that can easily stun-lock most enemies.
  
  
• The Bunker Buster now does double damage to enemies if you risk receiving splash damage
  by point-blank shooting an enemy.
  
  
• The Pung Cannons explosion now does double the damage of hitting direct shots, making it more useful when aiming at the feet of enemies rather than directly at them.
  
  
• The Deus Mortis now has a new mechanic where you can call the pellets you've fired back to your current location. This new mechanic allows you to hit the same enemies twice with the same pellets.
  
  
• The Plague Rifle and Deus Mortis have swapped weapon slots with the Plague Rifle being in Slot 5 and the Deus Mortis being in slot 6.
  
  
• The BBQ Belter and Warhound have swapped weapon slots with the BBQ Belter being in Slot 7 and the Warhound being in slot 8.
  
  
• The Warhound now uses Pung Canisters as ammo, with the Plasma Grenade ammo type being cut from the game.
  
  
• The Warhound, rather than releasing a flurry of cluster bombs upon exploding, now detonates in a cross pattern similar to the Firebomb from "Rise of the Triad".
  

[h3]The Enemies:[/h3]

• Most enemies have received major sprite improvements and revisions.
  
  
• The Visual effects of enemies firing and or otherwise attacking the player have been substantially improved with major art improvements and revisions as well as new art drawn up for the effects.
  
  
• The game's Gore system has been entirely reworked with major art improvements and revisions as well as new art drawn up for the effects.
  
  
• All enemies have received a substantial balancing pass.
  
  
• Several enemy types have received new attacks and behaviors.
  
  
• 3 New enemy types have been added to chapters 1 and 2.
  
  
• The pacing and revealing of certain enemy types has been altered to help improve early-game combat.
  
  
• Melee-resistant enemies now have purple armor or purple skin to help the player visually identify whether or not an enemy is melee-resistant. Enemies that were formerly purple but not melee-resistant have had their color scheme changed.
  
  
• Melee-resistant enemies have new visual and audio effects that play when the player punches them to help the player understand they are doing less damage.
  
  
• Melee-resistant enemies are no longer stunned by melee attacks.
  
  
• Drones, which were formerly melee resistant are now weak to melee attacks. (But they still have their melee counterattack.)
  
  
• There are now 2 types of shielded enemies. Enemies with "Red" shields can deflect all attacks with the exception of explosive and fire-based attacks. Enemies with "Yellow" Shields can deflect all attacks with the exception of explosive, fire-based, and melee attacks.
  
  
• The physics of enemy grenades have been tweaked and refined to make them feel less chaotic in combat.
  

[h3]The Pickups:[/h3]

• Most Weapon and Ammo pickups have received major sprite improvements and revisions.
  
  
• Ammo and Weapon Pickups now have rings around their base that make them easier to spot mid-combat.
  
  
• The Collisions for most pickups have been improved which has also helped to resolve various bugs.
  

[h3]The Prelude:[/h3]

• The opening Cutscene has received updated artwork and minor editing tweaks.
  
  
• The game's opening tutorial level has been completely remade. It has mostly retained its original layout, but now features various minor improvements including, better texture work, improved visual clarity for elements important to progression, better combat spaces, as well as additional areas for tutorialization.
  
  
• Brand new Secrets along with a few revised old ones.
  
  
• Tutorials are now triggered by question mark pickups rather than invisible walls to make their appearance feel less abrupt and annoying.
  
  
• Accompanying Tutorials the text explaining what you need to do are videos that showcase the mechanics discussed in action. Furthermore, Tutorials such as the melee tutorial are broken up into multi-part sections, in order to better introduce players to the nuances of the mechanics. Finally, the mechanics are often put in a context that will see you actually being forced to use them, such as with using the dashes I-Frames.
  

[h3]Chapter 1:[/h3]

• The Chapter 1 levels are being completely remade. They have mostly retained their original layout, but now feature various minor improvements including, better texture work, better flow, improved visual clarity for elements important to progression, and better combat spaces.
  
  
• Brand new Secrets along with a few revised old ones.
  
  
• New scripted sequences, some of which help to contextualize the jump from level to level.
  
  
• Brand new as well as revised old dialogue some of which has been tweaked or added to better set up events that take place later in the game's story.
  
  
• General pacing changes.
  
  
• Some super special stuff I don't want to spoil :>
  

[h3]Chapter 2:[/h3]

• Various visual/aesthetic improvements such as better texture work, and improved visual clarity for elements important to progression.
  
  
• Performance fixes to levels such as C2L6 which originally did not run very well.
  
  
• Brand new sprites for the boss variant of the Interdimensional Shambler
  
  
• New/tweaked dialogue.
  

[h3]The Menu's/HUD:[/h3]

• Menu's/The player's HUD has received major sprite improvements and revisions.
  
  
• Added new art for level title cards as opposed to using the in-game font.
  
  
• An option to disable the difficulty warning that plays upon booting up the game has been added.
  
  
• An option to adjust the frequency of Caroline's one-liners has been added.
  
  
• An option to disable the camera bob that occurs when you land from a fall has been added.
  
  
• An option to disable the death counter has been added.
  
  
• The Layout for the controls menu has been tweaked for ease of use on a gamepad.
  
  
• Menu's are navigatable keyboard only.
  

[h3]Misc:[/h3]

• Too many bug fixes to count.
  
  
• Various backend tweaks to help the game run better.
  
  
• A bunch of new Combat one-liners for Caroline (A few of the older/more cringy ones were cut, but even still we now have over 100).
  
  
• Even more sets of difficulty names! (there are now 30)
  
  
• New death messages.
  
  
• Reworked the Sacrifices A.I.
  
  
• Completely redid controller support, should now be plug-and-play.
  
  
• And more...
  

I'm not going to lie... this actually ended up being even longer than I was expecting it to be when I started writing it. But as you can see, when I said a lot, I was not joking. Truth be told, there's honestly probably even more I just forgot to include, and it's worth noting more work will be done before the game's full release, so the above list will get longer...
Probably not too much longer...
But still longer.





Now as shocking as this may indeed sound, all of the above... that's just stuff we did on the side.
About 80-90% of our time was spent focusing on the brand-new content, though there is a lot less to say about it because well... we don't want to spoil it.


First chapter 3...
Chapter 3 features 11 brand-new enemy types, 7 brand-new levels, all of which are notably longer than the former chapters' levels. A small bevy of brand-new mechanics, and a couple of uh... neat little boss fights ;>
Chapter 3 is where we've been spending most of our time. It's been a bit more ambitious than the former chapters, and let me tell ya it's a blast... but it's still not quite done yet. Soon though... (TM)

Secondly the ending.
Yeah I uh... I won't say much about it, but make no mistake, the ending has been just as much of a time sync as the bulk of chapter 3's maps.


Thirdly... Dem Skullies...
As you parade your way through Viscerafest you will collect a host of fun little grabbems that go by the name of Skullies, and with these in the game's hub you will be able to buy cheats, and gameplay modifiers that you can use when replaying a map. Some of them we have in already, others we're still working on. But I think in total the final game will have about 30...
Also one of them lets you play as dopefish.

Fourthly! LOOOOOOOORE!!!
So if you did not know, Viscerafest has an obnoxious amount of Lore, and I entirely blame Elijah for recommending we include it in the game. As you play through the campaign you'll be able to unlock chunks of the game's lore that you can read up on in the Hub. Shockingly writing up said lore can take a little bit, but I'm not joking when I say at one point shot Elijah a message telling him that "I am hiding a political thriller in Viscerafest" Which let me tell you was not on my to-do list when I started working on this game.


I was hoping to make this a short and relatively accessible post but that's very hard to do when I'm also trying to catalogue all the progress we've made over the course of an entire year. Trust me there were some things I wanted to go into far more detail about, however... we do have the old developer logs you can back and look at if you want more information as to why we made certain decisions.

Heck... you can also always just ask us a question! I frequently check the comments on all the posts we make, so rest assured if you have something you'd like to know about the game, I will likely be there to respond ASAP.

I think the only major thing left to address is at last year's Realms Deep we announced a 2024 release date. If that happens it will likely be toward the end of the year just so you all know. I really want the game to come out this year, and I know Elijah does too. Things keep happening that make that seem harder and harder to pull off, which has not left any of us happy on the development side trust me. I have been working on this game for 12 years of my life, and I don't want to make it 13, but I also want you all to receive a finished game, and I'm sure my publisher feels similarly... ;P





Thank you all for your support, seeing the encouraging comments, fanart, and general support always brings a smile to our faces. I don't thank the Lord for the blessing you have all been to us nearly enough, and I want you all to know that you've routinely lifted our spirits through frustrating and difficult times. We pray the Lord bless ya, keep ya, and make his face to shine up ya.
And we hope you have a wonderful day.

Sincerely,

Noah

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!