Hello all! It's been silent recently and I need to address why.
After the release of the gallery version, Which was delayed on FA,i'm sorry. Me and sprrigs sat down for awhile and looked over what we have done here for predation. We were not happy with ourselves. We aren't talking about the game itself, more of how we treated everyone else. We left everyone in the dark, not really giving much details to what's happening.

We both agree that this has to change.

We both agree that the community has to be informed as to what's going on.

To assist with this me and sprrigs have come up with a plan to get ourselves back on track.

Sprrigs will be taking over a lot of the social aspects of the project for a while, I’ve never been the most social person, meanwhile he seems like a natural at talking.
I'll actually be letting him take over for the remainder of this, so he can get the point across more.


Hello all!
Both me and sephra are sorry for our lack of involvement in the community. We have gone quiet quite a few times, and haven't always been involved. As sephra said, this needs to change. Me and him have come up with a few changes that will shake things up, hopefully for the better.

The first change will be a change to Patreon. We haven't ironed out all the kinks yet so it might not be here for a few more days. But we have a few large changes coming to the tier system.

Mostly, we wanted to change how we interact with everyone. Communication is key. To make sure we never lose that key. We will be producing a roadmap for every upcoming update to predation. This will also be coming out soon, as we haven't yet finalized the graphic.

To add onto the roadmap, I will be maintaining a dev diary of sorts. Every 2 weeks, I will release one of these development books. It will showcase what we are doing with Predation,
These will be coming out every Monday starting tomorrow.
They will be featured on Discord, Patreon, and Furaffinity.

For now these should help set us back on the right track and should help you know more about what's going on with amber and the crew.
If you have any questions, Please message me on discord through the server or through dm, @sprrigs#7056.
Get ready for those new updates coming soon

I’ll be seeing y’all around
~Sprrigs

Howdy all,

This is an awkward post to write; I want to start off by saying I haven't quit making Predation, I've been working on this and that for it pretty consistently since my last posting and though I'm very painfully aware of how slow I am at this sort of thing, I can say with confidence I haven't given up working on the project and still very much believe in it!

The last few months have been trying, to say the least; anyone keeping track might remember I cut off an anxiety medication I was prescribed earlier in the year because it turned out the damned stuff was being reclassified as a controlled drug, and I know it's probably a bit trite to blame my lack of social contact on the ups and downs of dropping the thing but... well, at this point I think all of you can agree it's prompted something of a change in my behavior.

I mean don't get me wrong I've never really been able to process talking to people and being able to engage like I really should as a person doing a thing in public, but it's gotten such that in focusing on keeping myself able to work to some degree I've let a lot of things slide that I really shouldn't have done, at least without any sort of warning.

those of you in the Discord may have seen me relatively more often where the setting is more informal, at least as far as my brain goes, but even then I feel like I'm just not as able to not be overwhelmed by things and, invariably, I just tend to retreat to my little isolated animation cave and hope that when I eventually put out things that it will have been worth all the unwarranted silences and unprofessional ways of going about things.

If there's anyone reading this whom I've blanked at any point on discord or wherever, I apologize unreservedly; I suck at communicating anything about this stuff and I tend to just blank anything out in favor of my obsessions when things aren't going so good, but that hardly makes up for my cowering from people wanting to talk and I can only offer my apologies for not doing what I should be doing. I can't promise 100% because I'm an asshole but I would encourage anyone who that's happened to to re-contact me and I'll try and awnser anything I can, I don't want to be the kind of person who shuts themselves off from people and I hope I can prove by my doing that I'm trying to get back to some sort of state where I can work consistently and keep on top of things to the extent I can be chatty and exuberent and all that fun stuff.

Sorry for the ramble, hopefully that might shed some light on what's been going on. Thanks very much for reading!

-S

Hey everyone,

First off, apologies for the radio silence on here in the last couple of weeks and in general; I also want to give a wider apology to you all for the slump in progress seen over the winter and feel I should give some context as to what's happened and what I've been doing about it.

Game development is continuing and is in fact getting to be more productive than I've been in about a year or so now; this is primarily, I believe, due to some rather drastic changes I've made in my life and health which included breaking off from an anti-anxiety medication I'd been on for a little while now, losing a lot of weight, all that good stuff.

I decided to start doing this for quite a few reasons, some of them are a bit too close to the bone for me to want to detail them but suffice to say, me and my dad were on the same pills and the choices he ended up making were... not something I wanted to resign myself to following, so I decided I needed to rip everything away and start fresh.

There's some posts that I think (I hope) I made publicly viewable on Patreon that go into more detail as to breaking off the medication and my feelings while I was going through that process, so on so forth, which may give you a better understanding of why I decided to go through with it.

I'm still suffering the effects of withdrawal but, compared to a week ago I'm not in some kind of Trainspotting-esque fug state where I can barely sleep more than an hour at a time so that's something, and while I took that opportunity to just collapse and coccoon myself until the worst was over I've been getting back to normality, slowly but surely, and with it I've found my concentration, drive, motivation etc etc. is starting to return to me.

I'm very happy to say that, because I'd been suspecting for a while that these pills the doctor had given me were really only resetting the problem continually, and much as it's still difficult dealing with my head completely without any kind of 'take X to feel better' left I'm starting to find a clarity to my thoughts and feelings that I honestly forgot was even a thing xD

I wouldn't advise anyone do the same without consulting your doctor if these kinds of things are problems for you too, but for my circumstances and the way of thinking I'd become acustomed to it was necessary for me to do anything in my power to try and stabilize before things got out of hand.

Furthermore I want to say thank you to all of you who've supported me since this project started; much as this past year I have gone through some pretty decimating shit I never even considered giving up on this game because people believed in me and supported me and gave me something to focus on when there really wasn't anything else, at least for a while; if I didn't have that, who knows how much worse things might have gotten for me? I certainly know I wouldn't have had the motivation and strength to endure this if I wasn't hell-bent on finding a way to be able to work to the capacity I need to and do it properly, and now here I am with the clearest head I've had since teenage-dom started kicking in and I still have the opportunity to make something awesome for you guys; I really don't know how I got so lucky but I hope this outlines how far I'm willing to go to return the favor to all of you!

Anyway, back to work with me; specifically in the last couple of weeks, when I have worked, I've been working on the sex animation for the Pharmacy Worker again (and have been very much enjoying it too!), as well as a new intro sequence and some drawing, generally trying to brush my skills back up and ease back into a work schedule.

So yeah, TL;DR I know I haven't been working at my best for a while now, and I apologize unreservedly for that; but I hope that what I've done has struck at the heart of the issue rather than just cut off hydra heads as they sprouted and I already feel like my hope for that is paying off!

not sure how to end this so, yeah; hope you all have a nice day, and hope to be able to get some fun stuff to you ASAP ^^

-S

I did not expect such a flood over those couple pictures, thank you!

I'll try my best not to become all shut-in-y and post regular updates to you all! speaking of which I'm going to put something else up too because woo content!

This is copied over from my Patreon posts but I wanted to apologize on here as well for my lack of activity; I will be going to respond to questions and such!



Hey everyone!

So I was starting to get a sort of, psychological thing about updating the game til I'd done that animation for the wolf pharmacy worker, but after a couple months grinding my teeth I've realised it's really not the way I can work effeciently; my productivity slowed right down and I was so blindered by getting this one aspect, (one important aspect admittedly), that I had left everything else in favor of white-knuckling it through the animation.

Well, I'm happy to say it isn't done yet, because I took a step back and realised what I was doing to my productivity; the lesson here is evident, I opened back up into coding again and background objects and level design and I feel great!

And also, to properly get over my fear of uploading, have this:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/x6pae8ktw.....otfix.zip?dl=0


That's a new version! It's rough, bare with me there'll be bugs and such for sure, but it's got more level to explore and some garbled person talking over the radio, and the text boxes are back in bug form along with the lighting, just a host of fun stuff to check out!

And no, it doesn't include the animation I'd been grinding on; I've taken a bit of a break from the grind of adult animating but I intend to get back to it when I feel recharged and ready, by which point I'll have hopefully done a load of other stuff to advance the state of the game as a whole!

Any feedback is always welcome of course! Do keep in mind it is a rough release, not as polished as I would have liked, but it gets to a point that you've got to snap out of cycles like that and carry on; which I intend to do!

Please come on over to the discord server and take a look at the WIP section for a more comprehensive list of stuff I'm working on and up to, not to mention come say hello, always nice to meet a new friend ^^

Yes, I am that unbearable in conversation too, and people will attest!


Anyway, I don't know how to end this so, hope you all enjoy what I've got so far! oh also there are secret areas now you have to walk into to reveal, 2 in all; happy hunting, and no spoilers! (they're just aesthetic but still, I plan to have areas that will be a whole other path through the same level if you find them in passing, which I think will be good fun for replayability and such and such; enjoy!

Hey all! About as simple as it sounds, I'm still in the trying it out stage of it but looks like I can make it run with minimal frame dropping!

I'll be doing NSFW stuff and SFW stuff, anything to do with the game really, and for now there'll be no set schedule but if people are interested that may change!

Here's the link if you wanna stop by, I'm streaming and playing music currenty so you'll have to suffer through my terrible taste in music or mute it!

https://picarto.tv/SephraScribbles
https://picarto.tv/SephraScribbles
https://picarto.tv/SephraScribbles


There you go, hope to see you sometime!

-S

(if the whole animating process isn't your thing you might not find too much of interest in here, fair warning!)

Hey everyone,

It occurred to me to put this up so I can direct anyone who might want to ask about aspects of animating or express an interest in it to me or anything like that; not that I don't like being asked of course, always enjoy a good conversation, but the problem is I really don't know how to teach what I do xD

I do want to be able to impart stuff when people ask though, and I figure one solution would be this:

(Link contains NSFW .gif frames)

https://mega.nz/#!NCo32YBD!UOPVaMRQ.....owFu2AYAwjYTGc

That is a copy of the folder I worked/work from for the Subway Worker Rat, including all frames to that animation and a compiled one at the end. There's also some empty folders in there with names that I use as quick references when I want to see which parts of the animation are designed to loop and which aren't.

===

So just to quickly run through how they go from that to in-game animations, each of these frames are .gif files which you'll know I'm sure; they take up virtually no space and are one of the few picture types to support animation, which is why I figured they would be good to use; another reason was that I didn't want to use anything I had to pay for, coz I'm a cheapskate like that, and because the animations I wanted to create didn't need a particularly varied colour pallette. .gif files are 'colour indexed' I believe the term is, so once it has a particular set of colors down the image effectively throws out all other colors it isn't using to save space; I think anyway? That's the conclusion I've drawn over the years at least!

(A quick tip for anyone editing .gif files also, in GIMP at least when you open them up they'll be set to 'indexed' colour mode; set it to RGB before you edit anything and it will open the pallette back up until you save and close the file again, at which point it will revert back to indexed!)

Anyway, once I've made several frames in GIMP and numbered them accordingly, I'll put them all into this little program called UnFREEz which you can find here:

http://www.whitsoftdev.com/unfreez/

Simple and effective, compiles .gif files into animations of varying speeds and nothing more, just drag and drop!

At which point I'll have a compiled animation that I can port directly into Game Maker (the one aspect of the process I did indeed pay for, though it was worth it!) and it will become a usable sprite I can edit the speed of and with the game's code set to repeat from, say, frames 37 to 50 until a certain meter is reached, before the animation continues onward.

And there you have it, that's how stuff gets turned into animations for you all to enjoy, the way I do it at least! As you can see it's very basic, very mid-90s level of advancement here in terms of what I'm doing, but then so is everything else I want to accomplish!

===

I feel like archaic as it is there's still a place for frame-by-frame animating, and I hope giving you guys this folder of frames will at least be interesting to pore through and see how no one really seems to notice how many fuck-ups I make because they're gone before they're able to be studied xD

Like I say I don't really know how to teach for shit, but there have been a surprising amount (to me anyway) of people who wanted to learn the minutea of what I do; trust me though I am by no means an expert or even someone who should be teaching you anything; I've never even had a formal lesson on animation, I just started doing it and every time it got frustrating with the trial-and-error-ism of the process I'd realise I really had nothing better to do and went back to it xD

Finally if anyone does want to know anything about any aspect of what I do I'm more than happy to awnser questions, in fact I get a bit giddy and feel very egotistical for a short while so please, keep that dopamine a-comin' for me! Either note me or leave a comment, or contact me in any of the other usual places and I'll be happy to get back to you when I can with my stumbling flowery word-vomit ^^


Have a lovely day, if you enjoyed this let me know too, it was fun to write out!

-S

Hey everyone,

So as the subject says I was wondering if anyone had some profiles or names they could throw at me for a partial sort of fursuit that doesn't actually have any fur to it xD

The other day a friend of mine was showing off some stuff from one of the cons he's at, and the vague mention of me going to one at some point led me to look around for someone who'd fit the bill, but I realise I'm really not very good at looking for these things; what I am good at however is asking for handouts, so I thought I'd ask you guys!

I'll state first off that this is really more for speculative purposes, like if one day I ever get to the point of being able to justify the cost of going to America to come hang out and see all my con-going buddies, so don't think I'm ready to put money down or confirm anything xD

Basically what I'm looking for ideally is a resin sort of mask of Sephra, something that fits relatively close to the head and doesn't end up looking disproportionate, and again ideally one of those dealies where when you speak the lower jaw moves along with you. That's really the most important part, some suitable gloves would be awesome too but I can just wear gloves if I don't want to break the illusion. Oh feet too I guess, but again I wouldn't call them a deal breaker.

So what do you guys think? know of/happen to be someone that can do that sort of thing and I don't have to pay $1000 on it? xD Is what I'm asking for even really reasonable? I need your help!

Thank you for the indulgence, back to work with me!

-S

Hey everyone!

Wanted to give a little progress update, after taking it a little easy during the holiday period and having a few days to myself it was back to work animating, and as per the poll the route the animation is taking will be scissoring!

It's been fun to do, very challenging actually trying to get Amber, who gets more nude in this one so far than all others and we're not even on loop 2, to spin around in the appropriate way that both looks realistic and remains...well, hot looking xD

I think I have for the most part cobbled something together in that regard of quality, but I want to wait until I'm through with this bottleneck of trying something at animation I've never attmpted before to show you all how I see the scene going; as always I apologise for the slowness of the work, just a byproduct of being a perfectionist on this kind of crap and I'm not about to question a winning hand here, you know? xD

Hello and welcome also to all the new watchers, and thank you to all the new favouriters! I see the numbers have shot up of late and I'd imagine this has a bit to do with the advertisement I placed on FA! Glad to see it's working, I hope its not too cheesy but if you're here it got the job done I guess! I'll probably put in for doing a more long-term contract if this proves to be a good way of reaching out to people about the game, there are very few avenues open to spreading an ad about a game of this nature around! (Or rather, I know there are near infinite venues in porn websites, but I don't know if it'd quite fit the usual marketing brief for porn site ads if you know what I mean.)

Oh, another thing that I only want to mention because it makes me feel good dammit, is that the game is featured on Pornhub now with a couple of animation compilations someone's done! It's been up for a while and I've been aware of it for a while but I...forget whether I mention it so yeah, little weird badge of honor I think, but I'll wear it proudly! (Thank you to whomever uploaded those too, please feel free to contact me, I won't bite! I swear!)

So yes, bit of jolity and back to working in one of the finest jobs a man can ask for, doodling porn all day and getting paid for it; to everyone new and old, thank you from the bottom of my heart for all of your support ^^

And happy new year too!

Hey y'all!

So as you've probably seen I put up an animation with a poll in it to see where it should go next, which is heeere:

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/29919668/

And the results are in!


//////////

in 5th with 6 votes is 'none of the above'
===

in 4th with 33 votes is 'continuing the handiwork'
===

in 3rd with 79 votes is 'moving to oral'
===

in 2nd with 111 votes is '69' in the sunshine'
===

and in first place with 132 votes is 'scissoring action'!
===

361 total votes cast


//////////

So looks like Amber will be getting royally scissored in the near future!

(You have no idea how badly I want to do some kind of Scissorman/Clock Tower thing with it, but I'll abstain)

I've got some ideas on how to make it as good as I can do, it's rather exciting to do it this way asking everyone what they think when I can't decide on something; and the total votes are amazing! Did not expect even a third of you guys to give me some feedback, and I want you to know it's very much appreciated ^^ In other news the year's ending blah blah blah arbitrary point on a manmade calendar system etc etc. I don't even drink anymore so this whole thing holds even less meaning to me this year xD Not that I'm being a grouch about it! Just a regular ol' night out here in the wilderness, might catch a free firework show or two if we go stand in the garden!

Oh, in other news I can walk up to the squirrels in my garden now and throw digestive biscuit chunks at them; I don't care if they're vermin, I find them funny dammit xD

Thanks again everyone, hope you have a fun new years party, be responsible and don't go dying on us!

Hey everyone,

Thought I'd post up a quick update here to tell everyone what's been going on; in short nothing particularly new to talk about, just the good ol' animation progress and a plan to redesign the first level to be more fun and make more sense, like for example I don't usually see store fronts on subway platforms XD

That whole first level layout sprung initially from that room being my first test level, funnily enough; you start the game and have a long straight to place enemies or items you wanna test out, there's a slope to test her movement up and down it, a grabbable ledge, a crawl section etc. But at the time I'd also freshly made up all those BG tiles and was itching to see if they fit together like I'd hoped; luckily they did (thank you Duke Nukem 3D: Atomic Edition's fan pack thingy with wall tiles in it if I remember correctly; saw that when I was 5 and never forgot the method xD) so yeah I basically beautified my testing area rather than take into account how it would look in the context of the game's world, which I do want to make at least comfortably ignorable and not full of glaring inconsistencies and illogical things, you know? Also that testing area was built right next to the map's border, which again as a noob I didn't reaise would be a problem, coz you couldn't select all items at once in GM1 that I knew of and you could only expand the room's borders out by going down and to the right, where the area was top left XD

anyway, TL;DR I want the new version, when we finally start kicking this shit back into gear, to be new from the get-go and have some more polish, some more content, some new cool level stuff, the whole biz ^^ It's gonna be so much fun man, half way through there's gonna be a structural fracas in the subway which is gonna be fun to add in story-wise, and with luck it'll look brilliant; I don't know why I'm being coy about what it is, you've seen my drawing of trains lately ;)


So yes, despite what I'm sure many have assumed by now we're still plodding along slowly, still working to give this stuff as much quality as we can, and still loving doing so beyond belief ^^ Thank you all again for your continued love and kindness, I eat it like candy to fuel my nightly work binges xD

That and coffee previously, but it turns out drinking 3 cups past 10pm is not a good idea for one's sleep patterns; who knew, right?

Hope you're all having a lovely day wherever you are out there, thanks very much for reading, and I hope you enjoy the content previews I've put up recently ^^

Hello again everyone,

I know right? two journals in as many days, I must have gone mad :P

I got a couple of messages asking about commissions and such because, well, I haven't really said I wouldn't publically xD

The main reason is of course the game, and the amount of time it takes to get through things like that alongside work (for me, anyway).

This means that I'd like to say outright that I won't be offering animation commissions to people for the forseeable, sad as it is; I tried it once early on in development and I really can't work on both the commission and the game efficiently, and end up taking an ungodly amount of time to complete both; you could argue that I should try and just do the commission on its own and then resume work after, and that may well work, but thing is I don't feel I've really got the time currently to test that out if it turns out to cause another delay; last thing I want is to push this thing any further back, and someone asks me why and say 'oh I was getting paid to do something else', you know?

so TL;DR on that, animation commissions are a NO, i'm afraid.

But anything else:

Sketches $15

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/26431434/ (NSFW)

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/26422355/

Lineart $20

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/23766309/ (NSFW) (that minus the colour xD sorry, don't have any examples as such)

Colour $30
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/26699760/ (NSFW) (minus shading of course)

Shading $40

see above xD

I also do non-moving sprite characters, like this:

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/24225059/

For $10 a pop.


Also I'll be limiting it to 3 slots; sorry but I can't forego work too long!

Hope that's of some use to people, not that I mind you messaging me asking about stuff at all! I just didn't want to have to make you do that when the info you want is something I probably should've posted publically to begin with xD

Hey everyone!

So as usual I forget to update everywhere, my apologies again for leaving you all in the dark for so long!

A lot has happened in the slightly over a month gap since my post, with our programmer Byful doing some awesome work on building the new engine up; if you'd like to see the progress he's been making here's a link to the dropbox in which he puts all his progress updates:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/gik6ag44.....-WpeE46da?dl=0

Be forewarned there isn't as much of the actual content in the games as he's working more on the mechanical side of things, so if you'd like to download the one with the most animations (but an inferior engine by yours truly xD) I'd suggest keeping with the link in the submissions part of my page.

Byful does his work alongside a full time job so as you can imagine the work is taking a little while, but in the meantime I've taken it upon myself to re-do some aspects of the older animations and get them looking a bit closer to how I'd like them to; stuff like the tails, the paws, heck even the character models are waaay off on the first few animations I did (being the dog and the rat subway worker in that order) in some frames at least, and I wanted it to reflect what I've learned since about animation and pixel work and such!

So hopefully when the new 0.6 version is out (to which I've not given any kind of eta for yet, sorry) you'll get some new content both in the new and old enemies, or at least nicer looking content! Alongside doing those animations I've been working on getting the rest of the level mapped out and the appropriate background assets to be contained therein, including a subway train that took a horrendously long time but was so worth it IMO; I've done both an outside and inside so part of the level, potentially even a redesigned part of the level you've seen so far, you'll be able to travel through the cars to make your way through in some areas ^^

I realise it's been a while since any new content has really appeared, and that's on me completely; I apologise for both the lack of updates on FA specifically and the lack of anything fun and new to show you guys and gals in general; I can't really offer much of an excuse besides this all taking quite a bit of time and things IRL that have been barriers to progress, but I want to assure everyone that my focus is indeed still firmly on getting you all a quality experience and working at it until that happens.

But hey, my hope and wish is that when this dry spell of sorts is over with and the new version progressing nicely toward completion now, this will be a relative footnote in the development of the game!

Thank you all so much for continuing to show interest and support me and message me lovely things and all that, the support and kindness and friendliness everyone has expressed since development took off (and for those that were already there telling me not to give up, you know who you all are~) is a testament to how unbelievably nice the Fandom is and always has been ^^ Without you none of this would be possible, I owe you my livelihood and my eternal thanks ^^

Right, boot licking over with, I'll set to work trying to get up some things for you all to see in the submissions ^^

Hey Everyone!

As the subject says, after some talks and demonstrations and some very early and crucial promoting back when Predation was a $70 a month project on Patreon, my friend Byful has offered his help in making a stable and far more streamlined engine for the game!

Me and the other mods in the discord server have been saying for a while what a nice guy he is and how good he appears to be at programming from glimpses of stuff, but after he grabbed GM2 and we talked for a bit he was on board to help me out!

This means I can focus my attentions purely on the art side for the moment ,getting the animations done and the backgrounds designed and all that, and not have to worry or stress about leaving the code there to be forgotten while I hammer out an animation or two; but now that stress isn't there anymore, I've got an awesome programmer covering me and really ensuring the future productivity of this project!

So stay tuned while that conversion from my novice code to something more professional is achieved, I'll go back to animating and animating to my heart's content, and everyone is hopefully very happy, I sure am! Especially considering the very generous discount to his services he gave me, he's a really decent guy and I look forward to working with him to make the game as good a quality as we can ^^

Hello again all!

First off, my sincerest apologies for my absence on the site; in all honesty with the discord and the patreon and my being used to my FA page being pretty small and not as watched, if that makes sense, I didn't make the mental jump I needed to remember FA isn't just a place where I check out cool pics and people and such, it's where people might want some info on the game I've told them I'm making xD

So sorry about that, I'll try and keep updates more regular from now on; not only that, but I've been working in my absence! It was slow work at first but I think I've gotten my mojo back to some degree, at least in terms of work; I won't bore you with home life details but you can imagine the kind of stuff that has to be done after something like this happens, and I gotta help out my ma where I can!

Like I say though, I've been working and I'm happy to say I'm in the finishing stages of a new sex animation and working through a move set for a new lizardy enemy, and both of which will be uploaded here as previews when I get them to a good enough standard ^^

So not a great amount of progress I know, and I apologise for that too; everyone's been very supportive and I'm very thankful for that, but I do understand I'm undertaking somehing that people would like to see and I intend to make good on what I've put out there thus far. I hope that in time, as things normalise, I can get back to and even improve upon the update schedule I set prior to dad's passing; I intend to show that I remain serious about this project!

And it's understandable if people are nervous, I mean who wouldn't be? You guys don't know me for the most part, to the point that you could make a guess on whether I'd have the drive or interest to do it anymore at least, and in the indie gaming world there have been a hell of a lot of scam artists and mis-sold products. I understand, and I intend to prove to everyone that this is carrying on, through actions and updates; I hope I can earn people's trust over this, and I'm beyond grateful to the people that are continuing to support me through the worst of it; the love and compassion shown really took a weight off of the situation, and I can't express how thankful I am.

Anyway, I've rambled on long enough; expect a couple of animations up soon, and look forward to the dog's 'sex' animation; at 280 frames it nearly doubles my previous count, and I really hope you'll enjoy it ^^

Have a lovely day everyone!

-S

Hey everyone,

I'll keep this short,some of you may know already and I don't want to spend too long writing about the subject, but yesterday my father passed away suddenly at home despite our and the paramedics' efforts. Honestly I think I'm still in shock, as is my mother whom this has to be hitting worse than me, and in light of this I'm going to need to take a couple of weeks hiatus from progress on the game so we can mourn and I can try and keep the both of us somewhat together in the head.

The thought had crossed my mind to just carry on, use the work to distract myself, but a friend pointed out to me how that end up with me associating the two every time I tried work afterwards and... I think it's best that I sacrifice some work for now so the project isn't tainted by these recent events.

Thank you all for your continued support, it made dad really happy to know I was getting somewhere making the game and he was always telling me to keep at it, and that came from all of you being interested and taking the time, so thank you from the bottom of my heart and I'll continue my work soon as some distance has been created. Don't worry also, I'm having to stop myself really because I enjoy the work so much, so it won't be one of those times where this hiatus journal is the last thing you hear for 2 years or something, but...yeah I'm rambling now lol


Hope everyone has a nice day, thanks for reading:)

-S

Hey everyone!

So it's been a little while since the 0.05 release, or the last one anyway (memory leaks are a bitch!) and in the meantime I've been devoting work entirely to the creation of the sex sprites for the Golden Retriever enemy; after the first is done for him I'll either do the Pharmacy Worker's second, ground based sex animation or continue to his ground one, depending on what people think! I'm pretty sure I can get two done in time for another update along with some other stuff I want to try out, like expanding the level a bit and putting in a daze mechanic for Amber.

Currently for the animation (which you'll find in submissions unless you were incredibly quick to click on this after its publishing) I've got 85 frames, and we're barely past the first looping section! In fact I just completed that and after I'm done with this will move on to the transition to the second loop, but lord knows how many frames this will end up at by the end xD I think as I've gotten more used to animating I've tried to get it looking smooth as I can, but that comes with smaller movements and more frames; that will be something I want to ask people at some point, possibly on one of those strawpoll things, if I do a direct comparison between this when it's finished and a lower frame animation like the Dog's and see which people would prefer, speed of creation or detail; I have a feeling I know already but still! xD

This also leads me to questions regarding how I'm going to set up my update structure; I want to give at least a monthly game update with some new content of some form or other added for people to try out, and I think that's an accomplishable goal. I'm still experimenting though and it may turn out that this goal of two new animations for the next version is going to be a bit taxing or just take too much time in general; I want to try at least though and see where it gets me so that I can set myself goals for updates that are realistic for my output, which overall I think will be best for everyone at the end of the day ^^

A lot of people have said to me not to get myself too stressed or overworked doing this and I do think it's vital that I can spend as much time being lazy as I can have some time to refresh myself and not burn out! Those of you who've been here a while might already know I did come quite close to that in the lead up to last Christmas, but with all of the family and festivity type stuff going on I took some time off from the game then and it turned out to be exactly what I needed, as I'd been running myself dry for weeks not getting a whole lot done regardless of how much effort I tried to put in and it was really killing me and my quality!

That's not to say I plan to take two week breaks on the regular, but I am going to try and say to myself that some days don't have to be spent constantly animating or coding or stuff like that; still though, I do believe the increase in productivity and energy gained from those days off will outstrip the benefit of constant work.

That isn't to say I've ever had anyone be like 'you must work harder, why are you enjoying yourself?', as usual you lot all humble and amaze me with how supportive and nice you are, but it's easy enough to fall into the trap of being entirely in charge of your time management, ergo always feeling like you could be working, so why aren't you, as a result; so this is really more of a decision I've had to come to for my own sake, just wanted to make that clear coz I'd hate for anyone to think that I've felt pressured as a result of their support; on the contrary, its the support of everyone that 's making me look at myself and my time management and such and trying to work out how to better things for my work, so I can carry on making this game to the best of my ability ^^

So, rambling aside, TL;DR animating is getting to be a longer but more detailed process, next update will have at least one new adult animation from the Golden Retriever which you can view in my submissions with what I've got so far, and I've been thinking of how to best utilize my time and energy based on my work output to give me a good quality of life while giving you a good quality of game ^^

Wow, you know sometimes I make these things concise and wonder why I just spend half a damn page getting to the same points I did in 3 lines xD

Hope everyone is having a nice day, thanks for reading!

-S

Hey everyone!

My apologies for my relative silence on here, it's been a very hectic few weeks with the sudden explosion in interest and I've barely been able to reconcile all of my social things with getting any work done toward the project, such a gigantic swirling of the brain I've only really come back down to earth lately xD

But thank you all for joining me and watching and favouriting and commenting and such, I really do appreciate it and I'll be going through them, I always look at the comments and am very grateful for them thank you all so much!

Anyway, gushing over, here's what you're all lookin' for:

https://mega.nz/#!sWRyUJLa!dxNC67A0.....PR6tZmIsM9LNrs

and here's the changelog/readme for it; Enjoy!

It's here!


EDIT: don't worry also, I'll be putting this up as a submission in a little while, decided to do this right before I had to drive and ran out of time, sorry! xD


So after a few false starts and many bug tests and such, I decided to stop fixing up every little thing and just release it on here so I can start working on new content rather than patching things up; they'll get patched up eventually but I'd rather give you all a new animation or two for the next numeric update ^^



HERE IT IS:
https://mega.nz/#!sWRyUJLa!dxNC67A0.....PR6tZmIsM9LNrs


Anyway, I tried to include a readme file in the zip but when I try and re-do it becomes a .rar and rather than deal with winzip for the moment I thought I'd post it and the changelog here:

==================================


PREDATION ALPHA 0.05 UPDATE CHANGELOG


Hello!

I just wanted to say before getting to the additions/fixes that this update does NOT contain any new 18+ content I'm afraid, so if you look around for new stuff you'll be out of luck for now! The next update should make up for that though I hope ;) If you've played 0.04 it won't be that functionally different; despite the lack of 18+ material this time there is a new enemy however, and a new block feature I've tried to set up; press C to block incoming attacks now! Other than that various bugs and annoyances have been fixed or attemptedly fixed, and I hope that overall this will provide a much more stable experience for people to get a look at what I intend for the game. Now that this is out I can focus on content addition and animations!


- C to Block

- Punch combo moved to 2 punches; still buggy, pressing Z twice at the right tempo will cause a combo attack; if you get stuck
press the C key or jump, or something of that nature xD

-Pause Menu implemented properly, press ESC to bring up Amber's phone AKA the pause screen

-Fullscreen mode now available

- Dynamic screen sizing, AKA drag on the window to your heart's content!

-New Enemy, L1M2, the 'tutorial enemy'; 2 attacks implemented, text intro

-Fixed various enemy AI problems, though a few remain of course

-Fixed hitboxes in most circumstances

-New KO animation for Amber becoming infected, triggerable by losing to the Golden Retriever's sneeze attack! (no CG yet)

- Myriad improvements and tweak to help with stability

- Fixed issue that causes game crash with a log that has 'Light Controller' listed in it

- Game now pauses automatically when the window loses focus to another or is minimized

- Music can now be turned on or off via the pause menu


-There's more besides but I can't quite recall currently, those are the main ones though



Hope everyone enjoys it, let me know of bugs or opinions or suggestions, and why not pop over to the discord server while you're at it? Huge thanks to the fellows over on there for their bugchecking and tireless efforts to help me out and get some nasty stuff fixed!

And thanks to you too, I realise this isn't the most content filled expansion but I hope it shows my dedication to continuing to make this a fun game as well as a fun... experience ;)

Hi everybody!

As the title says, I now own GM2! This is a direct upgrade from the version of Game Maker I was using beforehand and already the improvements are massive and incredibly useful! For starters the game project file ported over with no problems (that I've yet found at least) and the game's compile time for testing out stuff is a quarter of the time taken than it used to! The interface has been vastly improved, with pretty much every complaint I had about the old one addressed well, and overall I think this is going to be a real game changer (ha ha) when it comes to being able to just get on with what I want rather than spend a couple of minutes navigating through archaic drop down menus and windows to find what I need; the amount of time I save not dealing with that has already been noticeable!

Full disclosure, I went half in with a supporter who will remain nameless and spent the other half from the patreon funds I've graciously been given; that makes this the first thing I've purchased with that money; can't get more business expense-y than buying a program that lets you do the main business thing you want to do! xx

There's going to be another hot fix update to get rid of that hilarious duplicate bug among others, with a couple other little additions while I work on the adult animations, but I'm taking a little time to familiarise myself with the new workspace and such so bare with me while I have some fun with my new gadget xD

Hey everyone!

Work continues as usual; along with the making of the rest of the level to be able to have the whole first level out as a demo of sorts, I wanted to let everyone know I've been sprucing up some of Amber's sprites to make them a bit nicer looking, including stuff like the tail wherever I forgot it, foot pads, general improvements that I can see need doing now that I'm better at this and so on.

The movement set for Amber was the first major sprite project I undertook when I first started this, so as you can imagine the time between and animation after animation have given me a few good ideas on making stuff look better in general!

once I've gotten most all of the moveset done I'll package up a new version with a couple of little additions such as that for you to check out; nothing major just yet, but work will be focused on a new enemy after this little clean up is done ^^

Hope everyone's having a good week; it's snowing right now here in Britain, again, but that does make it an extra cozy day for sitting in front of the PC and spriting away!

Hey everyone!

Very short thing, but today I logged in and I'm officially over 10,000 page views on here!

I don't know if that's even considered a landmark anymore but I've been on the site in one profile or another for 12 years now and never thought I'd see the day, so this is something very special to me and I wanted to thank you all for being the ones to make it happen ^^

Makes me feel like I should do a Kiriban xD anyone remember that? is that still a thing? Am I that out of touch?

Well, if a half finished Simpsons reference doesn't seal it, nothing will I suppose xD

Thanks again everyone, back to work with me ^^

Hey everyone!


Quick update on what I'm workin' on at the moment; with the movement system improved now and things looking a bit more stable mechanically I've been free to start building on what I've already got, which is a nice change of pace from making the initial construction!

Which means, as you can see, I'm adding in Combo attacks! This is part of my wider idea to improve the combat of the game and make it actually fun; I don't think I'm good enough yet at that to really nail it but I've been working on the first combo code and bar a couple of annoying gripes I've gotten it to work pretty darn well I'd say! I'll put it in the next update for people to see but it probably won't be perfect then, as with anything on here; the main problem I have with it currently is the combo works just fine, 3 seperate attacks triggered by consecutive button presses, but I've not yet pondered my way into working out how to space those attacks out so they dont' just initiate as soon as you press the button xD


There are several needlessly complicated ways to do this but I want something elegant; thankfully it isn't game breaking, I assume most people use the Kick for now with it being the heavier attack, certainly what I use in debugging xD


The Kick will be getting a combo of sorts ,though being a heavier attack it will take a while to swing properly; makes sense right? Other things I'm planning to include will be a sprinting barge to knock an enemy down or stun them in some way, an aerial attack for both punching and kicking, that pipe you may have seen in some of the artwork and other non-lethal weaponry, and even a ranged weapon or two for the later levels with hard to hit enemies of the flying persuasion ;)


In other news, level design is the bigger change people will notice when the next update pops up; what you'll have to do now is go and get the red keycard from the bottom, open up to the second floor and go to be bar, at which point the pig will let you out through the employee hallway and get you to a further point in the level that is now blocked off at the bottom by explosion debris!


Depending on how things work out I might end up doing the whole level's layout and populate it with the enemies I plan to add after the fact, or I might get on with animating those enemies before I plan rooms for them; what's everyone think? Both will take time of course, but both will get done either way ^^

Hey everyone, will keep it brief coz I'm on my phone; so in a day from hell for many, many reasons the icing on the cake, unless something else happens to rival it, is my computer has now died once again.

I think the problem is the hard drive with windows on it, based on what I'm reading, so hopefully I'll be able to get it back up and running soon; I actually made a backup of stuff like a half hour before this happened so nothing is lost I think, but still very annoying.

The problem as it stands now is, everything went black with the PC still on, and it rebooted with the little beep noise, to that flashing underscore that appears before the bios menu; it just stays there though, doesn't even move to the bios screen.

Typical eh? My apologies to anyone whose stuff like sketches and such are affected by this, I'll hopefully be able to get this back and online before too long.

Have a good day everyone, remember to save often and make backups!

EDIT: so unplugging it and looking at the hard drive connections seemed to do something, and the PC is working for now!

Taking this chance to further back up everything xD

Hey Everyone!

Thought I'd post up a quick update, let you all know what's going on at the moment in my cave of pixels and monitors xD

So I managed to get the update out on the 14th, though as many of you will have seen/played by now it is a very rough release by comparison to other stuff I've done, or at least by the quality I ideally would have wanted; at the same time it was valentines day and I thought sod it, why not? As usual everyone has been going above and beyond in helping me with bug testing and encouragment and suggestions, and honestly I've not felt this good or confident in quite some time ^^

So currently I'm taking a few days to focus primarily on the rewards people recieve from my Patreon page ( *ahem* https://www.patreon.com/HornedLizardStudios *ahem*) which consists of some sketches and pixel art, all of which I'll be uploading for the Scraps gallery to give a bit of differentiation from reward stuff and game stuff; when I'm not doing that I'll be bugfixing and such, and I'm even making myself a little advert for FA's ad system that I'll hopefully get up at some point soon ^^

That'll be my first use of backer money actually, which I hope is a good use of it; I figure it's going to directly contribute to game development in that sense so it's worth a shot!

That's about it for now really, keep an eye out for a hotfix for that version in the next week or two depending on how these rewards go/how difficult certain bugs will be, and a big thanks again to everyone helping me out and being so dang nice!

Hey everyone!

So another thing I've been working on is the music for the game, which I purchased a MIDI keyboard for this year and is going really well all in all; it's a good break from animating and such when I need it and I've got one or two things I'm quite happy with for the moment that I'll be adding to the next demo; silly to make such a deal out of it for what I'm doing but I always wanted to get into electronic music and this has been a really fun experience learning and composing and such!

I've also bought a directional mic for recording my own footfalls, punch noises, doors closing, so on so forth; why not right? May as well do it right and learn stuff about sound editing too!

While I have your attention, I'll just put this here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLphA-MZvXg

One of my favourites since I was a kid, stuck in my head today for whatever reason, and I'd feel remiss if I didn't put it up and give praise to the DN3D soundtrack of old!