Gaze XI - Sling Penis and the Boulder (Patreon)

I hope your 2018 has started well, and if not, I hope it will improve soon! Ours has started quite well, with little bit of general sickness, cold weather, all the classic January things that we've come to expect from change of years ^^' 

First and foremost, thank you for the awesome last year! I'm very grateful for the support, of all past, present, and future patrons, and public players of course too! <3

Also, you might be wondering why this is called as a Gaze, and not a Weekly Gaze or a Monthly Gaze (Well, it wasn't called as Monthly Gaze to begin with xD), and the reason for it is that I'll switch these gazes to basically be "undated" because I am not able to write a new gaze every week... Just coming up with good topics that are "writeable" enough takes so much time that I think, pretty much everyone, would prefer that time spent on actual work on the game. I'll also look into posting smaller updates with WIP things, instead of trying to cram everything in one post (Gaze) ^^

I've been generally posting small WIP images of things in Discord, but we'll see how it works out if I'll post here instead. I know a lot of other Creators post very small things too, I kinda feel like it's spammy to post "not so impressive things", but maybe it's just an issue with me personally... I do like seeing WIP things other Creators post though ^^

Anyways, onward with rambling!

We have basically started our 2018 with Hunt and Snare by updating to Unity 2017 (from 5.6 version) and refactoring parts of the movement system and gunplay. Refactoring means cleaning up, improving, and reorganizing code, so that it stays clean for the future. It's like cleaning your room, before biohazard teams swoop in x) This will push the next build forward a little bit. We are aiming to release the build next week however, and it will primarily be gunplay improvements/polish.

Also, we ran the poll, late last year, where patrons had to run "red cube green cube no cube" -test. The results were overwhelmingly DX10.1+, literally there was one person who had DX9, and one who had DX10 only. This means that Hunt and Snare minimum requirements will be set to DX10.1 going forward. Hunt and Snare will still be playable for those without DX10.1, BUT you will not be able to see all aspects of the game, mainly, the new island (once complete) is likely to be devoid of grass and trees because we're switching to GPU Instancing (trees and grass are not placed, they're rendered only at runtime). This will greatly improve FPS for DX10.1+ users, and... well, it will improve your FPS too if you're using DX9 or DX10 cards, because you won't have to render all the trees and grass that makes your gpu cry ^^'

- Too many trees! But hey, perfect frame rate -

Another reason for this, besides the optimization, is that Unity is going to, this year, remove DX9 support from the engine, and we need to keep up to date with Unity Engine updates (for new features, optimization options, tools we us, etc). Basically, going forward, it's likely Hunt and Snare is going to get more non-DX9 supported features.

If you feel like this change will ruin Hunt and Snare for you, please send me a message and we'll give you refunds from your pledges. I wholeheartily understand if this makes you feel like you've been scammed out of your money and you won't receive what you pledged for because the game won't be up to par others will receive. Please do note that this applies only to current Patrons (as this post will be made publicly available in couple of days), the reason being is that I can't see nor verify past pledges of people who have stopped pledging because of how Patreon works ^^

To more positive things!

One of the reasons why we haven't pushed a build yet, besides refactoring, is that we're currently working on multiple things at the same time. Last year, large parts of last year anyways, we worked solely on one feature at a time, which meant that while builds were frequent, there wasn't really anything being worked on besides that build. This year, at least the beginning, we're focusing primarily on adding the core features of island gameplay (Inventory, conversations, shopping (also processing prey, it's basically shopping xD)) and new island (instead of the demo island that we have currently). This is essentially Release 5 (we're still on 4 here).

Once done with Release 5, we're more or less completely open for content creation: We can add items, conversations, characters, cities/towns, progression, etc, without limitations. Also... doggies, as promised ^^

What to expect on Skiia rework?

The old island was very compact because it was primarily intended for close range capturing, and compact means everything is very close to each other which causes optimization issues (you can see a huge variety of things close to each other, basically across multiple biomes). While the new Skiia is wider and things have more space in between each other, it doesn't mean there's less things to do or things to look at. Think of general shooting games with cramped spaces to wide spaces of Skyrim/Witcher. More space doesn't equal less things to fiddle with!

Speaking of things to fiddle with, the mooring point on new Skiia is going to be port city of Kirhaal. There is likely to be one main hub on all islands in Hunt and Snare, and it will be the biggest concentration of Player <-> NPC interaction. It doesn't mean there's no NPCs to interact with in the wilderness, just a lot less. Kirhaal is not a massive city, there but is likely to be a lot of NPCs to interact with, at some point. Of course initially it will just be a small collection of houses and an NPC or two. But like with real cities, they start small, and grow over time. Some NPCs will just offer couple of lines, while some, more major NPCs, maybe have tasks for you to do, or offer something more substantial than just a quick suck and squirt ^^

- I love big bullets and I can’t lie.. ....I probably used this joke somewhere already didn’t I? -

Kirhaal on Skiia as a hub will serve as your primary trading port where you can buy and sell accessories, clothes, toys, rifle mods, and other general loot and items. Speaking of loot; We're hoping to cover all sorts of things as items, so that you can find both usable items and miscellaneous fluff items that are either valuable or just fun to find. Generally the looting system is going to be fairly RPG like, with commons, uncommons, and rares, but they're unlikely to have actual "stat benefit" as we're not planning on having any character skill systems. Not sure yet if we'll go full Skyrim and Ultima on it and allow you to find forks and other random stuff from pretty much every container there is, or if we'll go the classic RPG way of only having loot on hidden chests and such ^^

We are most likely going to have "filler" NPCs in addition to the those that you can interact with. The filler NPCs basically just wander around, and give you a feeling of city that is populated, but those wandering NPCs don't really offer you anything in return compared to actual NPCS. 

- I finally had time to test out Marvelous Designer -

- ... and waste time doing random things with it, oops -

We're going to bind conversations partially to sex acts too. Basically it will be possible to adjust sex acts slightly based on conversations with major characters, e.g. go from position A to C instead of A to B, giving a bit of dynamicity to otherwise linear acts. Visually we're going with kind of a "soft speech bubbles" approach (similarly to how Night in the Woods does it, but fit for larger text amounts) instead of the large conversation interface often used in visual novels. 

I'll talk more about conversation system when I have proper screens to show of the basic setup with it ^^

With love,

~Ruffleneck