Ero Hunters

What's the game about?

You have discovered an unknown island. Upon landing, you quickly find that the island is inhabited with monstergirls, some of which are more dangerous than others. While your skeleton crew can scavenge some materials, you'll need to capture and "train" these monstergirls to protect and work for you. Catching them isn't just a question of throwing a ball at them, instead you need to craft equipment to weaken them first. Of course, you can also breed them to have the most genetically optimal slaves friends to work with you.

So in short, it's the concept of Palworld, but 2D and mostly using Ero Dungeon's dungeon and combat system.

What's the same?

You still send out groups of girls into procedurally generated dungeons (though your "player character" now explicitly exists in the game) where you fight in 4v4 Darkest Dungeon style combat. If you complete the dungeon, you make the land a bit safer and you can spend your gained resources in your "guild". In the backend, the way data is imported and the way scripts are handled is still the exact same, as is the moddability/translatability.

What's different?

Everything else, of course.

It's a bit much to explain, especially since a lot may change during development, so I'll touch the main points.

Equipment is no longer limited to 6 slots. Instead there are about 32 body slots which can all be filled (inspired by Kinky Dungeon), though some are only for extra restraints and enchanted items grow weaker when you equip to many of them. You can craft your own equipment, provided you know the recipe and have the resources. You can use equipment in combat to equip it to the enemy. Enemies are just as players and affected by equipment in the same way.

Buildings are no longer fixed on the map but built by you. These can automatically gather resources, or craft materials, etc... These need to be manned by employees to function, which is where your captured girls come in. They will of course refuse to work, unless they are obedient, which may require special equipment, building enhancements, or other means. But monstergirls can be naturally better at some jobs than ordinary humans. There are also more resources than mana/favor/gold, since you need - for example - latex to make a latex hood.

Breeding happens when you combine two girls in a breeding pen with one of the magic strapons. Girls have semi-random genes (and a race) that they will pass on to their offspring. The non-strapon-girl gets pregnant and lays an egg from which a fully mature girl hatches. Extras can be shipped off to the mainland.

Dungeons are superficially similar to Ero Dungeons, but have an overhauled Curio system. Additionally, they - and the enemies within them - fully depend on their location on the map. Encountered enemies that aren't captured will remain in their habitat, so you can slowly weaken them over time.

Goals have been reworked. They are now permanent and fixed depending on the girl's role, race and your "research". Just fighting battles and completing dungeons will be enough to slowly level them up, certainly for lower levels. Girls now level up normally (from 1 to 100) growing stronger with each level. At certain levels they can specialize in a specific role (again depending on race, obedience and research).

Research you can sacrific amounts of resources, or capture certain amounts of girls, as a sacrifice to the (quite lustful) Gods. This unlocks new buildings/building modules/equipment recipes/goals/roles/etc... and is a replacement for Quests in Ero Dungeons.

Again, the vast majority of these aren't implemented yet. It's just a rough roadmap of some sorts.

What are the timings?

I'm currently only working partly on the new project while finishing Ero Dungeons. I estimate that I won't have anything playable by November, though I should be able to get a build out for December. That build should be likened to the Tech Demo of Ero Dungeons, a simple Minimum Viable Project that contains the main loop of the game. Some Ratkin enemies to catch, some equipment to catch them in, some buildings to make resources, equipment and further Ratkin.

Some Progress:

Below you can see the new player puppet. Since I will try to use it as a base for most enemies (to limit texturing work for equipment) I wanted to make it a lit prettier than the old chibi one. She's not missing any limbs, those are auto-generated (again saving some work).

There has also been a full overhaul of the generation of these puppets. They are no longer done using tools within the Godot engine, but can now be edited in the game itself. This speeds up the animation progress, allows for some easier mass editing, and makes puppets fully moddable. This means that modders can't just add new animations, but they can also add completely new enemies/players (they are the same in this game).

Here's the current overworld menu. The island is a simple island for testing. I originally drew some art for the buildings in this project, but liked it so much that I redid the buildings for Ero Dungeons in the same style.

At the same time some technical underlying changes are underway:

•  Streamlining of the save/load-system
• Improvement of the parsing of scripts
• Tooltips within tooltips, where scripts can automatically create sub-tooltips
• Improvement of the verification/validation of imported data
• Fixing of the (very many) memory leaks in Ero Dungeons

These aren't really visible, but they do take some work.