Making the wolf pups come to life in the upcoming Slough Creek episode has been our focus for much of the past eight months, from the beautiful 3D models and animations created by our partner GIM to the sophisticated AI behaviors that our lead developer Tommi has been designing and building. We’re still very deep in development, with much more to do before Slough Creek is ready for release, but the pups are shaping up well enough that it’s time for a sneak peak — assuming anyone out there is interested.
So today’s devblog video looks at a few aspects of the pups, mainly around eating. The pups, of course, are very keen on food and will approach either parent who has food to share, whining and food-begging, until the parent regurgitates some tasty chunks. We’re using a combination of animations, blendshapes (small mesh animations on the pup’s face and ears), and Look IK to create believable behaviors. While there’s lots of refinement still to do, it’s coming along, and well on our way to meeting Tommi’s goal to make the pups as adorable as possible.
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While we are very focused on developing WolfQuest: Anniversary Edition, we also are deeply grieved and angry about the killing of George Floyd and the larger issues of systemic racism and oppression in the United States. Dave and Susan live in Minneapolis/St Paul where the protests are affecting everyone, as they should. We hope that the sorrow, rage, and ugliness of these last weeks ignites deep and lasting change in our neighborhood and ripples out to the world.
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We have released the first episode of WolfQuest 3: Anniversary Edition (Amethyst Mountain) for PC/Mac on Steam and itch.io, as Early Access. While in Early Access, we are updating the game frequently with more features, multiplayer, and ultimately the Slough Creek episode with pups. The mobile version will come after the game is completed on PC/Mac platforms. We’ll then resume development of the next episode, Tower Fall (DLC).
(the bison devlog a few weeks ago was my former favorite) The pups are so cute! I love that they can now go in the den. Its so cute watching them go in the den as well as the fact that they have emotes now! Do they share the regurgitation's of meat of now? and can the pups sleep both inside and outside the den? if they can, will they be vulnerable to predator attacks when they sleep if they sleep outside? Slough creek is certainly going to be much harder than amythyst mountain! Your making great progress! how long can they survive without food on accurate?
