Hey everyone, it's me, Tib!

While Sephra was working on his own little side project (which btw you should absolutely check out!), I cooked up a small quality of life update for Predation. 

This one doesn't have any new content, BUT, I finally nudged myself to make it possible to FULLY re-bind your controls!

This works for both Keyboard and controllers. However! I need to say this right now, the game is still not properly playable with a controller, and especially things like menus and the interact system isn't controller friendly. I will tackle all of that later on, but for now, you should be able to rebind your controls at will. 

Please feel free to give it a go and tell me how it goes! If you find a bug, as always, feel free to tell me about it in our discord server

( https://discord.gg/hornedlizardstudios )

Again, small quality of life update, but I do hope it'll be useful for people! As always, you can download it from Itch!

https://hornedlizardstudios.itch.io/predation

Thank you <3

Hello everyone!

Right, I'm biting the bullet, it's as stable as it's going to get under current circumstances so here you go:

REMEMBER THIS LINK IS 18+

Have at it! 

Okay, quick overview before you do though:

-As I've mentioned this is fairly buggy currently, the battle system isn't complete, the ambush system messes the enemy up and freezes them, etc. But it's gotten to the point where I know what I want to do to rewrite how all that works so everything works properly.

While I'm on the subject, full disclosure for you all, I've been using ChatGPT to help me out writing custom js code for some of the functions of the game; this is made in the RPGMaker engine which allows for custom stuff to be tacked on in javascript files, things like code to display the images and switch them around at the right points etc. And I, not knowing javascript, decided to use it for some help. I hope you'll see it the way I do in that my goal here is to get you all some art and gameplay combined into a fun adult experience, and I can promise you the art and the music and such are all things I've done myself for this. 

The idea is that when Tib's not busy with Predation's code, a much more central and important thing, they can get to making it a lot more stable and streamlined, but meanwhile I can set up this game's mechanics to how I'd like it as a stopgap, get you all this gay little scenario I've been working on, and... yeah hopefully that's good enough reasoning for the use of it, I do understand if not but you should all know before you play it. 

If that's fine though then please do have a go, as I say everything but the nuts and bolts parts are done by yours truly and I'm really very excited with how I can expand this into something pretty varied and packed with content!

For example, at the moment there's one full(ish) outfit in-game to find, take a look in the locker room down south if you want it found quickly, but the way I've set it up now it's a matter of making image overlays for each part of the body I've made outfits for; so far we have headwear, eyewear, four accessories slots for jewelry or nail polish or whatever, a main outfit slot, underwear, shoes, socks or pantyhose, and a weapon.

So within each of those slots I can make something and it'll all fit together based on what you'd like to dress him in, essentially! 

And along with that, I believe I've got the same setup ready to go in a broader sense with the addition of other playable characters in future! This IS RPGMaker after all, and I'm thinking potentially even an RE:2 style A/B scenario; so to anyone sad that this new project is male on male for now don't worry, both enemies and characters are going to change that in the future! 

I'll stop rambling now, hope it all works okay, now that I've put this out to you my plan is to do a rewrite of all the ambush/battle stuff and simplify it all, now I've learned the engine a lot better; it's been a great tutorial I must say, getting better with this thing all the time!

Let me know how it went for you!

Much love to you all,

-Sephra

P.S. controls are a priority change for next time, and if it's too dark for you then in the system menu (the button with the cog) there should be a lighting effects toggle)

Hey everyone! I know it's a day or two late, but here's the public release of our latest testbuild!

This one includes a few small things, for one, I've started work on the quest system, which now includes one quest you can play from start to finish! Simply go to Vic's coffee shop and talk to him to initiate the quest, and once you finish, you might find a nice reward at the end!

Another one is, as you can tell, more options for download! I finally have an Apple developer account so I can push Mac updates as well, without gatekeep screaming at you that it cannot be checked for malware, since now it IS checked for malware by Apple themselves!

And next, there's now an AppImage version as well for the linux folk! 

Please keep in mind that the game overall is still very unfinished but we're working on getting it back up to speed!

Thank you for all the support, and don't forget, if you have any questions or just want to talk about the game, feel free to join our Discord server at https://discord.com/invite/HornedLizardStudios

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Little extra bit from Sephra, just to say this other thing's going well and I'm still hoping to get to put out a playable thing somewhere on or adjacent to Christmas... I've sat here for a good few minutes trying to think of a good festive pun that'll go with it but between packages and coatings of white stuff and old time religious values I'm spoilt for choice really; I'll just get back to it now, the latest thing to go in is differentiating between footstep noises depending on the type of floor and whether the player has footwear on or not and I'm not gonna lie when it started working I got a little giddy about it xD 

Anyway that's cryptic yet informative enough I think, you'll see soon enough all going well!

-S

Howdy all! Sephra here first off, meant to get this up yesterday but was scrabbling to put a thing together to show you that would show off a thing I've been working on without giving away too much, BUT at the same time will give you a good idea the sort of thing it is:

Now that is an attempt at a maid outfit, hopefully the various fills show that off, and it's currently composed of the headpiece, the wrist bands, that thigh band, the main dress, the tights (or pantyhose if you fancy), the underwear and the shoes are all separate parts of the outfit; and as you can also see, there's going to be states of damage to them too, which is also the case with the tights but as it happens you can't really show that off properly without a pair of legs in them and I'd rather be horribly obtuse about it still than show you the character who inhabits this outfit; not to say this will be the only one of course, I'm just trying to subtly intone to you there's going to be various slots that can be mixed and matched and... anyway, all that aside I know we tend to get excitable about stuff we're trying out and then you end up with radio silence on it and it looks kind of dumb on our part so I've been trying to just keep this quiet as possible until I knew I'd be getting something out for you in regard to it; and if nothing else I'm happy to say I'm confident enough in getting this out for people to play a bit of soon that I want to start teasing it in this long winded way!

With that though I will turn over to Tib and their adventures in the code, watch this space etc. I'm very excited about putting out this thing and seeing what everyone thinks of it!

-S

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Hey everyone, it me, Tib!

First of all, I’m sorry for the slow progress on my part. I’ve been struggling with financial stuff and had to look for something on the side, but that didn’t work out, so now I’m back on Predation full swing!

Lately, I’ve been getting the AI into a more finished state since, more or less, that’s the last piece of the puzzle now. Once I have all that figured out, we just need to put the maps back together and add extra detail, the fun bits! I’ve also been experimenting with Sephra on more complex transportation systems in maps, such as large cargo lifts, and soon the teleport room will be usable as well, some of you might’ve already seen it in the underground section!

Of course, I’ve been learning a bit more when it comes to C#, trying to get better at coding overall. Turns out making games is both really taxing and difficult, even when you’re making a relatively simple 2D game. I’m starting to accept that not every part of the game needs to be perfect, it just needs to work so there’s a playable, hopefully fun game on the other side for everyone to enjoy.

But, as I said, I’m back on Predation now full force, and I’ve set a personal deadline of the 12th of next month (November) for when I’ll push a new update for the game! I can’t quite tell what the update will contain, but I’ll do my best to add some new things and fix some of the bugs that others have reported.

One last thing! We’ve decided to disable the community features on our Itch page completely until Itch gives us proper tools to moderate bots spamming our page with malicious links.

Once again, thank you all for your support, and don’t forget, if you have any questions or issues, feel free to reach out to us on our Discord server ( https://discord.gg/hornedlizardstudios )!

Thank you <3

Howdy all,

There's some links to a couple of videos Tib's done I'll put here so they don't get lost in the shuffle:

Sephra here again, come to regale you with things that have happened over the past month, for the second time now as the lovely drafts system on this site has betrayed me again, so I'm feeling a little sassy about things now; but, at least, work's been fine xD I've had a week out this month to host my partner who travelled over from America for a week, first time out of the US for them so it was quite the thing! Then there was a few days of complete dazedness and eventually back to it, where I've mostly been doing my usual thing of starting the day on mapping, laying out the levels now we're doing multiple routes with hopefully some different challenges, and then thinking of something that'll be needed for that new area and diverting off to that, something else occurs and I move to that instead etc. Rinse and repeat the next day; it does make my brain happy but it also means now I'm in the stage of collating it all together I'm also plugging up various asset gaps and the like.

And aside from all of that there's some assets for the other various projects we're entertaining ourselves with; one of them you know of already and another will be a while coming but I'm going to have a fun time putting that out I think! I'm not the most subtle with the cryptic comments but still I intend to make up for it in other areas; but for that first one, here's Tib to close this out:

Hey everyone! 

It a me, Tib again, with a small update on what I’ve been doing! I did a bit of 3D stuff, mostly with audio, but what you’re all more excited for is Predation! Sephra did an amazing job with the new VHS shop, so I’ve decided to add some ambience to it, some quiet rustling about… someone might be nearby…

And we also got one of the elevators working that you’ll be able to use to traverse different parts of the underground! It still needs a bit of polish, but I’m quite happy with what we have already so far! I’ll keep going with the AI for the time being when able to do so, once we have all the AI finished, we can simply stitch all the maps together and get a new update out!