Testing, tuning, tweaking, and fixing are continuing apace on the upcoming Slough Creek multiplayer mode for WolfQuest: Anniversary Edition. Today's devblog looks at a couple features along with the ongoing task of tuning and balancing the game for multiplayer.
For example, we've built a new voting system for choosing dens and rendezvous sites, where all players have two minutes to vote for their preferred location, and then the host ratifies the vote (breaking a tie if necessary). We've also finalized the way that pup genetics works in multiplayer. This is a tricky matter indeed, with technical, usability, and social concerns that need to be satisfied. The dev team pondered it for many months until Tommi realized that, with the pack being a family, they share a common gene pool. The two parents obviously (or at least hopefully) have different genes, but offspring share their parents' DNA in various combinations. So we can simply draw on everyone's genes when calculating the pups' genes. This is by no means a perfect solution if you think about it real hard, and it doesn't capture the complexity of some Yellowstone packs, but for our purposes its a pretty good solution that meets our needs.
We've also been working on game balance for 4- or 5-person multiplayer games, increasing the frequency of competitor attacks on the den, increasing the wolves' hunger rate, among other things, to create sufficient challenge with a larger pack than you have in single-player.
So it's coming along! Not ready to release yet, but we are making excellent progress.
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WolfQuest: Anniversary Edition is available now for PC/Mac on Steam and itch.io, as Early Access. The game currently includes Episode 1: Amethyst Mountain, Episode 2: Slough Creek, Lost River: Classic, and multiplayer mode in Amethyst and Lost River. (Slough Creek multiplayer is coming soon,.) Once the game is completed on PC/Mac, we will turn our attention to other platforms. The next episode, Tower Fall (DLC) will follow. We do not announce specific release dates. We will release them when they are ready!