Devlog 1/18/2021 (Patreon)

(I thought i did this yesterday and i did not, i'm sorry)

Hello everyone! This time it’s me, Vero!  I’m filling in for Sprrigs so he can rest for a little while, and I’ve been doing most of the small things behind the scenes too, which I wanted to talk about here really quick!  

First, the most important part, how is the game?I have decided to do something that takes a while, but I am almost completely done with it now. I went ahead and poured over every line of code in the entire project, correcting small syntax errors and overall formatting things better. Why is this important for the game itself? Because in the next release, we will no longer be using the YoYo games “runner”! So, what does that mean? It means the game will no longer be running as interpreted code. It will be compiled as C code by us, and you will be running it as a proper executable! This gives us much, much better performance, better memory management, and it also means that we can do… drum rolls… Linux versions! That’s right, I’ll be managing the Linux versions entirely, so any questions you have regarding that, please forward them to me! I have also experimented with a Raspberry Pi version, as the engine now has support for that too, but that would need a lot more work that I am not willing to put in yet, since I don’t think anyone would run out to get an RPi just to play Predation.

Next, I will be reworking Amber. Not her art, that will stay the same, but I will be reworking her movement system, her fighting styles, how you interact with the world around you, etc… I made some progress in this regard, and hopefully, fingers crossed, I will have a demo put up somewhere showing off how it works early next week! This does not mean that controls will change, they will likely stay the same, but everything will feel more “alive”. Punches will feel more impactful, jumping will be a lot more dynamic, Amber will move a bit more fluently, and other small things like that! Another small change, in the 1.0 version, you probably noticed that the game was checking if you were running the latest version or not! Well, that worked great, but I will be removing that feature, for two reasons, one, I don’t think it’s all that useful looking back at it, especially now that I’m also working on an optional launcher for the game, that will auto update if you want it to, and because it increased our server costs by a lot, thousands upon thousands of requests to our API in a single day! That’s crazy, but unfortunately also quite expensive! But thank you so much for your support and for playing the game so much!  

And last, the website, currently it is a mess because I have been doing a lot of things at once, but I want to bring back a much simpler layout soon, one which we can use just for downloads and similar things! Anyone who registered to the emailing list, your Emails have been completely and safely purged from the database, we will no longer be sending out emails, as a few people decided to report us for spam, so we got blocked by pretty much all major emailing services. Until then, I am sorry we are stuck with the current one, but in case you need something from there, here: https://predation.azureedge.net/
That’s all for now! Thank you!
Vero