We've made an Early Access Logs and Votings subforum which is only visible to game owners and in which only the developers can post in.

So, if you subscribe to it, you'll get notifications of all votings and devlogs we post and that way we don't need to spam the announcements section for non-critical information and you'll still be able to keep up with development ^^

All build related posts will be posted in announcements as normally ^^

There's currently two threads:
A Devlogs' thread ( https://steamcommunity.com/app/944330/discussions/4/1639792569853213675/ )

And a thread for Island #2 poll ( https://steamcommunity.com/app/944330/discussions/4/1639792569853197014/ )

Cheers!
Ruffleneck

Changelist r5.24:

* NEW Kess will finally give female players a reward for rumor hunting!
* NEW Cabin Paw, the first actual crew member (who’ll come with you on the ship and to other islands, but you’ll get to pick between male and female Juin in later builds, default to female for now). Will potentially be sexable in the long term, but not for now!
* NEW Minor NPCs: ~20k words across 9 characters that expand the world and lore, but do not have a full act associated with them (we’ll eventually vote and see who should be sexable :3). Minor NPCs are identifiable by “darker” name text.
* NEW Reworked new game system - You can now start a new game with the same character, and load different save states and autosaves through the Continue game button, and the system streamlines creation and starting of a game with a brand new character.
* NEW Save states system - You can talk to Cabin Paw to create new saves or load old ones. Do note that prey is not saved until we’ve added proper prey processing and inventory system.
* NEW Kirhaal has been reworked and is a lot more city -like now.
* NEW The Cotton Ball and Sterling’s shop are replaced with prettier custom houses.
* NEW Graphical overhaul to make things prettier in general. Namely new water shader with reflections and prettier waves, and updated and prettier day/night cycle.
* NEW 14 new acts to spice up the selection on island. Largely pawing and pawjobs and a little bit of anal.
* Added bunch of different kind of act locators around Kirhaal.
* Added texture streaming to optimize GPU memory usage.
* Added an unlockable quick travel path between Kirhaal and other side of the mountain.
* Fixed acts in Showroom and on island having issues assigning characters to right slots.
* Fixed shadow cascades being wrong between different quality settings.
* Fixed advance time used in some conversations advancing minutes instead of hours.
* Fixed missing Davh tongues (dunno how this made in originally).
* Fixed alignment of random acts, they’re now a bit more interestingly aligned and better positioned.
* Fixed conversation variables defaulting to NULL instead of 0 and false which was causing some odd behavior with some conversations.
* Fixed Spirit being there after act.
* Fixed time progression taking you out of Spirit conversation.
* Changed and optimize Kess’ tit lamps because they were a bit too unoptimized and performance heavy.
* Changed all conversation animations to have some crossfade when played to remove occasional snapping.
* Changed city lamps to be a bit more optimized.
* Changed day night cycle to be faster (day 120mins/night 90mins)
* Changed unenterable houses to have some “light glow” in the closed windows so it looks a bit more lived in.
* Changed Main menu to match the new Kirhaal.
* Changed Sterling to be a bit easier to bang.

Changelist r5.24.1:

* Fixed dock and some other static meshes not being blend with the terrain.
* Fixed misaligned act appearing in the fountain (moved outside of the fountain, and aligned properly).
* Fixed “hat” not being abandonable in some cases.
* Fixed some new acts having characters in off positions.
* Fixed Sterling not agreeing to talk without promising to bang her, and turning her down first.
* Fixed Showroom genitalia checker not checking genitalia properly.
* Fixed characters getting assigned to wrong slots in some acts.
* Fixed filtering in character picker.
* Fixed “Tasting” not having animated doggy tongue.
* Added missing sound surface information.
* Added necessary colliders to support splashing and sfx for ocean, river, and pools near statues.
* Changed animation handling of Showroom to match Island’s animation handling (which also fixes tongues on Showroom).
* Changed Showroom to return to default animation when characters are changed to prevent mismatching animations from occurring.
* Changed act position indicators to have emissive material so that they’re easier to spot at night.
* Changed eye <-> head weights of random NPCs so that they use more eyes and less head to look at player.

Enjoy! <3
Ruffleneck

Thank you for your patience! <3

There's still a few bugs we need to iron out, and then fix up what rises from the internal testing phase, but all the content is packaged up and ready. Not much longer now! ^^

Options menu won't be in this build, but we'll release it as a separate build (with just the options menu in it after this build).

Recap of what will be in;

• Kess will be sexable (FxF act),
  
• There are some 20+ thousand words of minor NPCs to chat up with and learn more lore about the world from,
  
• The first of the major crew members for the player (Cabin paw, initially a female, but you'll be able to choose a male or female once we add the option in) is in,
  
• A "fast travel" option between Amber Woods and Kirhaal (once you discover the other point),
  
• Kirhaal has been reworked to be more interesting place to be in and more compact to travel through,
  
• The save system now allows you to save and restore from different states, you'll be able to start new games with your characters without having to remake it, and bunch of other things. The autosaving still allows you to pick from where you were, but in addition to that you can visit the Cabin paw to make separate "log entries" as you please ^^

Thank you very much for patience!

I'm sorry we're late with the build! It is coming along very well, there's a lot of stuff in the build and sometimes there are just unaccounted for factors in development which can make release dates a bit hazy ^^

What is still on the list:
- Binding remaining Options menu buttons to graphics features (Medium to long task)
- Binding swimming to new water shader/effect (Short)
- Some more writing to tie in certain characters with each other (Short)
- Adding animations to new minor NPCs (Short)
- Making some of the remaining animations for minor NPCs (Medium)
- Prettifying save game menu (Short)
- Internal testing thatistotallynotsexualevenifitsoundslikeitsorry (Medium)

What is done for the r5.24:
- Kirhaal and surrounding area overhaul
- Optimization and updating of Skiia vegetation
- Optimization and updating of Skybox/weather/lighting
- Optimization and updating of Sea
- Save game menu (save states, load states)
- Kess full act
- Dozen NPCs
- Bunch of small acts
- Adding of against wall acts around Kirhaal
- Realigning and improving some positioning of ~few thousand act positions on Skiia
- A small "secret" place
- Improvement of Star New Game -> Make new Character flow making it clearer and easier to start with new characters and less confusing and I'm saying it here because it's kinda bit thing for basic usability... ALSO YOU CAN START A NEW GAME WITH THE SAME CHARACTER WHOOHOOO! x)

I would estimate a couple of weeks max until the internal testing, and then short while from there to release. We don't want to rush builds out though, it's not good in the long term, but it's definitely not a long time until the release!

Sorry again for the delay!

Best wishes,
Ruffleneck

I wanted to write a small update as we're approaching the two month mark up date since the latest build (or are at it?). We're well under way with the build, but it'll likely take us one more month to finish up with it as we want to push more meat in ^^

We generally try to release one build every other month. It gives us enough time to work on new features and content without rushing and trying to fulfill a quota of build releases to pad up release numbers. Some might prefer faster cycles, but over the couple of years working on Hunt and Snare in public (Steam Early Access build was our 22nd public build release over the past few years), we've noticed that this kind of a cycle is best when it comes to developing new features and bigger content updates.



Initially we released builds weekly or biweekly, but the time it takes to prepare and release a build pretty much ate 10-20% of the development time, and it slowed down development of new features because we couldn't really work on one thing for extended period of time (which in game development is generally required). Also, back then Hunt and Snare builds took just few minutes to make, and most of the time was setting up posts and uploading builds. Now builds take 4-6 hours to make, but there's nearly zero work outside the actual build compiling, except half of the team just fiddling fingers and waiting x)

As mentioned in the earlier paragraph that the Hunt and Snare developer team is just four people; Thanks to sales on Steam we've been able to purchase some outside hours in form of an another artist (working on some new and better houses and the player's ship), and couple of extra writers to populate the world with fluffs and make it feel more living ^^



What we're adding in the next build are "Minor NPCs". Minor characters can be short or long, can have quests/tasks associated with them or might not, can be important to the world or might not be, the only difference between Minor and Major characters is whether or not they have sex acts associated with them. Kess, for example, was originally intended as a minor character, but she'll be getting a full act in the next build.



The minor and major characters will be identifiable in the game, at least in the first release with them. We'll see how it looks and plays out and if it's annoying to know "who can be banged" or not ^^

Also, the bigger feature is moving from simple Graphics Presets to a proper options menu. Can't say on the exact number of settings you can tweak, but I'd say it's "a few games worth of options". You'll be able to tweak pretty much every option to some degree, to disable and enable most of the graphics features ^^



Along with the proper graphics options menu, we're finally adding trans characters to spawners properly and adding ability to tweak the spawner combinations; E.g. if you just want trans, you'll be able to remove males and females out of the spawning, or if you just want males or females, you can filter others out. The important thing about Hunt and Snare is giving options and maxing out to your preferences. Do note that this doesn't affect the written NPCs (which will eventually get clothes, though full nudity is likely to be an option), it only affects the spawned ones ^^

We're also expanding the save system, from a simple autosave, to allow save states. This is basically a classic save/load system, but we're at least initially going to limit it to saving in a ship; The autosaves would still cover your travels elsewhere, but if you wanted to create a "continue point", you'd have to visit your ship (initially just outside it on the docks). The saving system will also streamline loading and starting a new game, because choosing a character you've made is... tad bit confusing at times (the hat and spyglass thing) and some people thought you're forced to play as the Butler (you're not!) ^^

In addition to that, we're expanding the minor acts with a small set. It's mostly more pawing as it was the most lacking category, but I think a bit of surprise anal too ^^



Also huge bunch of work have gone to making initial city, Kirhaal, better looking and better in general, but... just look at the screenshots. Images are stronger than swords x)

Thank you for reading (or skipping to the TL;DR!)
You are all awesome!
~Ruffleneck


TL;DR:
- We aim to release next build early-mid next month
- Takes time to make chunky builds
- Thanks to Steam, we have extra helping hands
- Reworked city
- Minor NPCs for city
- Save states
- Extensive options menu
- More single acts and variation
- Sex with Kess

• NEW Auto-saving system; Saves progress with NPCs, position, and time of day. Captured prey are currently not saved because the system itself is going to change vastly at a later date.
  
• NEW and bigger variation of Acts on Island; From temporary ~25 in last build back to original 48 (some of them were disabled in earlier build because Davh was added and there wasn’t enough time to fix all of them) upped by 25 NEW ACTS into total of 73 acts.
  
• NEW and reworked Vegetation setup; Prettier, cheaper, better performance, and 99% as good trees as before, just optimized better. Also fades out vegetation with a nicer curve and there’s grass shadows on highest quality settings.
  
• NEW and reworked post processing effects stack; Better effects, better performance.
  
• Added play guide reminder to the ESC menu on island.
  
• Added “toggled” button to Showroom to show better what character you’re changing in list.
  
• Improved spawn rate of “Howlers” in Amber forest.
  
• Improved navmesh carving by obstances.
  
• Improved terrain texture blending.
  
• Improved mountain passage (still wip though).
  
• Improved texturing and quality of the mountain.
  
• Reduced volume of water splashing.
  
• Fixed POV camera being inside Davh’s mouth.
  
• Fixed age old bug of tongues hanging out and being left in weird positions when switching animations in Showroom.
  
• Fixed tongue poking through throat in certain positions (unrelated to bug fix above).
  
• Fixed some acts missing sounds.
  
• Fixed loading issue with older character tags on characters.
  
• Fixed having input device plugged in breaking controls in game (note: This doesn’t fix spinning camera caused by having a controller plugged in).
  
• Fixed character tag issue breaking code sharing for missing tag or having Stoic tag.
  
• Fixed “Engineers”’s gun state funkiness (note: Player still starts with a gun).
  
• Fixed conversation typos or misuse of gender / species (19).
  
• Fixed tagging issue on footsteps.
  
• Fixed “Sailor” introducing herself twice.
  
• Fixed “Barkeep” penis awareness issue.
  
• Fixed “Bard” act not progressing properly to the end.
  
• Fixed “Dock Clerk” being angry forever, can now be appeased.
  
• Fixed zoom not working properly between creating a character and starting a new character.
  
• Fixed tooltip spam (not visible in-game, but spammed logs)
  
• Fixed “Engineer” getting speared by penis.
  
• Fixed penis going through character in Close Comfort act.
  
• Fixed eye base color loading issue in acts.
  
• Fixed long act name issue in Showroom; Now scales text size better.
  
• Changed bug report hotkey to F9 from F12.
  
• Changed bug report to load up in Steam overlay for Steam version.

• Camera minimum distance allows you to look inside actors currently.
  
• Currently there are only one male and one female voice, so if player picks a voice A and prey or NPC has voice A, it can be a bit confusing. Later on we’ll expand options, and have unique voice set for player so there’s never two identical voices overlapping.
  
• Weapon equip/unequip is a temporary flip only.
  
• If you climb up on a roof of a building, and drop inside, you might get stuck because of autosave saving you inside a building you’re not supposed to go into.
  
• Jiggle effects do not work very well on low framerates.
  
• Camera may spin or controls may be unresponsive if a controller (or a device that is being considered a controller e.g. an ergonomic mouse) is connected that has a joystick axis at a non-zero position.
  
• Abnormally low frame rates for systems that meet minimum requirements on Windows may be caused by a missing Visual C++ Redistributable 2017 package. Download the x64 package here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2977003/the-latest-supported-visual-c-downloads#section-2, install, restart, and try again.

Happy huntin’! <3
~ Ruffleneck

New features:

• NEW Auto-saving system; Saves progress with NPCs, position, and time of day. Captured prey are currently not saved because the system itself is going to change vastly at a later date.
  
• NEW and bigger variation of Acts on Island; From temporary ~25 in last build back to original 48 (some of them were disabled in earlier build because Davh was added and there wasn’t enough time to fix all of them) upped by 25 NEW ACTS into total of 73 acts.
  
• NEW and reworked Vegetation setup; Prettier, cheaper, better performance, and 99% as good trees as before, just optimized better. Also fades out vegetation with a nicer curve and there’s grass shadows on highest quality settings.
  
• NEW and reworked post processing effects stack; Better effects, better performance.
  
• 29 other fixes, changes, or improvements.
  
• 19 conversation typos fixed!

P.s. Sorry for the silence when it comes to announcements; We're still figuring out what is the optimal way to post progress and feature previews and haven't had time to settle with any specific setup yet! Our primary focus has been replying in community and making the upcoming build ^^

~Ruffleneck

Welcome old comers and new comers and all comers <3

Hello everyone!

Hunt and Snare is now officially coming on Early Access 17th of this month, this lovely December <3

Launch discount is Steam's suggested 10% and I assume it lasts for the launch week, and then just vanishes, poof, so get it while it's hot, and while winter hasn't cooled it up already x)

The release version is r5.22 (r5 = release in current milestone 5, and .22 = the number of builds we've released), basically the first version with playable Davh (dogs).

Thank you everyone for you feedback, patience, and support <3

See you in the release day!
Ruffleneck