Hello friends! I'm just gonna cold-open this, if that's fine.

It has been quite some time since we've emerged from the depths to talk about game progress, or much of anything for that matter. There are several reasons for this.

The first and most comprehensive reason is that our company has always existed primarily on revenue from client work and services. We have 5 full-time salaried employees, and that takes a lot of work to sustain! The Kickstarter was instrumental in keeping us alive during a couple of months of a particularly vicious drought, and without it we wouldn't have been able to survive as a company, let alone make this or any other game. So, little surprise, the thing we've been doing the most of in the last couple years is the sorts of client work we've always done.

The second reason was our expo, GDEX, which just finished up its 6th and (so far) most successful year in terms of both growth and sales. Over the last few months, we had to put the game on hold to focus on making this event as successful as possible without neglecting the client work.

Anyway, that's all for the excuses. We're back on the No Mercy development grind for the moment, and it feels great! We are still fully planning on finishing and releasing this game.

While there hasn't been much concrete, shareable development done on the game itself for a while, we have continuously been refining our design and vision. We've been polishing the story, planning the layout of the world, and finalizing our concepts for the characters and enemies this whole time.

Right now, our current activities are focused on building the networking infrastructure that will facilitate online co-operative 2-person play, and beginning to really implement the world and story that we've been working so hard on.

We're hoping to have a major update out as soon as it's ready, but we don't want to rush it; all of the updates up to this point have been simple tweaks to our old prototype vertical slice build. The playable demo you're all familiar with has been separate from our main development branch for nearly a year now, and we're really not trying to spend any more time on it.

The update we recently pushed to the demo reflects the changes we made for GDEX 2018, and includes a couple of bugfixes, as well as all-new music. Nothing worth getting too excited about, although as a team we're very pleased with the direction of the music revisions. We figured we'd use these changes as an excuse to touch base and let everyone know that yes, we're still alive, and indeed, the game is still being made.

We are trying our hardest right now to break free of the cycle of client work and fully emerge as a proper game development studio. We are in starting conversations with some possible partners to allow us to focus on full-time No Mercy development as well as promotional assistance, although that's already probably more than I should say about that, I don't want to jinx it!

As always, we value all of the support and feedback of our community. You are all wonderful people and we couldn't have done anything without you. Thanks for being with us so far on this crazy journey!

Our main point of interaction with our friends and supporters is now our Discord server. Feel free to join and harass us! (Please don't actually harass us, just hang out and be chill!) https://discord.gg/tq6WxqH

Our main website is here, if you feel a burning need to fact-check me on all this client-services nonsense I've been spewing. https://www.multivarious.com/

We love you five-ever!

- Tom and the Multivarious team