Howdy, ladies and gents! And welcome back to that thing I said I wouldn't be doing again!!!
Aren't I a stinker!
Last time we chatted, I said that devlog would probably be the last one we did, and I meant it. But!
I still intended to post something of substance for you all to read. I was hemming and hawing about
what to post, though. Something about the game's development history? Perhaps something
about the game's story? But now did not particularly feel like the right time for any of the ideas I was
coming up with.
Regardless, enough work and developments have accumulated that I do, in fact, have something to talk
about from a developmental perspective. It was getting to the point where I was honestly planning on ending whatever I posted with a mini-devlog of sorts anyway. So I thought... "Eh, why the heck not? What's one more devlog? It's not like anybody is going to care..."
So! Without any further ado...
Here's one more devlog for your reading pleasure!
OST and Sound
We've been in the trenches a bit working with our new composer, John S. Weekley, on establishing
and refining the sound of chapter 3's music. Thus far, the score screen track and the song for C3L1
are just about done save for some final polish. Up until recently, John was working on Coven, which
just dropped recently, but now his schedule is a lot more open, so we're heading forward at a much quicker pace. We recently dragged Markie into the equation to help refine the sound of the music a
bit, and because of that, we've mostly been tinkering with the two above songs to make sure they're perfect before moving on to the rest of chapter 3's tracks.
As for the audioscape though, Markie has been having a darned tooting heck of a time up until recently. Without getting into the nitty gritty details, he'd gotten a home that, for, uh... stupid reasons... he wasn't able to move into for quite a while, which, as you can imagine, slowed us down a tad. But now! He's finally been able to move in! He's been in the process of re-establishing his workspace, and once he does, the work should start getting done fairly quickly.
As a final note on the sound and music side of things, several songs that were previously not on YouTube (notably "Signal to Slaughter" and "Minutes to Midnight") are now on our channel along with the rest of the OST! So, if you care to jam, you can check out our YouTube playlist with fancy little visualizers here!
Youtube Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJg0WI2Gczzn_RnszpXIdh5qnGebxOrhZ
General cleanup
There are a lot of little systems in Viscerafest that the average player probably doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about, but they are there, and just like the big boys, they need some polish too. We've made a cavalcade of fixes to our oneliners system: voice overrides, respawn mechanics, Players starting position and aim, gibs, jump pads, weapon auto swapping, push puzzles, occlusion culling, ladders, explosive barrels, cutscene skipping, powerups, save system, switches, UI, etc...
Enemy Polish
Lot's of little tasks in this category that we've been plugging away at, more than I will likely be able to easily recall. A couple that stand out in my mind though...
The parasite enemy type has been a particular nuisance. Parasites don't navigate via navmeshes or nodes like most of our other enemies, they jump around kind of like the spawns out of Quake, and this can make them a real pain from a technical perspective. We've had lots of issues where parasites have clipped through walls or floors, and we have had to fix them. We've dealt with some problems that resulted in them skipping their windups and immediately flinging themselves toward the player when they are not supposed to. We've fixed a bug where they would just infinitely glide through the air, never
actually landing from a jump. Another issue we fixed is sometimes the parasites would just deal double damage to the player, because why not? But it's not all been bug-fixing with them! Because they're one of Viscerafest's smaller and faster enemies, they can occasionally be difficult to track visually. To help with this, we've given them a trail that they leave behind, which makes it easier to keep an eye on their movements. There are also some technical issues related to how we balance them across difficulties, and so we've altered what aspects of their behaviors change from difficulty to difficulty.
There are a couple of enemies that can come back from the dead in Viscerafest, and one particularly annoying and hard-to-replicate issue tied to this mechanic is a bug where the enemy's invisible and invincible corpse will continue to pursue and attack you. Related to this, these kinds of enemies don't always play nicely with scripted sequences, so we've been working to resolve that as well.
There's a flying enemy that gets introduced in chapter 3 who was moving when he wasn't supposed to, that's been fixed. That same enemy occasionally stopped attacking the player for no reason; that's been fixed. Melee enemies had an issue where their movement speed would multiply exponentially, which we fixed. Some of the tankier enemies/bosses have had their stun mechanics reworked a pinch to make sure they are not pushovers. And finally, of course... Enemies have received a vast multiplicity of balancing and behavioral tweaks.
Chapter 1 Polish
Being the oldest levels in Viscerafest's campaign, chapter 1's maps, while polished(ish) mechanically, were pretty rough around the edges in virtually every other regard. Because of this, we decided to remake them and spruce them up a fair while ago, something we've been slowly plinking away at in the background whilst tackling more important tasks. Now! Chapter 1's rework is almost completely done! And it should be wrapped up before the year ends.
The Prelude up through C1L5 is all done and dusted, with only a pinch of audio work remaining for them to be 100% completed. The same will be the case with C1L6 by the time this devlog is reviewed by our publisher and sees the light of day. Otherwise, we've been plinking away at general polish work on all the levels of the game's first chapter. This includes difficulty balancing with the enemy and item placement, setting up the ambient audio volumes that dictate things like the scale of a room and how sound resonates through it. Minor bug fixes, some of which related to how saving works, etc...
Chapter 2 Polish
While Chapter 2's levels are indeed more recent than chapter 1's, they are very much still in need of some intensive touch-ups. Whilst not nearly to the same extent as Chapter 1's levels, we've been going through and giving Chapter 2's maps a solid facelift, as well as completely reworking and improving their encounter setups. C2L1, C2L2, and C2L3 are all virtually finished in this regard, C2L6 is close behind, and C2L7 is midway done.
Once work on C1L7 finishes up, we'll be continuing our work on Chapter 2's general polishing labor.
Otherwise, though to a lesser extent, a lot of what I said for chapter 1's polishing work carries over
to chapter 2, just a bit more WIP.
Chapter 3 Polish
Save for the boss fights, missing audio, difficulty balancing, and some save issues, Chapter 3 doesn't have a whole lot more work left for us to tackle. Given we spent so much time already cleaning it up, it's almost at the finish line - so our primary focus has been bringing the earlier chapters up to speed. With that said, we recently had a milestone to meet with our publisher that involved us sending a content complete build to them so they could look everything over. This highlighted some technical issues for us internally that we spent a fair bit of time working on. Amid that, I also found a method
to help optimize one of Viscerafest's less performance-friendly levels, C3L3 - Virile Vanity.
In essence, the vast majority of the work we've done on chapter 3 as of late has been bug-fixing, most of which was tied to some of the new enemies we introduced, and I highlighted a few of those issues above.
The Thing You Can't Escape
In the section above, I mentioned a little milestone that we were working on that we recently had to send to our publisher. Working on this milestone dredged up some memories, some truly horrifying memories, and because of that, I feel talking about this milestone would be an appropriate way to end this update.
Game development is a rough time, and nothing quite highlights the pain it induces more than playtesting. Don't get me wrong; I love playing Viscerafest; it is a game I have made for myself, first and foremost, after all. The problem is that... when you go to make a build for testing, or perhaps a build that will get released publicly, you must ensure that the build works fairly flawlessly. I mean, obviously, there will be bugs and whatnot, but generally speaking, most players/testers should be able to get through the experience without any significant hiccups. This means before the testers test a build, we, the developers, have to test the build, and doing so calls to mind that belovedly memed scene from the film entitled "A Clockwork Orange."
There are a host of stupid, nonsensical, ridiculous bugs and issues that crop up during game development, and my favorites are the kind that only show up when you export a build or are in the midst of a long play session. Nothing quite ruins a day like a soft lock that only occurs when you play a level smack dab in the middle of the campaign after having sequentially walked through the entire experience to get there. In isolation, the level might play fine, but in the context of the greater whole? And only when you've exported a standalone build? Nah...
When we were pushing early access updates or releases, it was not uncommon for me and Elijah to have to stay up all night testing builds, doing 100% playthroughs of the entire campaign's content, only to find a last-minute issue that required us to stay up another 4-5 hours to both address it, and then export and test the build again.
Those lucid memories of craving rest as I stared at my monitor, waiting for Elijah to send me the newest build so we could hopefully finally go to sleep in a few hours and meet our deadline, have re-awakened once again. You see... that milestone involved us sending them a build... So, the pains of that process have returned! They're just worse now because... well... the game is *at least* double the length of the early access version... About two weeks ago now, I had to play through the game a good 8-15 times back to back as we attempted to address any last-minute issues with the build before we sent it off to our publisher. A fair few of those times, I'd gotten almost all the way through an entire playthrough before we found a significant problem we needed to address.
The fun part is... this is just the tip of the iceberg! Soon we'll be in the beta-testing stage, where this process will get much, much, much worse... And I am not going to lie... I am moderately dreading the coming months. We'll get through it, but the closer we get to release, the lower the threshold for error is going to get. I simply don't have the energy to stay up all night testing builds anymore, and I probably took a good few years off my life doing that already. So basically, we're going to be having a fun time, I'm sure...
A Not So Quick Side Tangent
In our early access days, the process of finally getting a build test ready for our publisher could potentially take... well... days. This is, of course, not to mention the fact that the builds we sent to them would often still have bugs that needed to be resolved before said builds could be pushed to the public. Hence why they were testing them to begin with; two developers playing a game are simply not going to find the full suite of issues teams of testers can.
In case you were wondering, this is, in part, why we were so quiet on the content update front. We could have probably released more early access updates between now and our last update, which was published quite a while ago. But doing so would have meant...
1 - We likely would have ended up adding another couple of months to the game's development.
And...
2 - We would have ended up killing what energy and sanity we had left doing so.
I had some reason for bringing this up...
I think at a certain point, my schpeel about the milestone just turned into frothing rambling...
But it does allow me to... in no uncertain terms, comment on something.
I’m very much of the opinion that the choice to use an Early Access model for Viscerafest was a mistake. Don't get me wrong - there are certainly good things that have come from it. I don't think the final product would be nearly as polished and refined as it will be were it not for the feedback and help our community has given us throughout the development; and I am incredibly grateful for all of you who’ve had dialogues with us and attempted to help us to work out some of the kinks in our vision.
But as a part of the Early Access model, we were required to constantly shoot for frequent and significant content updates throughout it’s lifetime - and while we initially thought that was achievable, we underestimated the strain that goes along with it. Doing one big release is more than enough trouble for a tiny development team like ours, without having to drag the headache it induces throughout an entire game's development cycle - especially whilst we were often making significant changes and, in some ways, still forming the substantive core of the gameplay experience.
In tandem with the above I would like to apologize to those let down by the lack of content updates post 2023. It was certainly not our intention to leave everyone high and dry, hence why I chose to go the devlog route. Truth be told, through a combination of hubris, inexperience and outside incentive, we chose this route when we could have put our foot down and said no to our publisher, asserting that we thought this was the wrong decision, and it's on us that we didn’t.
Granted, it was not a decision we bumbled into completely by accident, our publisher has a consistent business model by which they abide, and given prior success they felt this was the best route for us to take. At the time, we didn't know what we were doing, and rather than choosing what we felt was right, we wanted to play suck up. But needless to say, it was the wrong choice for Viscerafest, and should I continue to work in gamedev, it's certainly not a business model I intend to adopt again.
But That's All Folks!
Admittedly, this last chunk of the update has been slightly more pessimistic than I would like it to be. But these thoughts have been brewing in the background for a while now. Overall, I'm very happy with how Viscerafest is shaking out, but I'm less happy with the road we've driven to get to this point. Praise the Lord God; It seems we'll make it out the other side in one piece with a game to be proud of, but boy... what a rocky journey it's been.
With all that said, I do think one final question to answer would be... "Will we make another devlog?" I mean, we already did go back on our word and make one extra, so to be safe... I'm not going to shoot down the possibility. I doubt it because, as you might have parsed above, the vast majority of the game's remaining work will mostly just be grinding. But I'll leave the door open!
For the rest of development, we'll probably be down in the trenches. Maybe just giving you some sneak peeks of the content coming in the next 4-5 months!
But until next time, or perhaps the time before next time! :>
We ask God bless you, keep you, make his face to shine upon you!
Hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving, pray you have an even
better Christmas! And perhaps even a spectacular new year!
So, ladies and gents, thank you for reading, and have a great day!
Adios!
