The Anomaly Department news & patch notes

• Fixed a bug where on the last level of Back Alleys your teammates could spawn outside of the spawn room
• Enhanced the anomaly camera. This affected the Back Alley the level most but it should make it much better on the Graveyard levels as well.

• Added Graphics Quality setting. This should help quite a few people.

• Fixed an issue where trophies wouldn't always show up for all players

• Fixed an issue where the Slippery punishment wouldn't always be removed

• Fixed a few localization issues.

Thanks for the bug reports and feedback. We are monitoring them and getting them fixed ASAP. We are also adding a audio settings but that will take a week or so.

• Landmine visuals will be consistent across all palyers
• Fixed an annoying bug where the landmines would block you when they weren't actually visible. If you were running into the occasional step up or even blocked path for no reason that was because of this.

The Anomaly Department is officially available now on Steam.

Thank you to everyone who played the demo, joined us during Steam Next Fest, reported bugs, shared feedback, or added the game to their wishlist. Your support helped us reach launch day.

We hope you enjoy your first shift.

TL;DR

• Major performance enhancements.

• Adjusted lighting quite a bit.

• Added a quick, one screen tutorial pop up on first play through.

• When you have a penalty/punishment you will now receive a more clear notice through the UI.

• Fixed a timing issue where doors would sometimes visually close twice.

• Fixed an annoying issue where you would sometimes have to click twice when in a menu.

• A few other minor bugs

Long winded explanations:

The performance difference is large. It had to do with lighting so I took the time to replace the entire lighting system and rework all the lighting in the game. Aside from performance improvements I think things actually look better and a bit more unified. The quick tutorial is because when watching people stream this(I love watching it btw!) some people who aren't familiar with anomaly games were unsure of what to do. I hate long tutorials in games and wanted to avoid them but this is the simple compromise. One screen, a handful of words and a close button. I hope this helps the newer players. Another thing I noticed is some people would not realize how the punishments worked. The whiteboard in the control room makes a noise and updates any time a punishment is applied but enough people missed this that it was causing some confusion. If you didn't realize punishments were in the game it is reasonable to assume you might be experiencing an anomaly or even a bug. Now when you have a punishment applied you will receive a notice in the UI. Overall this should be a great update. I plan on doing a bit more polish before the release and then it's time to work on post-release content. Thanks everyone who has been playing my game and sharing clips. I love to see them!

We hope everyone had as much fun with NextFest as we did! So many great demos. We 30x'd our wishlist over the event which is insane. Thank you so much. Today we are announcing that we have decided to move the release date back to July 14th. The Anomaly Department is in a ready to release state but the original timeline we had planned would coincide and compete with the biggest game sale of the year... Steam's Summer Sale. We, or should I say "I" since I am a solo indie developer, have loved making this game and I love seeing people playing it and laughing. I want to give it a fair shot at success which means pushing things back a little bit. In the mean time I have been working very hard on performance improvements with a lot of success. I had planned on waiting and releasing that update only for the full release but since things are delayed I will be updating the demo soon. If the game would get a little choppy for you then it should run much better once that update drops. I have more exciting plans for the game as well. As hinted at with the demo the levels get progressively longer. This is by design and most people like it, albeit you have yet to see the pain of the last part of the grocery store level. That being said some people prefer the quicker, smaller levels so we will be introducing 'mini-contracts' which will be single room levels whose difficulty will likely be similar to what is included in the demo. I have everything in place to create these and I will now try to have at least a few of these included in the full release. If I can get enough excitement and enthusiasm over it I will try to get at least one put into the demo. If you are reading this like, comment or do any sort of engagement. The last thing is I have had so much fun watching people play on Twitch and YouTube. I want to compile a few montage video of people having fun so if you have any and would like to be featured then reach out at [email protected] Happy gaming!

Thanks everyone for playing the demo. We hope NextFest is going great for you guys! We made a minor update.

• Added option to invert look. This is because the streamer Cheesepopps wouldn't stop whining about it.

• Fixed an edge case where the Red Light / Green Light event would shoot you the next round.

• Minor localizations fixes

Thanks for all the support and feedback. We hope you are having a blast this NextFest.

We updated our demo to improve first-person comfort.

• Disabled motion blur

• Reduced or disabled various post-processing effects

• Minor FPS stability patches

• Minor performance improvements

Also... that security door acts a bit more like a door now. We hope you are enjoying the demo! Happy NextFest!