Hey everyone! This time it's me, Tib! I've been hard at work making Cooper before we continue on Predation, as you all know, we are NOT stopping development on Predation at all, but both me and Sephra needed a small break, and we wanted to give you all something new to play!

You can get the current build from here:
https://predationstorage.blob.core.windows.net/cooper-rabbit/CooperRabbit_0020.zip

Here's a rough overline of all the changes since the last build. There are obviously a LOT more things that I did, but thes are the main ones:

-Added a full save system, along with save stations on the map, and the ability to save to any of the 100 save slots

-Added “load” option to the main menu so you can load previously saved progress

-Added an inventory system, along with a currently work-in-progress UI!

-Added a couple of clothing items

-Added the ability to read notes added to the inventory! Story related notes will now be added to your inventory, which can be read when using them

-Added an Equipment tab to the inventory, showing the currently equipped clothing on Cooper, as well as the ability to take any of the currently equipped items off

-Added an RF Receiver item, it’ll ping nearby save stations when equipped in one of the accessory slots

-Added some extra items around the map you can use for some bonus interactions

-Added a pause menu to be able to pause the game, return to main menu, quit the game or load it up, along with access to the options as well while in the game

-Added a Music volume slider in the options menu

-Added the ability to skip the intro movie by holding down a button, which will take you directly to the main menu

-Added more sound effects around the map, including ambience effects and some hidden SFX

-Added a few extra commands, including the ability to move any entity around freely (the base for creating NPCs soon), to call functions of parent classes of the caller class, display system messages, save and load the game and more.

-Added a “Messages” queue! This will display system related messages (such as saving and loading the game info), as well as small inner monologues when inspecting items, interacting with certain things in the world, or similar non-critical information about either the game itself, or Cooper himself

-Added a small warning message about the game’s current unfinished state near the beginning of the demo

-Added the ability to take screenshots! Pressing F12 will make a pixel-perfect screenshot and place the image in your Pictures folder, useful for reporting bugs!

-Changed and expanded the “Window popup” module which can now display more elements, and includes an image viewer for story purposes

-Changed the Dialogue system so it can access the Command system, making it easier to create cutscenes and do things during dialogues, it essentially gives the dialogue system full awareness of the games current state, and can influence progression and variables

-Changed the intro sequence slightly at the start of the demo

-Fixed the movement feeling jittery when running from side to side

-Fixed the interactions being unresponsive and inconsistent, now pressing E will properly trigger interactions in front of the player

-Fixed being able to pause the game and interrupt certain sequences and command chains that could lead to a lot of edge cases, now a central Command handler is responsible for keeping track of currently running chains, making the execution thread-safe. 

-Upgraded the engine to a custom build of 4.7.2 Mono

Obviously there are so much more, but those are the main overview points!

My next focus is going to be the combat system! I want to get that finished before moving onto the actual NPCs and movement.

*As mentioned before, us working on this does NOT mean we are no longer working on Predation!* This is simply something on the side for us to do to avoid burnout and give you all something to play as we get Predation going more. I’m already very happy with our progress in this game, starting from scratch like this with all the knowledge I gained from Predation over the years made me realize how much more I know now vs. when I started working on things years before.

Sephra also wanted me to show ya'll two amazing pieces he's been working on for the Intro! You can find them below, and here's what he had to say:

Howdy all!
Not much for me to add that'd be of interest to you currently, still working away at the assets and having a great fun time doing so! I figured I'd show off a couple of these intro slides at least, some nice safe preview stuff to put up for the moment!

More to come on the events in the interior of the place though~

-S

We can't wait to show you all even more!

Thank you!

Tib <3

Good evening everyone,

Sephra here today! I come baring a new DEMO!

http://predationgame.com/downloads/CooperRabbit_0.0.1_DEMO.zip

We've been made aware that the above download link might not work, as an alternative, please use the following URL for now:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mmHwG7kZJ2QcmcMZBU1AGtwW8ZiXLXN8/view

As yet we've not thought of something final, so we've been calling it Cooper after our Rabbit protagonist; if you've been following along you may have seen an earlier build of this I attempted, with some rather unfortunate results that I'm in no hurry to repeat; luckily Tib has done something truly remarkable and created for me a version of Godot that I can pour my perverse little ideas into and ask them to link it all together mechanically, more in line with what we're used to working on than RPGMaker at any rate (and more complex too), fully created by them and their fully biological brain, and taking shape at such a rate and in such a spectacular way I barely know if I'm going to be able to keep up with my end of the bargain actually making the assets for it etc.

SO! What is this game, then? What's the general idea?

Taking place in the same universe at the same time as Predation, this is a little precursor story that is initially only going to involve our bunny protagonist Cooper and his unfortunate circumstances, waking up after a party at an abandoned strip club turned nightclub without his friend Natalie anywhere to be found, wondering if he's the only person left in the building; of course, he soon finds out that isn't the case...

Gameplay wise it will be a top down, fairly old school game in the vein of the old Metal Gear series (before Solid) that will also have a battle system we've been devising that I hope will be interesting and sexy in equal measure; it'll be turn based, will feature a lot of grapple moves of various descriptions between Cooper and the enemies he encounters, along with many different items of clothing to equip him in too:

Various status effects, like getting liquids splashed on you or other similar things that occur when you're urban exploring, and so on!

Now, the current demo doesn't have these more fun parts to it just yet, but we wanted to show you all what we've been working on and why we think it's worth the effort of doing this alongside Predation (although admittedly, I've been fairly obsessed with this since Tib started working their magic on it) so we thought we'd show you how the exploration part of the game works, give you a basic idea of what it'll feel like to play etc.

When we get it in though, even if I do say so myself I think it's going to be pretty good fun, and this is just the start too; but mostly what we have in mind with this, apart from a gay old time, is actually getting stuff out in some sort of order and not getting overwhelmed by the scope of it, putting in some of the lessons we've learned from Predation etc. The hope is that we can just start putting stuff out here regularly, give you all something to actually have fun with, and it gives us something fun too I've certainly been very jazzed about the whole thing and I hope you'll all give it a go too!

Another little preview of a part of the battle system, just to give you an idea!

That's it from me, will leave you with some words from the lovely Tib:
[8/9/2026 9:37 PM] Sephra: Hey everyone, Tib here just to say a quick word regarding Predation and this new game!
As some of you may remember, we moved away from GameMaker a long while ago, and moved over to Godot shortly after Godot 4 came out. When this transition happened, I JUST started learning Godot 4, and because of this, while I made the game work, a lot of the foundational code that now holds it together is rather weak, because back then, I wasn't super familiar with the engine, and had less experience. 
After Sephra suggested that I should re-write this game he started in RPGMaker, I thought about using RPGMaker as well, but decided to try and start it in Godot from scratch, to see how much I've learned over the years. And in all honesty, I'm blown away by how fast I was able to get some solid basics up and running. I'm very optimistic about the future, and I know progress has been slow, but I genuinely believe that now, with a lot more experience, we'll be able to move forward faster. Once all the basics are ready in this game (which shouldn't take longer than two months), we'll be able to update it regularly, and during this time, I can go back to Predation and re-write some of those early, fragile systems that hold it back. 
I want to make it clear that I do NOT want to abandon Predation in any way. But we definitely want to give everyone something fun to play, and give something for all the support we've been getting. I will keep everyone up to date! Thank you <3

Hey everyone, Tib here!
As some of you might know, I’ve been asked to help with Cooper a little bit, since both me and Sephra feel super confident in this game, and it’s also a really nice way for us to avoid creative burnout!
After a small break last month as I had some personal stuff to take care of, I’m not only back working on Cooper with full force, but I genuinely LOVE what I made so far!
A little background first, a loooong long time ago, I first got interested in game development because of this little game called Crysis. It had a cool map editor that was so simple, even super young me could get into it and make something silly. But what stood out the most, was this little tool it had called the “FlowGraph”. It was essentially a way to script behaviour in the game, make things happen, by creating a flow chart with “building blocks” and logic gates. That’s where I first started to learn about programming logic, what an “if” statement is and all that good stuff! And ever many, many years later, I still remember some of the old tricks I learned in that system.

And recently, as I was making it easier for Sephra to create logic without having to write any code, I remembered how easy it was for young me to create FlowGraph in the editor for Crysis… sooo I decided to <try> and create something similar! We come full circle, I present to you… a very early and still super fragile flow graph inspired system I made in Godot!

I’m able to create some basic building blocks with this system, such as “zoom the camera in” or “Display this dialogue and wait until it’s finished”, “toggle these lights on or off” and more! It’s based on an implementation of the Command Pattern system I’ve been perfecting, and I felt like putting an entire graph system on top of that would work well, and luckily, it goes!
Here’s a small example I made:

https://youtu.be/TKA-OH_pueQ

Each graph can start at different events. The events available will depend on the type of node we attach the graph to. In this case, it was a base switch that I created previously that has the following 3 events: ToggledOn, ToggledOff and Interact. Since the switch will always make a sound when it’s used, I can simply hook up a PlaySFX event to the Interact event, that way, every time we interact with the switch, it’ll play a sound! But with this switch, I also wanted to toggle some lights around the place, and just to show off the system, make a small dialogue appear when it’s turned on, and then also when it’s turned off!
I’m excited to put this system into action soon and see how much it knows.

BUT

I also have something else to show off!
We’ve been also hard at work making sure the NPCs and enemies in this game feel much better to play against. So, I spent a good while making sure they are more reactive, and here’s a small video showing that off:

https://youtu.be/c0-lM3ZzFF8

As you can see, NPCs will patrol or just guard an area. As soon as they see the player, they will do their best to make their way to where they are. If they last saw a player run into a room, even if the player is no longer visible, they will try to turn the lights on and look around said room, trying to find the player. If they can’t, they will return to their original position. NPCs can also HEAR things, if a loud switch is flipped, they will hear it if they are close enough and will attempt to investigate.

I’m hoping to give the early demo over to you all very soon, as I’m genuinely proud with what we made here so far! And I’m very optimistic about the future of it all!

With love,
Tib <3

Hey everyone, it’s a me, Tib!

I promise this is not an April Fools joke, there’s plenty of those going around already!

I wanted to give everyone a small update on what I’ve been working on! I will do my best not to get too technical, but the truth is, I’m suuuper excited for all of this!

Sephra has asked me to jump in and completely re-write the Cooper Rabbit game he’s been working on so it’s all human code, no AI involved at all!

At first I wanted to do so in RPGMaker, after all, that’s where the game was, but after assessing a few things, and given how “little” of RPGMaker the game really used, and how heavily I would’ve had to modify things to deviate from the base functionality of the engine, I’ve decided it would be a lot easier to simply move things to an engine I’m already very familiar with, Godot!

And I’ll be honest, I always felt like Predation has been a huge learning exercise for me for the past year or so, but now that I got to start a new project and see how fast I can progress… I can see how much I truly learned.

In the span of a couple of weeks, I’ve finished replicating RPGMakers movement, I learned more or less how Godot’s TileMapLayers work, AND I created a system for Sephra that can make in-game actions happen with no extra code being written at all! It’s all drag and drop (or in this case, click!), and as far as I can tell, he’s been quite happy with the results so far too!

I got really into designing similar developer tools lately, and while this game is a lot easier to create than Predation is, it helped me learn more, many things I can apply back to Predation as I work on this too!

I can’t wait to share the game with you all very soon!

Thank you <3

Tib

Hey all!

Well Tib's covered it all pretty nicely I think, but I'd like to put here how thankful I am to them for taking this on and putting the engine together, it's coming together in a way that already it's outclassing my efforts in RPGMaker; I realise now that even if I did manage to learn how to make all the javascript myself it would be practically ripping the engine apart, shoutout to Bitshift for their advice on the matter (Please look up their games, Cruel Seranade, 1 and 2! They're awesome!), and with me having already made the assets it's all been coming together at a good rate, I'm already used to the engine too, really a very positive month for us! 

We're keeping it fairly simple though, the scope's not going to change and the idea is still for us to have a thing that can have content added regularly and quickly, but yeah now thankfully we have a nice new engine and my dumb ass is back to the art stuff where it belongs xD 

So yes, next month or so is going to be a mix of knitting this all together and continuing on with Predation stuff, I have SO much I want to do and think up and subject poor old Cooper to and much as it's a slog I am working on the highest resolution animation I've yet attempted for Predation; and for those who aren't too excited about guys (weird but you do you) I still fully intend to include more than one playable character in this game; the sky, and our self imposed rules, are the limit now!

-S

Hey everyone! Its me, Tib! I wanted to give everyone another end of the month update about what I have been working on!

Sephra is currently recovering from a sickness so I'm doing my best to keep things rolling as smooth as possible!

For Predation, I worked on some bug fixes regarding the save system and especially with the inventory. As many have reported, the inventory had some issues if you left the game to the main menu then came back. This should be fixed now, and I will release a patch sometime soon with some more small fixes too!

Meanwhile, Sephra has asked me to start re-writing the Cooper game, this means I will be starting it over, doing the code all myself so it is not using any AI generated code. This might take a bit of time since I never had to code RPGMaker, but I will do my best! If anyone is interested in helping with it, feel free to reach out to me on discord or Telegram, on both my username is tibaverus!

As always thank you so much for all the support, we hope you will enjoy what we have cooking up next!

Tib <3

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