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[Smerik]

Juiciness, that's the word. Game Juice. That's really hard to describe. But when its there you just feel it. You feel the passion of the developer who spend way to much time to perfect particle effect x, wobble y and camera shake z. This is the only thing that still makes me love games nowadays. Even a lot of triple A games fuck this up, they spend so much time on the big things, that they forget the small details that actually mean a lot. This why no one can beat rockstar at open world games



Anyways keep up with the progress this game looks like a lot of fun already.

[ActualDog]

Thanks everyone! I'm really glad people like the capsules. The process for getting all the capsules out of the machine is a little slow right now, so I'm unsure if I'm going to keep using it for dog respawning (gonna keep it in for a bit and see how it feels), but even if that's the case I have a ton of other ideas for how to utilize it (auto-feeder, random rewards, etc) so I think it's been a good thing to build regardless. It's also really nice to have a new type of object in the game.

Really amazing stuff in this thread, you should be proud of yourself.

Ah, thanks! It's tough sometimes to not get overwhelmed by how much is left to do or to stop fixating on certain things that aren't as far along or nice as I'd like. It's very encouraging to hear when people dig what's here so far.

It's amazing how the game starts looking better and better without losing that awkward charm it had before

Super glad that's the case! I've been trying to be really conscious of this as I move things along.

Juiciness, that's the word. Game Juice. That's really hard to describe. But when its there you just feel it. You feel the passion of the developer who spend way to much time to perfect particle effect x, wobble y and camera shake z. This is the only thing that still makes me love games nowadays. Even a lot of triple A games fuck this up, they spend so much time on the big things, that they forget the small details that actually mean a lot. This why no one can beat rockstar at open world games

Anyways keep up with the progress this game looks like a lot of fun already.

There's definitely still a ton of future stuff I want to do for general game feel and juice, but I've been trying to keep things at least at a minimal level as I implement them. Spending some time on smaller details has been keeping me sane as I move between bigger features and systems.

---

I've been doing some construction mode updates recently. Building 3D editors is hard and I've never been super happy with how mine felt, not to mention the fact that I had no clue how to add in a third dimension to pen placement. I decided to overhaul things a bit and I've started working on moving things over to a sort of pin-board approach. The idea's the you attach everything to nodes rather than having completely free placement. This sacrifices a bit of control but makes things 100X more usable (so far, at least), and I'm digging the direction.

Initially I was hoping to have a 3D cube of nodes visible at all times for you to click on, but it was pretty clear from the start that this was just way too visually noisy.

I want pens to be able to be placed in all three dimensions, but I haven't figured out a way to give completely free movement in any sort of user-friendly way so I simplified things a bit and only show 2 dimensions at once.

Using distinct nodes like this means movement is smooth regardless of how zoomed in or out you are, and it's immediately obvious to the player where they can put things. By taking things a little further and allowing you to scroll the depth plane, you can get 3D placement that's not too wild to deal with.

There are some feedback issues in the above gif. I've since modified it to change node color instead of increasing node size. Even so, the feedback isn't 100% there yet and there's more experimenting I need to do. It's totally usable though, and I think this strategy is going to work!

And then finally, I can apply this sort of approach to other objects as well. It's a little hacked in there at the moment, but I got it working for pipe placement and it's way easier to use than my previous system was.

I still have more work to do to clean up all this code, and the game itself doesn't fully support 3D pen placement yet (foreground pens block visibility), but I'm excited about this direction. It already feels much more user-friendly and it should make context-sensitive placement much easier to implement as things that need it come rolling in.

[Bricabrac]

Initially I was hoping to have a 3D cube of nodes visible at all times for you to click on, but it was pretty clear from the start that this was just way too visually noisy.

Interstellar mode activated.

Construction mode looks great. 
Just a quick advice:

I've since modified it to change node color instead of increasing node size.

Remember about colorblind people! There are tool like this one you can use to upload a screenshot and see if your nodes will look clear for everybody. I think making the selected nodes more dark/saturated instead of just changing color should do the trick 

[JobLeonard]

You can also combine visual queues. For example, changing shape as well as color. You could make them cubes instead of spheres, or even "czech hedgehog"-shaped. The latter could also could them feel more like they're connected perhaps.

[ActualDog]

Remember about colorblind people! There are tool like this one you can use to upload a screenshot and see if your nodes will look clear for everybody. I think making the selected nodes more dark/saturated instead of just changing color should do the trick 

You can also combine visual queues. For example, changing shape as well as color. You could make them cubes instead of spheres, or even "czech hedgehog"-shaped. The latter could also could them feel more like they're connected perhaps.

Good calls, both! I've consolidated the number of colors, and highlighted nodes now essentially increase saturation and base shape instead of changing size or completely updating their colors. Will probably take another pass at it at some point but it feels much nicer!

I've also started adding in room expansion! I've wanted something like this for a while and I'm really happy with how much it's already added to construction. It does a lot to increase the possibility space for the types of layouts you can build.

It's not fully integrated yet in the sense that you can't yet shrink pens, you can use this feature to clip pens on top of each other, and the camera system doesn't really know what to do with large areas, but it's coming along!

If the above features don't take too long I'd also like to get in a mode where you can place objects inside of pens themselves, and that'd be the last construction feature I tackle for the time being. My next target is AI, which is in dire need of some love at this point.

[JobLeonard]

Very, very nice!

[ActualDog]

Very, very nice!

Thanks! I'm happy with how it's turning out.

---

I've been tightening up the editor implementation and getting in usable support for pen re-sizing. The most frustrating thing about working on this editor so far is that most decisions I end up making seem super obvious after I come up with them but take me a while to actually get to.

You can see my approach to re-sizing in the above post where you click on each arrow to move one node row at a time in whatever direction you choose. It's super tedious to make changes like that and it means you need a second set of opposing arrows in order to shrink the pen back down. I went through two iterations of arrow layouts to support shrinking as well as growing and it was mostly just visually messy and still tedious.

This morning, of course, I realized that the actual solution to this problem is to be able to click and drag the arrows. This makes changing the pen layout way quicker and lets me combine the shrink/grow arrows into a single UI element. Of course, now that it's implemented it seems ridiculous that I'd have ever thought of doing it any other way. I'll chalk this up to my relative lack of experience with building 3D editors.

The re-sizing auto respects the pinboard bounds and any existing pens in the field. I also do some special stuff to switch out the axis of the node plane depending on which arrows you're grabbing, and that feels pretty OK but I might have to re-visit it in the future and also nudge the camera a bit, because it obviously only works at certain angles. Showing a preview of the node plane switch when you mouse-over those arrows might also help a bit in that regard.

Anyways, I've been having some fun playing around with room sizes and I'm very happy to have this feature mostly working!

[ActualDog]

Took a slight break from the pens to play with head and snout physics. For a long time now I've wanted bouncier heads on the dogs but setting that up was gonna require a decent chunk of adjustments to existing code-paths so I held off.

Along with just general bounciness and reactive graphics, there are a few other reasons I want this feature. One is so I can have head bones modified via genes in order to get a greater variety of shapes. This isn't in yet but I'm paving the way.

The second reason for all this is so I can eventually add neck control to the dogs in a way that looks reasonable. Once I get back to that I now actually have an appropriate physics-enabled bone I can target to move the dog's head where I want it to go.

I'm following the basic strategy I've used so far of just rigging the head mesh and then converting those bones to jointed physics objects in Unity. Though getting the head halfway solid still took a fair bit of tweaking.

There are still some outstanding issues I need to fix, like being able to grab a dog by this new head without it exploding, but I'm pretty happy with where I've ended up.

The ears are also not attached in the best way at the moment, so they don't move perfectly with the head itself. It looks pretty funny with this specific ear setup, but it probably won't work with all of my future ones, so it's something I need to solve. Probably I'll just be rigging two additional ear bones and attaching the ear objects to those.

[Fuzzy Branch]

Ha! That last gif looks really good -- tangible squishiness

It might be really cool to also have a gene affect the 'floppiness' of the ears, so some dogs could have floppy, droopy ears that swing around. Keep up the good work!

[JobLeonard]

[nekromantikko]

This looks awesome and the genetic algorithm stuff is super interesting :D
Definitely gonna be following this one

[Smerik]

There are still some outstanding issues I need to fix, like being able to grab a dog by this new head without it exploding, but I'm pretty happy with where I've ended up.

That's a feature right, not a bug. Looking funny like always!

[ActualDog]

Ha! That last gif looks really good -- tangible squishiness

It might be really cool to also have a gene affect the 'floppiness' of the ears, so some dogs could have floppy, droopy ears that swing around. Keep up the good work!

Thanks! I like the current ears but they're just unity prefab shapes and are most likely temp. I definitely wanna have some legitimately modeled varieties of ears and noses, and floppy ears seem like a must!

This looks awesome and the genetic algorithm stuff is super interesting :D
Definitely gonna be following this one

Glad it's interesting!

There are still some outstanding issues I need to fix, like being able to grab a dog by this new head without it exploding, but I'm pretty happy with where I've ended up.

That's a feature right, not a bug. Looking funny like always!

Exploding dog joints make for good gifs but frustrated players!

---

Let's see, first off I did some testing with gene-based snout modifications to see what sort of cheap variety I could get. The tech here is super not complicated, I'm literally just scaling and rotating the snout bone based off gene values, but I'm pretty happy with the results. The head weighting isn't perfect right now, so you get some goofy stuff like eye deformation along with the snout mods at the moment, but I think this approach will work for me going forward.

After this snout stuff, I started diving into an AI update. I have a lot to tackle but I started with getting the dogs to explore their pens. This is something I've wanted to get working for a long time and I'm pleased to say it's actually working out so far. While working on this I noticed that I had actually completely broken the dog pathfinding a few months ago, which would explain a lot of the weird behavior I'd been seeing. The bug was super dumb and small though, and now that that's patched up...

This gif was recorded when there were still a few bugs with node placement but it should give you a basic idea of how the system works. Those black nodes represent areas a dog has observed but not yet visisted. As a dog moves around the pen it'll drop nodes not only in the places it's currently at, but also in places it can see. These nodes are unavailable for general purpose pathfinding and consideration, but are used as potential destinations for dogs when they decide to explore.

It's not shown here, but the system works with pipes as well, so dogs are now smart enough to be able to completely map out the world you build for them and no longer will just stay mostly within the same room!

Working with this system has unearthed a few core pathfinding issues, so I'll probably be cleaning those up for another day or two, but things are feeling pretty good. The main outstanding issues are that dogs can have trouble navigating around corners sometimes, and their heads also tend to get in the way if they're trying to turn around close to a wall. There needs to be some consideration for turning direction when near obstacles.

Bonus dogs.

This last one is from before the exploration system was working fully, but it's also pretty much exhibit A for why I wanted the dogs to have squishy heads.

[JobLeonard]

I know I keep repeating myself, but this is the best devlog ever. The. Absolute. Best.

[Smerik]

I have been looking at this GIF for over 10 minutes hoping this poor dog realizes what he is doing, he is so damn curious whats outside of the bounds. His expression makes it even worse.

[oahda]

I know I keep repeating myself, but this is the best devlog ever. The. Absolute. Best.

Yeah, I realised too late that I should've voted for it in the devlog gold thread.

[JobLeonard]

There was a devlog gold thread?

[oahda]

Stickied thread in this subforum. c:

Also please name this game オッブルドッグ in the end, because that's all I can keep thinking whenever I see the title.

[ActualDog]

I know I keep repeating myself, but this is the best devlog ever. The. Absolute. Best.

Yeah, I realised too late that I should've voted for it in the devlog gold thread.

Haha, totally fine, the sentiment is enough! In any case there's always next year because this game is absolutely not going to be finished by then...

---

Been a little longer than usual! Lots to talk about, though I'm still not done with my AI updates.

First off, I wanted dogs to be able to grab onto things with their mouths since that's a pretty important dog feature if you ask me.

I started working on a manager for dog mouths. Basically, biting, grabbing, eating, barking, and anything else that uses a mouth will go through this central area to make sure the mouth is available and the needed object is within range. As part of this, I was noticing that mouth interactions like biting weren't really obvious enough so an effect of some sort was definitely needed.

Some comic-like lines worked out well and the end result is that it's pretty obvious and attention-grabbing whenever a dog decides to chomp something.

The basic idea with the way the tech behind grabbing works is that I raycast from the dog's mouth towards the object it wants to hold. The snout bone is moved on top of the collision position, rotated away from the normal of the hit geometry, and then jointed onto it. This results in a sort of snout stretch that I really like and it works pretty well, though there are still a few issues I might have to address later, like it resulting fairly large forces when used on heavier objects.

I also made it so dogs grab onto things when they eat them (mostly so their faces don't lose track of the food as they bob around), which I'm really digging for what I hope are obvious reasons.

Anyways, with this stuff working it was time to start in on the AI overhaul in earnest.

The basic idea behind the new system is that dog behaviors will be split up into two categories, Fixations and Distractions.

Fixations are different types of focuses that dogs will get that they will pursue for long periods of time. These can be specific objects or dogs that they generally want to keep interacting with, or they can be overarching goals like exploring the pen or visiting and running localized behaviors in a specific location.

Distractions are short one-offs that dogs will participate in as they go about chasing their fixations. Dogs can get distracted by things directly in front of their faces, nearby dogs running specific behaviors, or emotional needs such as being hungry or tired. This system makes it way easier to do super fun things like getting a whole pen full of dogs to start barking just because the others around them are also barking, or having a dog stop what it's doing to go steal a toy from another dog who's playing with it nearby.

Together, these are meant to model the one-track but easily distracted mind of a dog. Dogs will have a goal they relentlessly try to pursue, but they'll take breaks from this goal if something else looks appealing enough in the short term. The previous need-based AI was somewhat efficient but didn't really result in interesting or specifically dog-like behavior. I'm already getting more understandable sets of behaviors out of this AI and I'm hoping that'll continue as I refine it more. It's also very easy to add more fixations and distractions as the game evolves.

After getting these general concepts working, I've started to dive into some deeper details like dog relationships. Just today I hooked up the basis of the system that will let dogs form positive/negative relationships with other dogs. Unfortunately it's currently way easier for dogs to annoy each other than make friends so this system is mostly just resulting in all out dog battles at the moment but I think I'll be able to calm them down soon.

After I get this stuff all working a little more harmoniously and bug-free, the next step is to add in personality modifiers, which I'll talk about as I get to them, and then at that point I think I'll be in a pretty decent place!

And here's this update's bonus dog:

[coah]

Fixation / Distraction sounds like a great approach. I love how expressive the dogs are already, just the mouth related actions add so much.