Hello dog lovers!
It has been a while since our last dev log thanks to our adventures in PAX East and Playthrough NC, but we're back and here to give you all the details on what we've been working on these past couple of months! We have added a whole new sector to the game called Doggo City, in addition to new skills, new doggo actions (like digging), and new systems and items to make the world more interactive.
Doggo City
As we mentioned in a previous story, the next big area is a city that you can explore. This city is called Doggo City, due to some of its peoples' love of doggos. It is based on a grid plan and is cut up into districts for you to explore. Part of it is implemented now, and we hope to have more of it ready in the future as we continue to build. Right now, we have two and a half districts ready, which include the Park District, the Shopping District, and the Foreign District.
Park District
The Park District is the first one you'll encounter when entering Doggo City. The biggest features of it include the Pizzeria, the City Convenience, the Doggo Statue, and most importantly, the Park. This district is focused on teaching you the ropes of city life. All RPG doggo pathways have something to do within Doggo City, such as trading with people in the shops, terrorizing people in the city plaza, or just going into the alleyways to find new things to eat.
The biggest part of this district is the park. Inside the park, you'll find more ways to unleash your inner doggo. From digging stuff up to playing with balls, there will always be something to make your doggo feel right at home. As we get further along in development, we intend to add even more things you can do in the park, and we also hope to add several more parks to the city later on.
Shopping District
If you wander to the west side of the Park District, you'll see a road opening up to the Shopping District. Inside the Shopping District, you'll find a lot of places to raid shop. Places of interest include the Sushi Bar and The City Pound (a place to avoid when possible), and the Shopping Plaza. Lots of people roam around in the area, which makes it the best place to make friends, especially if you have the later skills for Friendly Doggo. Of course, using the alleyways or stealing from stores are great options too! More interiors will be opened up in future updates so stay tuned for that.
Foreign District
The Foreign District is only partially completed at the moment and is opposite to the Shopping District. You can enter it by following the road on the east side of the park. Immediately afterwards, you'll see the City Vet location, which is the main attraction for the district. This district is the least fleshed out currently serving mainly as a respawn place for your doggo. That being said, there are a few secrets here worth checking out if you're able to find them!
RPG Skills
The latest wave of RPG skills are the next row down the skill tree. This row of skills are "passive" skills, which don't require you to do anything for them to be useable. An active skill is one that you have to assign to a skill slot while a passive skill is always active. Each branch in the tree got two additional passive skills, which lets you choose which options you want to go for, or you can get both! As you get more skills, the cost of each one goes up, meaning you'll have to pick what order works best for you.
Friendly Doggo Skills
The two skills for the Friendly Doggo Path are Free Ride and Man's Best Friend. Free Ride allows you to bark at cars to get them to stop, which makes it easier to hitch a ride. Barking again makes them go again and you can bark while riding to make them go even faster! Man's Best Friend results in your doggo getting double rewards for being good like when begging for food from Dog Lovers.
Street Doggo Skills
The two skills for the Street Doggo Path are Shoe Taster and Gorger. Shoe Taster will cause NPCs to randomly drop shoes when you bonk them. These shoe items stop hunger from going down for 30 seconds, giving you more time to find more food. Gorger actually combos nicely with Shoe Taster in that the skill allows you to increase your max health by 50 by eating more then your maximum food, allowing your doggo to stay in a fight longer. Combined with Shoe Taster which freezes your hunger, you can easily rack up more health to bonk more baddies.
Wild Doggo Skills
The two skills for the Wild Doggo Path are Efficient Scavenger and Marrow Eater. Efficient Scavenger will cause more items to spawn in wilderness zones (forest, alleys, parks) making it easier to avoid humans. Marrow Eater increases the value of eating animals you catch. Both skills make it easier to focus away from humans as your doggo scavenges for resources in the game.
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New Achievements
We've also added many more achievements into the game based on the path you want your doggo to take. By doing these, your doggo will gain more milestone points, which can be spent on getting these new skills. A couple dozen more have been added and include things like finding a high vantage point in the City or escaping the Dog Thieves.
Digging and Peeing
In addition to new areas and skills, the doggo can do two more actions: Peeing and Digging. Both will be expanded in the future but for now they can help make you more in tune with being a doggo.
For peeing, your doggo can now pee on things. This serves as a secondary attack that can cause damage to enemies and knock out crowds, but it also is one of the ways to get a new achievement in the game for a milestone point by peeing on a fire hydrant. In the future, we hope to make it add a mini-map marker as well as have other uses in interacting with the world.
For digging, your doggo can now dig to search for things outside of the towns. To do this, you'll have to go into smell vision and search for a scent coming from the ground. finding them means it is a place to dig something up. Once you dig up the item you can pick it up and use it from the inventory. In the future you'll be able to dig to store things too so digging will become even more valuable in the future.
Dog Retaliation System
The Dog Retaliation System (DRS) is something that has been requested by several people for a long time. It is effectively a wanted system that will trigger based on the actions you take while in the towns. If you do something humans might not want like bonking them or tearing up trash, you will gain points that increase the odds of the police coming after you. The odds of the police showing up are split into five tiers represented by the warning paws on the upper left corner of the screen. Each is a 20% chance that the police will show up with the fifth paw guaranteeing that they will arrive. When the police are formally called a radio call will play. Two police officers will spawn in to try to send your doggo to the vet. Your doggo can either fight them off or try to run away which after a period of time will cause the police to give up. Your DRS Warning Level will also go away over time or after you get away from the police.
Overall, we wanted to add this system to give a little bit more differentiation for the types of actions you can take as a doggo. It matters what kinds of actions you take which gives you a variety of options to what kind of actions you can take as you explore the world and survive.
World Intractability
Last but not least we added a lot of small things in the world to make it more interactable with your doggo. A dozen new items have been added into the game for you to pick up. Some are objective items to get milestone points, some are food, and some are equipable.
We also added a few new features in the world that allow you to play with even more objects. Additional balls have been added and ball physical have been updated to make it easier to play with them the way you want. Vending machines are now bonkable, which you can push around to get food from. New city garbage bags are now breakable to get items from as well. Lastly, we've also added a new water pipe to drink from in the city.
[Vending machine gif]
We wanted to end this log by thanking everyone we met at PAX East and Playthrough NC. We got amazing feedback and many great ideas of things to add to the game. Going to both were amazing experiences and we welcome anyone from there to our community.
Thanks for reading! if you want more frequent updates, consider joining our discord: https://discord.gg/3mQnjNSMcW as we provide little tidbits and livestream times there. If you liked what you saw, please consider wishlisting as it helps out a lot! Thanks again and see you all in the next one!