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[ActualDog]

You're making some solid progress with this, really great to see!

Just wanted to say just how much I love the DOF effect on dog selection, and also dog-cam.


dog-cam



i love dog-cam

Thank you thank you! I actually have an idea for how to work dog-cam into the game, but I'll leave the specifics for another time...

---

I found out late Saturday, as I was crunching towards the indiecade submission deadline, that there's a late submission deadline at the end of the month. It's more expensive but I really want that extra time so I'm re-targeting. Regardless, I got a ton done last week in my mini-crunch push so I'm glad I didn't know about the late deadline until the last minute.

Anyways, things I've done. Lots of bug fixes and tiny things not worth mentioning as I prepared for a demo build, but today I got back to some bigger stuff.

Most interesting is that I revisited sleeping!

Got in some tech for expression changing, built a little particle manager to handle those z's in a good way, and added some sleep animations. Dogs will heave their chests slightly as they "breathe" in and out while sleeping, and there's some random checks going on to have them occasionally do little kicks as they dream! Eventually I want to hook up those kicks to personality (some dogs might never kick, some might do it a lot) and mood (more likely to kick if they go to sleep excited), but that's for the future.

Also, I was fixing some bugs with eating this morning and recorded some fun behavior. Dogs won't target food if they can't see it, but I'm allowing them to see through other dogs, so if they're hungry they'll all flock around a block of food like this!

[supermega_peter]

My god the sleep kick is great.

I love how creatively you're adding wonderful little personalities to each dog, I can totally imagine naming a whole bunch and creating little stories about each of them.

Is the player going to be able to name them, or are they going to have randomly made up names, or something?

It would be super cute if they had awesome generated names.

Although it would be totally odd/creepy if they had people names...

Ian is hungry

Steve is asleep

wat

[ActualDog]

My god the sleep kick is great.

I love how creatively you're adding wonderful little personalities to each dog, I can totally imagine naming a whole bunch and creating little stories about each of them.

Is the player going to be able to name them, or are they going to have randomly made up names, or something?

It would be super cute if they had awesome generated names.

Although it would be totally odd/creepy if they had people names...

Ian is hungry

Steve is asleep

wat

Thanks! I'm super happy with how the sleeping is turning out. My goal is eventually to have the dogs be unique enough that you'll be able to tell them apart purely from personality and movement, but that's pretty ambitious and I haven't gotten deep into individuality yet. Going to keep that as my carrot on a stick though.

I don't know exactly what I'm going to do with naming, but if they have names they'll probably be user-given. I might give it a little narrative context and not require you to name a dog unless you enter it in a competition or something. Anyways, that's little farther down the line!

---

Today I lost a ton of time to Windows auto-upgrading to 10 when I stepped away to grab coffee and then crashing within a minute every time it tried to boot up. Very exciting stuff.

Anyways, I got that worked out and then let myself work on something fun.

Dogs have a basic velocity tolerance now. If they move faster than they're used to, they'll go floppy for a bit. The tolerance base is tied to their age, but they can slowly increase it over time by putting themselves in situations where they're under more extreme velocities than they're currently used to.

I hope to have a lot of things like this as the game expands.

[nnyei]

Man, this is the first time I've come across a devlog where basically every gif has put a smile on my face. I'll definitely be following this.

[ActualDog]

Man, this is the first time I've come across a devlog where basically every gif has put a smile on my face. I'll definitely be following this.

Thanks so much!

---

Aaaand, we've got a working title!

I've been feeling pressure to do this for a while, so it feels good to have an actual way to refer to this project!

The other big thing I did today is, unfortunately, very sad. It had to happen eventually though.

Dogs can now die. Right now it's tied only to hunger, but I think that model might continue to work. If a dog's at max hunger for more than X seconds, it'll die. Because of the way my brain system works, dogs slowly get worse at stuff as they age (after a certain point), so as dogs get older and older they'll eventually not be able to take care of their needs, resulting in a "natural" passing. You could also just forget to feed them, of course, but you should try not to do that.

Not gonna lie, I felt a little bad taking that screenshot.

[eigenbom]

I see this a lot on twitter, I love it. Keep it up

[Artifice Machine]

Oh, cool abstract dogs. I'll read more...

Hey, this is funny...

Haha! That was the funniest thing I've seen in a while...

Wow, there's some fancy stuff going on here...

Awesome.

[Mark Mayers]

Wobbledogs is a pretty rad title.

Also don't worry about IndieCade. Nobody gets into IndieCade (although that shouldn't stop your from submitting, nor anyone else).
Although, I think your game has the weirdness that IndieCade likes to see.

You might want to go to the IndieXChange event if it's your first time at the festival. I was part of it last year and it was great.

[ActualDog]

I see this a lot on twitter, I love it. Keep it up

Thanks so much, I'm trying hard to keep my momentum!

Oh, cool abstract dogs. I'll read more...

Hey, this is funny...

Haha! That was the funniest thing I've seen in a while...

Wow, there's some fancy stuff going on here...

Awesome.

Thanks for checking it out!

Wobbledogs is a pretty rad title.

Also don't worry about IndieCade. Nobody gets into IndieCade (although that shouldn't stop your from submitting, nor anyone else).
Although, I think your game has the weirdness that IndieCade likes to see.

You might want to go to the IndieXChange event if it's your first time at the festival. I was part of it last year and it was great.

Thanks! The thing about Indiecade is that it's a cool festival and I only live about 20 minutes away, so it's kind of one of the most convenient festivals I could possibly exhibit at. The game's still so early in dev, but I've got my fingers crossed regardless. At the very least, the deadline's a great motivator.

Thanks for the tip about IndieXChange. I saw that checkbox on the submission form and kinda ignored it, but I'll give it a closer look.

---

No dev update this early in the day, but I just wanted to geek out and quick share a story. I was fooling around with the game last night and I caught my first real glimpse of the mechanics interacting to create interesting scenarios.

I built a one-room pen and dropped in 20 dogs so I could observe and pick things out I wanted to fix or add. I let the dogs mill around for a few minutes and then dropped in a food block. All 20 dogs swarmed towards the block, and their frantic attempts to get at the food caused them to push the cube into a corner. Some of them were able to get at it, but then they couldn't get away because the dogs in the back were pushing towards the cube and wedging them in.

I was about to break up the swarm when a single dog broke free and started waddling towards a pipe.

This is roughly the setup I had going on. You can imagine a swarm of dogs all stuck around the cube on the left.

Anyways, this lone dog wandered into the pipe on the bottom and shot out the top. Because of the setup, he was launched directly on top of the dogswarm. This caused the swarmdogs to start bucking like crazy in order to try and get this new dog off their backs, and all the bucking disrupted the group enough to break things up and clear the stuck wedge of dog bodies. The remaining hungry dogs ate their fill and resumed their nonsense.

Anyways, I don't know. It's not much, but the fact that I can get scenarios like this with so little content in the game is ridiculously exciting to me. These little dogs find new ways to surprise me every day and I'm so pumped to expand this possibility space.

[io3 creations]

That unexpected behavior reminds of a discussion about AI iirc in the Rain World thread.  Essentially, you can break down complex behavior into a few rules.  Once you have that, you can have a lot of different types of behaviors as the character AI interacts with other character AI.  Much like taking a few simple shapes can lead to lots and lots of possibilities that you haven't even thought about.  Of course, on the other hand, your task as a developer is to still keep those within a certain framework.

The part about food reminds me of something and I can't recall if it was mentioned before.  If dogs can eat, will they also leave "doggy biscuits" behind.

[maruki]

Man, everything looks great. I instantly became a fan on this: "Maybe you'll even be able to get them to commit a crime for you..."

[quantumpotato]

ActualDog: If you don't get into Indiecade, bring your own setup and set it up confidently. Another person carrying a computer in won't catch any eyes.

[NoLocality]

Wobbledogs

  I love it...best title 2016

[Mark Mayers]

ActualDog: If you don't get into Indiecade, bring your own setup and set it up confidently. Another person carrying a computer in won't catch any eyes.

100% agree with this. Carry around your laptop and show it to random people, everyone there likes video games.

[foofter]

ActualDog: If you don't get into Indiecade, bring your own setup and set it up confidently. Another person carrying a computer in won't catch any eyes.

100% agree with this. Carry around your laptop and show it to random people, everyone there likes video games.

Definitely do this. I'm totally jealous, since I went to Indiecade once and it was awesome!

[ActualDog]

That unexpected behavior reminds of a discussion about AI iirc in the Rain World thread.  Essentially, you can break down complex behavior into a few rules.  Once you have that, you can have a lot of different types of behaviors as the character AI interacts with other character AI.  Much like taking a few simple shapes can lead to lots and lots of possibilities that you haven't even thought about.  Of course, on the other hand, your task as a developer is to still keep those within a certain framework.

The part about food reminds me of something and I can't recall if it was mentioned before.  If dogs can eat, will they also leave "doggy biscuits" behind.

Yep, that's the basic idea I'm going with too. Simple, layered rules for how the AI should function. Results are promising so far, and I have a few really neat ideas I want to try out soon.

I haven't thought a ton about dog poop, but I think there's a place for it. What I don't want is for poop management to be a big part of the game. If I put it in, I'd want it to be something that interfaces with the training/learning system. Probably have you be able to put down like, a fake grass patch or something that you can train the dogs to use when doing their business.

Man, everything looks great. I instantly became a fan on this: "Maybe you'll even be able to get them to commit a crime for you..."

Thanks! Still got that as a high-level goal...

ActualDog: If you don't get into Indiecade, bring your own setup and set it up confidently. Another person carrying a computer in won't catch any eyes.

100% agree with this. Carry around your laptop and show it to random people, everyone there likes video games.

Definitely do this. I'm totally jealous, since I went to Indiecade once and it was awesome!

Haha, we'll see. I don't want to think too much about it until I know whether or not I'm in and the date's way closer. I think that sort of guerrilla showing works better with certain types of games, so it'd also depend on what my demo build's like at that point!

Wobbledogs

  I love it...best title 2016

Thanks!

---

Few updates.

First, dogs now get woken up if they get jostled while sleeping. What this means is if a dog walks into a sleeping dog, that sleeping dog will probably wake up. This also means that it's hard to raise a large number of dogs in a tiny pen because they'll wake each other up. Once I do more work on some other dog emotions, like anger, this'll have a bigger impact.

Second, I have a definite fix for a long-standing issue that I'm very excited about! Dogs have complex joint chains for legs. Because of the tribulations of physics, sometimes one joint gets a little separated from another. This is usually ok because it'll snap back, but in some cases, especially with super long pipe systems which have relatively thin walls and operate with high forces, one piece of the joint can tunnel through an object and get stuck on the opposite side as its attached body. This results in dogs flipping out and breaking. The solution I came up with, which is working like a charm, is to regularly check joint chain distances. In the case the distance gets too big, I move the offending joint to the position of the attached body. This isn't the position it actually wants to be at, but moving it there means that both objects will be on the same side of whatever object one might've tunneled through and the joint system will be able to resolve everything on its own. Pretty simple fix and it works great!

Finally, I started playing around with look variation.

I'm still thinking about the exact direction I want to take this, but right now the most promising idea to me is to fairly strictly limit the initial variations, and require user breeding to slowly bring out the extremes. The above gif only has material modifications, but I'm also going to be doing personality mods and I'd like to play with physical mods as well.

I'd love the system to be at a place where players can breed themselves into a hole and start producing dogs that can't take care of themselves anymore because of their fucked up genes. The above gif is generating texture modifications from my gene system (all 1's and 0's), so breeding is super simple to implement technically.

What I don't want is "breeds". I'd like this to be a single "breed" of dogs to start, with the ability for the player to kinda end up morphing their own "breeds" over time if they really try hard enough.

[ActualDog]

Lots of work on dog variation today!

I think that the initial dogs the player can choose from will be mutations taken from the standard dog you've been seeing so far rather than the completely random genes you're seeing with these guys. Fun to see what the system's capable of, though! Not shown above is support for longdogs, but rest assured that they are just as possible to end up with.

[ActualDog]

I ran into a problem last night with the look genomes. They worked great, but reverse engineering the genome to generate the default dog I've been testing with was non-trivial.

Essentially I was trying to solve the Knapsack Problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem). While possible to solve, it's non-trivial and not the most efficient thing with larger genomes. Not only that, but depending on the actual original values it might not even be possible to reach them exactly.

My solution to this was to convert the look genome to a modifier rather than a raw value. That being the case, the default genome is just a string of all zeros, which is obviously not hard to generate.

I came up with a generic function that takes a gene of any length (in the form of 1's and 0's), and two floats representing the max and min result values, which can be positive or negative. Given these things it can create a relatively even distribution of values depending on the input gene, and it's been working pretty well so far, though it took a bit of work to figure out!

Anyways, after all this I was able to mutate the base dog genome.

The idea's that the starter dogs will be relatively constrained (I've actually toned down the leg mods a bit since this gif was recorded by increasing the size of that part of the gene), but with enough variety for you to be able to pick out differences between them and choose your favorite.

The next step is putting some temporary stuff in the game to allow breeding tests so I can showcase that for the demo build I'm putting together!

[supermega_peter]

Every progress post you make is inspiring, you're doing so many interesting, thoughtful things

[Cranktrain]

I love the idea of being able to breed towards a dog that I want. I imagine there will be all these external, obvious attributes regarding their appearance, but also a bunch of internal ones involving their emotional characteristics, whether they're easy-going or grumpy or violent. Breeding in one direction might get you where you wanted the dogs to be, but along that line of breeding all sorts of unexpected traits may reveal themselves, and you can't go and undo that terribly easily, if you have a limited stock of Wobbledogs. Perhaps keeping multiple 'batches' would be a 'safe' way of doing that? But then having an even more limited number per batch will probably cause its own unforeseen conseqeunces!

And I like how, even though I have so much more idea of what game you're creating than I did a few months back, there's still a million directions you could go in, and they're all very exciting.