It's a day early! I'm away this weekend, you see.

So here's a week's progress with SH2. If the background's a grid, that's because I haven't made the actual BG yet, but a grid is useful during development for lining things up! There's also some ugly virtual buttons here and there, don't worry - they'll be gone!

Screenshot 1: Luck is a factor in the game, but I didn't want you to have no hand (hoof?) in it, so our equivalent of rolling a D12 is every morning you pick a tarot card. The cards values are hidden but pre-assigned so the one you choose counts! Some cards have extra effects - example, The Hanged Pony = Luck 2/12, so while that sounds better than Death (which is 1), it also makes it more likely you'll get picked for a lynching than Death does! On the plus side, pick the Ace of Knives (12) and you'll get bonuses for that day.

Screenshot 2: The ponies have hair now, so they're looking a bit better although they only have 6 manestyles to choose from at the moment. I add more now and then. The Stallions have the same mane pool as the Mares right now, but then again why shouldn't they look fabulous?

Screenshot 3: The town map has a little diversity now. You can also see some new info graphics. "Bloodlust" increases every day that you don't murder someone. If it goes too high, it hurts your sanity - this is to prevent you being able to sit tight for too long without consequence. There's also an indicator for your Luck of the Day, which you sometimes need to know before making a decision.

The "ingredients" will change - the cakes you make can be very powerful and how you make them is too simplistic currently. My plan is to alter things so when you try making a cake, you have certain ingredients to choose from and it'll take some experimenting to find out what ingredients make which cake - and it'll be re-rolled each game! You'll have to experiment.

Screenshot 4: While the Roster has all your information about the whole town, the Hit List shows what you know about the Town Council in particular - they're the ones you have to kill to win the game. After all, if you kill all the normal ponies, who are you going to rule over with your new reign of terror? There's a new role! The Naturalist surrounds herself with stinky animals (think Fluttershy) who make it impossible for you to break into her house and murder him/her directly. You'll have to frame them, get them in an event scene or deliver them a nasty cake!

Screenshot 5: And speaking of events, these are a new addition to the game which can alter your fortunes as well as add a bit of RP flavour. If certain conditions arise, you can get into all sorts of scrapes with the local ponies and the decisions you make can make things better or worse for you. My current favourite event is the Blackmailer - if you've been a bad pony, you might find yourself their target and have limited time to dispatch them before they blow your cover to the whole town.

In other news, I've got SH2 a slot on Steam, and when the store page is up I hope you'll feel like popping it on your Wishlist. I haven't done so already as Steam requires quite a few demo graphics before you can set a game to 'coming soon' and I'm not quite there yet.

Release date is set to 1st of August - that's the target. That might change of course, but I'm fairly sure we'll get there. Hopefully before then a cut-down HTML5 version will be ready to try out on GameJolt.

And very last thing, I was asked by a kind fan of horse-killing games if they could send some funds along to help with development. I had to dust off the old Ko-Fi account, many thanks to Paquin for the donation! If anyone feels like helping things along, it would be unseemly of me to stop you. Anyone who donates $5 or more, I'll be in touch after the game is released to drop you a Steam Key for the game!

TTFN

https://ko-fi.com/catsmeatstudios