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.

So... Why So Long?

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.

But Why a Year Since the Last Patch/Update?

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...

What's Changed Since theEarlyAccess Version?

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. Viscerafestis 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...

The Player:

• 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.

The Arsenal:

• 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".

The Enemies:

• 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.

The Pickups:

• 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.

The Prelude:

• 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.

Chapter 1:

• 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 :>

Chapter 2:

• 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.

The Menu's/HUD:

• 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.

Misc:

• 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.

But What's New?

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.

And I Think That's It?

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

But That is All For Now...

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