https://youtu.be/2fpxMunm8Bo
We’ve had wolf fighting in WolfQuest since the very beginning, but it was confined to the turn-based social arenas with stranger wolves. In WQ 2.7, we added stranger wolves defending their territory in Slough Creek, but you can’t actually fight them. You stay in your territory, they stay in theirs, and everyone’s happy. But since fighting is such an important aspect of a wolf’s life — fights are the number one cause of death of wolves in Yellowstone National Park —we’re building a much more realistic system for fighting in WolfQuest 3: Anniversary Edition.
Our goals for this fighting system are the same as for all the new game systems in WQ 3: to represent the complex, dynamic, and active nature of a wolf’s life within the constraints of a game simulation (and our own limited resources). Fighting of course is a common mechanic in computer games, but we want to make sure that our wolf fights are not merely recreational, but truly represent both the reasons for fighting — namely, to claim and defend territory — and the tremendous dangers that fighting presents for wolves. We also want to our NPC personality system to come into play, so a bold wolf responds differently in a conflict than a cautious wolf.
So we’ve designed a system where territory, personality, and the power balance (based on the relative number of wolves on each side of a conflict, as well as their current health) are all factors in how the wolves behave. How aggressive are they? Can they be intimidated by growls and snarls, or do you have to actually fight them, with all the risks that entails? Furthermore, this dynamic changes from moment to moment as the situation changes.
We’ve built the core system now and have been playing around with it to evaluate its fun-factor….and we think it’s pretty fun. For that we’ve been using placeholder animations and doing our best to ignore a lot of awkward moments when the wolves bite each other. Now the next step is to make it look good, by refining all the various ways that wolves can interact in a fight.
This video gives you sneak preview of some of the gameplay. Once we get everything working better, we’ll show more in a future blog post.
Notes:
* This is pre-alpha (i.e. very rough!) gameplay footage, just enough to prototype the new fighting mechanics. We’re now working on refining the animations and interactions.
* In nature, wolf fighting is almost entirely between packs, not within packs. While the latter has been known to occur, it’s only in much larger packs than the small family pack in WolfQuest.
* Fighting will be an option in single-player games, and in pup-raising multiplayer games (with your pack against NPC stranger packs). We do hope to add player vs. player in the next episode, Tower Fall.
And thanks to JayPlays for video clips from WolfQuest 2.7! Check out her channel for gameplay videos of WolfQuest and many other animal games! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4e517fIfsizbfEf_HsnFaQ