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The progress update devlogs are usually the best way to gauge this, and another will be out at the end of this month (every 3 months roughly). To review I have to:

-Finish scene art

-Write up the scenes and get them set up in game with timing/music/sfx etc

-Internally bugtest

-Release to supporters for a "closed beta"

-Release generally

Of all this, the art is the big one by far. This current cycle hasn't been as productive as I'd like, as I've had a lot of unavoidable distractions and some bad luck with health issues. However, the rat art is now done (including possibly the most complex piece I've ever done), and I hope to have at least one of the wolf pieces done by end of month. If this ends up being the case, that will leave:

-1 wolf piece

-2.5 pieces for the final boss defeat

-.5 of other misc small stuff

-Title screen

(keep in mind the big ones here have many variations)

So 5 total. Generally I estimate about 2 weeks per piece, so we'd be looking at about 2.5 months to finish the art.

Writeup is hard to say: I have been estimating this at about two weeks, but there's a LOT of scenes to cover, so it may drag on longer. Same with the internal bugtest, although I THINK the external/closed beta will stay the same at two weeks. So let's be a little pessimistic:

-2.5 months art

-1 month writeup

-.5 month internal bugtest

-.5 month closed beta

So at the MOST optimistic, if we assumed half a month for the writeup, we'd be looking at 3.5 months to beta, 4 months to public release (counting from the end of November). Realistically, probably more like 5 or 6. So maybe, MAYBE, end of April for public release.

And yes, I know, this is a slip yet again.The scene art is the most difficult, unpredictable and time-consuming part of the process, and unfortunately it has to be done last. Also unfortunately, I'm one person working in...less than ideal circumstances. General planning, mapping, programming, tilework etc are all things I can kind of stumble through even if I'm not doing well, but art requires me to be at least 80%, and unfortunately that's been hard to maintain recently. 

But this is always on my mind. Despite appearances, I am not fucking around. This game is important to me, even more so than it is to the fans, and as pathetic as it is, this is the best I can do currently. All I can do is keep going, keep locking things in, and be as transparent as I can. And promise that I'm not wasting time on constant re-writes, on constantly fiddling with unimportant details etc. None of that. It's good enough, and then I move on. It really is just the art that drags it down. If I was a "good" artist I could crank through these pieces in 3 days a piece. But I'm not, so it takes a while.

I made the choice going into this game to go as ambitious as was reasonably possible, and while I think that was ultimately the right choice, wow has it been a ride. If I had stuck with the scale of GT, the art would already be done. GT had seven scene CG on initial release counting the title screen; 3 already has eight completed, and I still have another FIVE to do. Game big. Game very big.

But we'll get there. Boars are done. Rats are done. Wolves are underway. Then it's just boss and some odds and ends, and the hard part will be over.

But I am sorry, and I'll probably repeat that in the official update: sorry and grateful people have stuck by me so long despite the bloated and unpredictable dev cycle on this thing. I was just checking back on dev update from July of '25, and back then I was saying March or April too. Of 2026. Ouch. But, back then I was deep in the guts of the game proper, mapping and scripting and such, wondering if I would ever see the end of it, and wondering if I would ever even be able to release the game due to the censorship nonsense going on then. Well, the censorship wave came and went, and the game proper DID get done (it just doesn't have any scenes in it yet)! The art will get done too. Just gotta keep working my way through.  

Couldn't say for sure. I usually don't plan that far ahead in detail, so we'll see. Ha, and glad you like the setup. Probably no xp drain stuff though, as messing with xp and levelling in any depth ended up being more complexity than I wanted to deal with. Mezz does get weaker in combat over progressive losses via other mechanics, and I tend to favor that as it "floats": it doesn't disrupt basic stat matchups in fights and can be cranked up or down on its own.

I'm not trying to be snarky here, but explain to me how you envision this working, and why you would want this? 

This game, and the games in this series, are effectively 2d 2000s-era RPGs. There is nothing to be gained by running them in VR. If you want to run 2d games or applications in VR for some reason, I'm sure there are various wrappers to make that possible, but again, I struggle to see the motivation to do so. 

No I getcha, and appreciate it. And I will say, at the very least he DOES end up tied to the staff a lot, a trend that shows no sign of slowing down going into 3.

Sometimes it takes a while to get through to the obnoxious bunny hero that, despite being taller, he's still not gonna win this one. Especially since the rats, while in possession of SOME mind-altering leverage, don't have nearly as much power or finesse there as most of the foes Mezz fights. So they have to settle for more basic and direct approaches to fill in the gaps (in the bunny).

Oh yeah. Thus the expression.

Both in the scene overall, though between the legs in the picture here. And as for chastity, we'll have to wait and see.

Thanks! Unfortunately the game has certain features, like a secondary save system, that wouldn't be easy to bring to a cell phone, so for now it's desktop/laptop only.

Ha, appreciate it!

As for the idea, the boring answer is that while hot, a full alternate path cutting through ALL the games just isn't practical in terms of scope: this shit is already juuust on the edge of what I can handle in terms of path complexity. I will however gesture to the boar and eventually hyena routes taking place in Haven, which DO cut across multiple games and do represent an ongoing, lasting corruption of the bunny. May also be some interesting things once we reach the end of the series, but that's a looooong way off. 

Appreciate it! We'll get there in the end, progress continues.

They have a lot of fun places where bunny snout can be ground into.

Also holy shit new horrifyingly ugly text post interface. I wonder if they had to swap out the old one because of the PHP vulnerability (though itch seems a little new to be still be using PHP anywhere.

Good to hear! I appreciate the effort, and good luck!

Once every THREE months, and that's more of a rule of thumb, though I have been sticking to it pretty closely the past few updates. This is actually considerably more than I used to do, but with such a long dev time I wanted to touch base and update people with some degree of regularity. 

Thanks much! Glad you enjoyed it.

I'll be the first to admit the combat mechanics, especially in this first one, aren't anything groundbreaking, but exactly, I did try to at least have SOME degree of thought required, so you couldn't just mash attack. Helps give things a little more stake.

And somewhat the same with the battle sex stuff: its a good start, but remember this IS the start. I learned a lot by the time I made the second game (and even more so with the third, now in production).

But thanks, and definitely check out GT when you can, it has a lot more content and a lot more polish. And I definitely appreciate anyone getting the word out: it's a bit isolated here on Itch.

Pff, I love that this keeps coming up. Enter the shed. Observe the shape of the space. Observe the ground type under the boars. Exit the shed. Observe the shape of the building. Observe the ground type.

But no, there is no special scene there.

I mean if you're talking PC play it'll be ages before it's even ported, from what I understand. But even once it is, gonna take some reeeeal expensive hardware to play, even if you do pirate the game itself.

Yeah, the goo thing is a little under-developed; one of a few ideas that just wasn't fully built out. But glad you enjoyed it overall!

Thanks! And plenty more to come.

Update every three months. Gotta wait till then.

Very true. Games went from a weird niche in the 80s to a pretty profitable golden age in the 90s and 2000s where juuust the right balance was struck between budget and profit-seeking and still having a small, passionate team that wanted to do something incredible. But by the mid 2010s devs and publishers just weren't competing to create the most fun or innovative products anymore: they were competing to create the most effective scams and life-style props. Games ceased being practical things to be ENJOYED and became a weird kind of status symbol of being in the cool "geek" crowd, a way to posture. Except that by the time this happened, the hobby had largely been murdered and these people were just wearing its skin.

This isn't to say all good games magically ceased in 2013 or something. They still happen. But they're much, MUCH rarer: an unqualified "amazing" game is nearly a unicorn now. And they're almost always from smaller teams largely outside the industry. 

Also, excellent username.

Makes sense. The last "modern" console I bought was a PS4, and I only ended up buying a handful of games for that. And obviously if they're just not your interest you're...not going to be interested. But I've been more curious where the people that HAVE enjoyed the series over the years were falling on this.

Oh hey, glad you finally finished it out! And no worries, I still enjoy hearing different people's takes and feedback on it, even if they overlap a bit.

Some good taste in endings too: I was definitely pretty proud with the whole video tape setup once it was finished, very much a fun idea. As for conditioning, I do enjoy "real" hypnosis as well, a lot more potential there than people realize, but it's just not a good fit for this kind of game, or at least what I'm trying to do here, so I tend to go with more fictionalized stuff. Too slow-paced of a build-up. For GT in particular though, it was important to the setup to actually have that initial scene with SOME kind of conditioning, even if it was a little vague and didn't have any visuals to go with it. Sets things up and all.

And thanks, appreciate the support!

Oh we'll definitely get to Scratch eventually. Just not on initial release.

Ha! Another convert!

Genuinely, glad you enjoyed it though. And I'm always glad to see new people discovering it. Mind if I ask where you heard about the game?

"The mechanic of healing with energy outside of combat, while only being able to recover energy during combat, made me think strategically, and I liked that."

Excellent, and kudos to you for figuring that out on your own: a lot of people don't seem to realize you can heal out of combat with the ability instead of items and understandably struggle a bit. But I think it does add a nice bit of moderate challenge, because you have to think a little about which healing makes more sense in the moment, and have this little ritual of "bandaging up" after big fights, which I think pulls you in a little as a player.

And yes, I'd definitely recommend Gutter Trash if you enjoyed this. There's a LOT more to it, especially since it's been complete for a while now, and it's a bit more refined in terms of design too: this is literally the first game I ever made.

Oh definitely, how people relate to a character matters a lot. And in that case especially: as I'm sure you know by now, a lot of people feel VERY strongly one way or the other about NTR/cheating/stealing, perceived or real, especially when you're playing the other side of that relationship. Which is understandable: if you're playing a game to simulate a relationship and then get involuntarily cucked, that's going to be a problem if you're not into that kind of thing. But as you said, not something I've had to worry about yet with mine: CS is mostly for people who want to self-insert into a character that gets thrown around and manhandled. In a more general sense though yes, absolutely. Always important to consider what the experience of playing the game is going to be for most people, and try to anticipate that as best you can.

Some good points. Something additional I hadn't considered earlier: Two of the big three people responsible for the GTA series are gone, and HAVE been gone since 5 came out. The entire dev cycle of 6 has been minus a lot of what helped to make the series what it was, which doesn't bode well.

You're correct though, it is entirely possible to make money cannibalizing brand identity: the live-action Disney remakes did VERY well financially despite being some of the most god-awful slop ever made, because people just see "Disney" and take their kids to it. See also the process of "rebadging", where random Chinese companies buy up previously respected AV and appliance brands and release garbage under them to the unsuspecting public. The problem of course is that this is fundamentally a scam, and thus can only go on for so long before the brand is worthless. There is certainly money to be made in clear-cutting, it just isn't sustainable.

But yes, like I said I don't plan on making any changes to my own trajectory or plans for the games from this. I've been struggling this whole time to articulate exactly why this matters to me, and I think it's something like this: I want to have a sense for the mindset of my audience. Not in a direct way: this or that kink, this or that character design or story element (Well I DO, but that's not the purpose here). But more broadly. Do they care about quality and thought being put into games in the way that I do? Maybe that's insulting to even ask, and maybe the answer should have been obvious. But increasingly I find myself in a room full of people insisting, sometimes violently, that there are five lights, when as far as I can honestly see, there are very obviously four. So I suppose on some level this poll is just a self-sanity check, like that guy in A Beautiful Mind. GTA 6 looks like it's gonna suck right? I'm not the only one seeing this, right? There's actually a guy standing there, waving, right?

Ha! Well thank you.

Sheer cultural and economic inertia in other words. "Why did you buy that thing?" "Because it's the thing you buy, and it was there, and I could buy it." I mean fair enough, that certainly might be it.

Could very well just be me being in a strange bubble. But I just haven't seen it. Not just on here, but in general. It's always people talking about how OTHER people will rush out and buy it, but never how excited they are themselves. Is the main target audience literally just too stupid to use a computer or a phone? What level of slop hell are we dealing with here?

I would more or less agree. I think 5 was mediocre, but succeeded because 4 was FRUSTRATING: it had a lot of potential, but it was just so, so botched on release. 5 was a chance to finally get a GTA game with "modern" tech that actually WORKED and flowed smoothly, and that was enough to carry it. 

But GTA games have always been these intensely carefully constructed systems of systems, like a Swiss watch that you can walk around inside of and just marvel as you keep finding ANOTHER thing you didn't expect, another mechanic, another part of the world that feelt more alive that you thought a video game ever could. Some people have commented that Red Dead 2 may be the last Rockstar game to really embody that in a meaningful way, and from what I'm seeing currently, they may be right.

Also true, although to some extend an extension of the above. The people who buy a console at Best Buy or Amazon and just download and play whatever jingle-jangle-keys is new this month probably do not even know that Itch exists. But at the same time, I imagine a lot of the people here DO own consoles and DO play larger, more professional games sometimes, or at least have in the past and gladly would again if they were worth it.

But maybe this is yet another example of the economic and cultural balkanization and stratification that's been tearing things apart for a decade or more now. Culture used to be largely UNIFIED and MULTI-LAYERED. GTA is a perfect example of this, because there was something there for everyone. If you were a nerd, you could marvel at the craft, the scale, the technical achievements, how polished the gameplay and systems were. And if you had a dent in your head, you could start the game up and spend 4 hours just driving around and shooting things. To be fair, I did as well, because even that was a lot of fun. But the point is there was a broad appeal. Maybe the days of that are over. Maybe now we have slop for the hogs and nerd shit for the nerds, and not really much combination of the two. And maybe GTA 6 can survive PURELY on being that hogslop. But we'll see.

This is at least a reasonable theory, but my understanding, which may be lacking, is that CoD hasn't been doing great recently; not TERRIBLE, but nothing like it was, and certainly not a "shatter the earth" demographic. Even more so for sports games. This would at least make sense, as both genres have been pretty deep into the slop for a while now without really causing problems for their core audience, but I just don't see the numbers being there. To be reasonably successful, sure, maybe. But to make a decent return on six years of dev time? To be the best selling game of all time?

From a certain perspective, GTA was always "Mainstream": GTA III sold 14+ million copies; San Andreas 27. At the time, people would constantly refer to the fact that you could pick up hookers in the game and then drop them off and run them over (despite this being .1% of the gameplay). To some extent, the early GTA games even reached outside the ordinary "gamer" sphere, in the same way Tetris did, since the PS2 had a HUGE install base and the game was pretty simple to pick up and just start messing around with. 

On the other hand, the point of the games was always to be a bit biting and sardonic. III couldn't afford a lot of licensed music, so they made a LOT of the tracks themselves, and one is literally a protest against the attempted censorship and rounding off of all the corners in culture that was happening at the time (and has only accelerated since):

"You're sweet, you're shy, you must admit
You censor your life for your benefit
But you lose all the taste, and you sit there and waste
Your day, your month, your year"

Notably, it's also a protest against stagnation and being locked into the past:

"Nothing stays, they pass you by

If you don't change, if you don't change"

And fair enough, I can see the irony. But not all change is good. Sometimes, a seed becomes a might oak. Other times a house, abandoned, rots to ruin. Or is vandalized. 

Regardless, I don't think it's a dramatic contrarian position to claim that the entire ethos of the GTA games was to be a dramatic contrarian, almost to the point of self-parody at times. That this too has been ruined by the usual forces isn't surprising, but it is sad. The game just became too big, and at a certain size cool people with cool ideas can't retain control, and every decision is made by the board room and the HR department.

I certainly expected B and C to do better than they did.

For GTA 6 alone, I have seen just about every furry icon imaginable, female AND male, drawn into that promotional illustration of the female lead. Lots of OCs as well. 

More broadly, furries are nerds, nerds like video games, and the GTA series is one of the most successful and culturally impactful video game series ever. Back in the day there was absolutely a lot of crossover. But also, things don't have to directly cater to the fandom (and really shouldn't, with a few exceptions), they can just be fun on their own. 

I've heard, but not seen confirmation. Could actually be funny, and lord knows there's a lot to mock about the fandom, but I have no faith that any writers on the new game would be able to deliver good jokes.

Oh hey, well glad that you found your way here! Which post on Predation was that though? Must have been a while back. Consider yourself on notice though: you've now got six-ish months to finish them out in time for Chapter 3.  

Oh this won't even be the game over, just the early losses. Working on the actual final rat loss now. Should be fun. But thanks!

Ha! I mean like I said, I'll take it. Just a very strange little bump. Seems to be back to normal for now at least. And congrads on your release!

Are you sure you read the poll? This is a broader question about GTA (Grand Theft Auto), not the CS games.