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tanner bananer
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« Reply #520 on: July 20, 2017, 07:33:53 PM »

very cutie dogs!
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JobLeonard
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« Reply #521 on: July 20, 2017, 07:36:29 PM »

 Kiss
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oahda
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« Reply #522 on: July 22, 2017, 05:18:19 AM »

you should make it either a hidden easter egg or a random chance that a dog gets the original face instead of the current one Gomez
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Bricabrac
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« Reply #523 on: July 22, 2017, 05:55:07 AM »

you should make it either a hidden easter egg or a random chance that a dog gets the original face instead of the current one Gomez
I second this
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« Reply #524 on: July 27, 2017, 08:06:09 PM »

you should make it either a hidden easter egg or a random chance that a dog gets the original face instead of the current one Gomez
I second this
i third this

also, very happy to see petting technology has finally been implemented. i can't believe i didn't think about it before. how
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ActualDog
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« Reply #525 on: July 31, 2017, 05:07:26 PM »

very cutie dogs!

Thank you!

you should make it either a hidden easter egg or a random chance that a dog gets the original face instead of the current one Gomez
I second this
i third this

also, very happy to see petting technology has finally been implemented. i can't believe i didn't think about it before. how

The best I can do for now is to let everyone know that I plan to have a bunch of different types of heads in the final game once I get heavy into content creation. I'm not gonna promise specifics at this point but I am WELL aware of how much ppl are into the original heads, haha.

---

I've been hard at work and have landed back in the UI zone for a bit. I still dread UI work for the most part but I think I'm getting better at it so that's cool at least. Still working on the prototype stuff but it's become one of those things where I've realized I need to shore up a lot of other systems in order to really test it out. The good news is that most of the UI work I'm doing is stuff that I already knew I was going to have to do at some point regardless.

My main focus has been on getting dog information surfaced to the user. While part of me likes the idea of having extremely limited UI and forcing players to pay close attention to their dogs to figure out what their needs are, there are a lot of reasons why that's not practical. For now I'd rather start with too much UI and downsize as I go along if possible. I'm pretty sure I'll never end up removing major bits of UI, but I'll probably at least ship my current hotkey setup so people can hide the GUI if they don't wanna see it.

The big things I need to show the player are the emotions and needs of their dogs. It really can't be a surprise when your dog dies of hunger, that's extremely unfair. At first I hoped I could get by with just the bare minimum by surfacing each dog's current emotion.



This is funny but it's also very limiting. This information is 1 dimensional. It doesn't give you details just broad strokes and honestly it's kind of redundant since dogs already get particle effects that represent their major emotions.

So I moved on from this and dived straight into a major HUD addition which got me here.



I'm sure this won't be final (I'm already aware that the icons are not obvious enough) but I'm super pleased with it so far. The camera icon in the lower left corner lets you snap the camera to the selected dog, names and needs are displayed prominently, and each canine in your crew gets its own little thumbnail on the bar you can click to switch between them. After this screenshot was taken I also updated the tinier portraits so they each show little icons representing their associated dog's current emotion so you can evaluate things at a glance. And of course, dogs now have their names surfaced above them, which I really love.

Originally I was changing portrait color based on how intense a dog's emotional needs were but that felt a little awkward. Not all emotions are things you can "solve" for yourself. While it's important for you to be able to know how your dogs are feeling, a dog being super tired isn't necessarily always something that requires your attention. To that end I might replace the bottom two bars (fear and anger) with descriptors. I'm not sure yet.

This view has already been worthwhile. Having all this in-game rather than just in a debug view has already made testing much easier, and it's helped me make some pretty major balance tweaks to emotions.

There's a lot of polish potential with this view but I'm not going to spend much time on that until I'm more confident that all the individual elements are close to final.

I've also implemented a super WIP shop (that third icon on the right). It just re-uses the inventory GUI for now so there's no reason to show it off but it does its job for now and is gonna be very important for letting me get in a little feedback loop (make money, spend money).

The last big thing for now is that at this point I've replaced almost all of my in-game text with Text Mesh Pro (a little more work than I thought... I have a lot of text in this game already). Way way nicer to look at.

And of course, some final dog gifs.

This guy is the best walker I've literally ever seen in this game. The peak of dog evolution...



And then at the opposite end of that spectrum...



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ProgramGamer
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« Reply #526 on: July 31, 2017, 05:10:46 PM »

Don't care if 8 legs spider doge, still totes adorbs.
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JobLeonard
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« Reply #527 on: August 01, 2017, 07:04:08 AM »

What ProgramGamer said

Also, your Sims heritage is starting to leak through Tongue
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ActualDog
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« Reply #528 on: August 01, 2017, 09:24:56 AM »

Don't care if 8 legs spider doge, still totes adorbs.

Yeah I have a real soft spot for the wilder dogmorphs. Hope to get some truly bizarre variation possibilities in once I'm full steam ahead with content creation.

What ProgramGamer said

Also, your Sims heritage is starting to leak through Tongue

Haha yeah, I know. I'm trying to be super conscious of the similarities and ultimately this game is gonna be very very different but it's hard not to fall back to inspiration from a project I spent 3 years working on. It's super funny to me how many of the decisions made on that game that I never fully understood or really thought about make perfect sense to me now that I'm trying to solve similar problems. I figure it's best to get the inspiration out of my system upfront in the first pass of this stuff and then refine things towards what'll work the best for this project as I go. There are already a few aspects of this HUD setup that I know I'll end up changing but it's super helpful to get a functional base in as quick as I can.
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ActualDog
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« Reply #529 on: August 08, 2017, 02:24:17 PM »

Made a new devlog vid (the last one was about a year ago, haha). Nothing super new if you've been reading this thread but you do at least get some extended video of the current build!




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JobLeonard
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« Reply #530 on: August 08, 2017, 02:41:00 PM »

As I mentioned on Youtube; what's happening with the dog in the back at 3:20? It's going full  Crazy
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ActualDog
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« Reply #531 on: August 08, 2017, 03:10:21 PM »

As I mentioned on Youtube; what's happening with the dog in the back at 3:20? It's going full  Crazy

Haha, I was hoping people would notice that. It's because it's standing partially inside the exit to a vacuum pipe. Every time its face gets inside it gets blown back out again but with not quite enough force to push the dog completely out of the way.
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« Reply #532 on: August 10, 2017, 05:07:12 AM »

while drawing a wobbledogs thing (i'll post it on twitter later, i'm busy right now), i listened to dogsong medleys to help me get in the mood. and it dawned on me that there should be at least one track consisting of barks. it's too early to think about the soundtrack but im suggesting it anyways.
another suggestion: show/race names for dogs like the ones horses have. i want them mostly because of how strange they tend to be.
and i think this has been asked alredy, but will we be able to walk dogs?
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ActualDog
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« Reply #533 on: August 18, 2017, 06:18:48 PM »

while drawing a wobbledogs thing (i'll post it on twitter later, i'm busy right now), i listened to dogsong medleys to help me get in the mood. and it dawned on me that there should be at least one track consisting of barks. it's too early to think about the soundtrack but im suggesting it anyways.
another suggestion: show/race names for dogs like the ones horses have. i want them mostly because of how strange they tend to be.
and i think this has been asked alredy, but will we be able to walk dogs?

The bark thing is totally gonna have to depend on what ends up happening with the SFX. Bark songs are cute but if my in-game dogs also bark then it'd be bad to have bg music that made the same sounds!

I don't know if you'll be able to walk the dogs or not but I was thinking about implementing some sort of leash-tech at some point to let you restrain dogs to in-game posts or something. I'll have to give it more thought!

--

Been a bit so I figured now's a good time for an update. A lot of my work since the last update has been on prototype stuff. I've been desperately trying to figure out a good core interaction loop for this project (a recurring theme) and so I was trying out some stuff. I kept running into the same problem, that it's very hard to create a meaningful gameplay loop that "does it all". After talking with a friend I kinda came to the conclusion that I've been overthinking things for far too long. I've been trying to make this a game for "everyone". It's a rare game that can do that and I'm at an even larger disadvantage than usual in that I have a few aspects of this project that are completely immovable at this point. I still have big plans for this game--I do mean for it to be more than just a surface level pet game--but I need to be more OK with defining an audience for myself.

With that said, I'm planning a renewed focus on the customization and simulation aspects of the experience and I won't be trying to shoehorn in entirely new outside systems at this point. I have what I think will be a good plan to drip-feed unlocks and new content (more on that another time), and my hope is that that minimal progression will be enough to keep people interested. After all, the dogs are really the stars here and I don't want to lose sight of that. I know this is all pretty vague at the moment but hopefully it'll make more sense later. I still plan for this game to be rich with stuff to do and discover, but ultimately I'm no longer going to try as hard to cater to the type of player who isn't gonna base-level just enjoy playing with and watching the dogs themselves.

All that said, I've spent most of my time recently working on something unrelated to everything I just talked about!





The game co-working space I'm a part of in LA (Glitch City) is hosting a fundraising event this coming Wednesday where among other things we'll be showing off our projects. It's pretty low-pressure but I figured it'd be a good opportunity to get some hands on this thing so I wanted to put together something solid to let people play around with. Since it's not really an experience at this point I decided to just expose all my customization stuff and let people go wild with those tools. Super nervous about this because it'll be the first time I've ever really shown this thing off.

At the very least, this is gonna be a killer debug tool for me once I get back into dog genetic content, but I also imagine I'll let you cheat this thing up in some form during the final release, because it's pretty fun to play with.

I have all the sliders being created dynamically based on the master dog genetic definition, so they should just update as I add more or change things around later. It was an interesting problem to try and set this up, however. The basics weren't too bad. I already convert genetic values to floats internally for most things, and because of a decision I made early on they're mostly meant to represent values between 0 and 1 (percentages of a modification), so converting them to slider values was mostly straightforward after working out a few kinks.



The reverse direction was a little more complicated but still not bad. I essentially round the slider's value to the nearest available permutation for a binary string of the desired length. In the case the resultant string is too short, I just tack on zeros to the front of it to make up the difference.

Code:
float range = maxVal - minVal;
float permutations = GetNumBinaryPermutations(desiredGeneLength);

float increaseVal = range / permutations;
int valuePermutation = Mathf.RoundToInt(sliderVal/ increaseVal);

string finalSequence = GetBinaryStringFromInt(valuePermutation);

OF COURSE, it's not quite that simple. This works for most genes but not all. Some genes are too long for me to fit their permutation num in a float, for example. For those genes I cheat. I split those up into usable chunks and increment each chunk uniformly as the slider increases. Not very accurate but accurate enough for what they're being used for at the moment. Another problem is that some genes are used in a "looped" way. These are genes that I iterate over and can infinitely grab sections from. There's no meaningful way to "increment" those genes because they aren't used all at once to generate a raw value. For these I check the incremental length, figure out which "section" the slider falls inside of, and increment only that section as the slider moves. This is still not ideal because some of these values (specifically for patterns) loop back on themselves as they're evaluated, but again, it does an acceptable job for now.

Anyways, working on all this stuff has gotten me playing with dog variation a bunch. It's particularly fun to just mutate a dog and see where it ends up.



I also like testing the limits of my dog locomotion. Not everything works but I was a little surprised this guy was able to walk.



And of course the addition of the puppy button meant that I played around with these babies some more.



Anyways, that's about it for now. I'll leave you with a screenshot story I took.



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Josh Bossie
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« Reply #534 on: August 18, 2017, 07:50:52 PM »

enjoying all the dogs itt

I'm envious of the fact that every screenshot is hilarious and good
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« Reply #535 on: August 25, 2017, 02:05:24 PM »

I really really want to get my hands on that dog maker  Blink Blink
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« Reply #536 on: August 27, 2017, 11:10:44 AM »

enjoying all the dogs itt

I'm envious of the fact that every screenshot is hilarious and good

Thanks! I was worried early on that the game would only look good in motion, but I've been super pleasantly surprised that screenshots sell it pretty well on their own. The physical movement translates really nicely to action shots.

I really really want to get my hands on that dog maker  Blink Blink

I dunno if it'll be making many more public appearances but at the moment I'm thinking it'll at least be something to include as a cheat feature (and/or possibly some sort of late game unlock) in the final game.

--

I don't have any good pictures of my setup, but the first public showing went well! I've been unpacking my thoughts on it over the past few days. There were some basic playtest issues, stuff like bits of non-obvious UI and controls, a few physics bugs, a crash I still need to fix, but this stuff isn't really what I'm interested in discovering at this point. It could just be that I was standing nearby and so people were being polite, but the game did actually feel like it's got a worthwhile base.

Takeaways:

  • Multiple people laughed out loud while playing, and a few took cellphone screenshots of their dogs. This was a relief because it kinda proved to me that the game's goofiness and appeal isn't just limited to the moments I curate. Even within a short, self-driven session people are able to find good moments.
  • People really like making large, long dogs. I should do some work to make them more viable. That said, people also really like the completely helpless dogs so I shouldn't erase them completely.
  • Pacing is going to be super important. I already knew this but watching people really drove home how huge it's gonna be to give a steady stream of new things to do. If I can do that well, I think I'll be in a very good place.
  • The dogs get tangled together a lot, especially the more monstrous ones, and people really like to point out that it looks like they're humping each other. If I can pull off physically animated mating, people would go wild.
  • People ascribe motivation and intent to everything the dogs do, even if there is none. I don't know if this will hold up with long-term play, but it's a huge asset in the short term at least. It'll take a lot for AI bugs to legitimately feel like bugs to people. I also should remove all subtlety from my AI designs. Unless I'm adding support for very distinct, readable behaviors, the AI underpinnings will be overshadowed by the physical randomness. A dog's body determines its apparent personality to a huge degree. Also, to a certain extent I could probably get the most immediate mileage by representing complexity with thought bubbles or something similar.
  • People are into the visuals. I got a lot of comparisons to Cubivore, Katamari, Spore, and The Sims. I shouldn't be afraid to lean into that stuff a bit more because people are always excited when they get to bring those games up, and the comparison is a great way to ease people into things and start stuff off with good vibes. Even with the Spore comparison, people meant it in terms of what they wanted that game to be or liked about it and so it was still a positive frame of reference.
  • There've been points where I'd considered making dogs fairly expendable, but after watching several people almost lose dogs to hunger, it's obvious to me now that I need to make sure it's very hard for dogs to actually die and that there's a lot of telegraphed lead-up before they do, so you're never surprised. There's nothing fun about petting a dog only to have it randomly drop dead while you're doing so.
  • Granted, the audience for this event leaned towards people already paying attention to the scene, but I had a decent chunk of people mention that they'd seen gifs of the game before which means my "marketing" is working. That said, an equal number of people mentioned that despite liking the gifs, they had no idea what the game was. Fair because so far I mostly don't either, but I really need to come up with a strong pitch.
  • Never use a wireless mouse for a demo in a room with a ton of other games.

So yeah, that's about it for now. Honestly it was more positive than I was expecting. I think for some people the novelty will wear off quick, but I also think there is legitimately an audience for it, assuming I can make the pacing work. It's not there yet, obviously, but I don't think I'm wasting my time. I'm looking forward to digging into the game some more.




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JobLeonard
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« Reply #537 on: August 27, 2017, 03:58:34 PM »

Looks like you got some great feedback!

When those legs come back into the frame running in the first gif, I just think of




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« Reply #538 on: August 28, 2017, 12:26:21 PM »

I really dig how the eyes of the dogs let you understand their feelings. That makes it super nice when you take a screenshot of a bunch of them. You should definitely make sure that the hilarious part of the game doesn't get lost while you work on it Wink
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« Reply #539 on: August 30, 2017, 01:31:10 PM »

wait waitwait are you gonna make the dogs actually fuck
that would be an important addition
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