https://youtu.be/87-I6RJp4h8
Thanksgiving has rolled around again, and we’re still working on WolfQuest 3. But at least we’ve persuaded the animals to put aside their differences and gather together peaceably* for a day. (Well, except for the bull elk, who drew the short straw…)
At its very best, Thanksgiving is a time to pause to think about what we are thankful. We know a lot of WolfQuest players don’t have Thanksgiving as a holiday in their countries, but we would still like to share our thanks with you this week.
We are thankful for:
* Eleven years of WolfQuest! It is remarkable that the game has persisted and we are able to keep improving and expanding it. Thank you to everyone for supporting WolfQuest!
* Our dedicated and enthusiastic players! Without you, WolfQuest would not be possible. We especially appreciate all the supportive and constructive comments we hear. Your thoughtful input is always considered and helps shape the game. Also, someone makes us smile every day, which is essential to our perseverance.
* Our talented WolfQuest team: Tommi, Andrei, Zach, Nick, Steve, Duncan, Paul, Omar, Tom and the amazing artists at GIM, and many others who are contributing their talents to the game. We are thankful to work with such creative and dedicated folks.
* Yellowstone National Park and all the conservation efforts that help ensure wolves continue to thrive in the real world too. We are thankful for parks and wild places. We hope all of you get to experience the call of the wild!
* And most of all, those incredible gray wolves and all the wild creatures out there. We can’t imagine living in a world without them.
We continue to make progress on WolfQuest 3: Anniversary Edition, albeit with some interruptions like last week’s server troubles (which have continued some into this week), and some other glitches that have slowed things down a bit more this month than we hoped. Tommi has been building out more animals, finishing Mule Deer and Moose and now turning to ravens and other birds. Zach has been slogging away on multiplayer for longer than any of us would like to admit, and is finally getting close to having it all working (more from him in a blog post soon). Andrei has been expanding secondary systems like music and weather. Nick, the latest Unity developer to join our team, has been improving various things like save-games and scent rendering, and is now diving into optimization to make the game run better on a variety of hardware. Susan has been researching animal behaviors and answering questions on social media, while George handles game reports and player support. Steve has been creating more animal animations for the wolf and now moose as well, and remaking more of the original wolf coats. The GIM artists have been working on more grizzly and fox animations, and some other animals we’ll show off soon. And I’ve gotten back into the environment work, focusing on the forests of Amethyst Mountain with more beautiful models by our vegetation artist Kerry.
We know everyone wants to know when when when! We are still hoping to release the first episode, Amethyst Mountain, by the end of 2018 for PC/Mac on Steam and itch.io, as Early Access — but we aren’t quite as far along as I had hoped to be by now, so that’s a goal, not a guarantee. At any rate, that’ll be followed by Slough Creek some months later in 2019, then followed by the mobile versions. We’ll then resume development of the next episode, Tower Fall.
* Inspired of course by “The Peaceable Kingdom” series of paintings by Edward Hicks, depicting humans and animals working and living together in peace.