(I'll be traveling this weekend, so releasing this devblog a day earlier than usual.)
The WolfQuest Saga* has been in beta-testing for five months now -- plenty of bugs to find and fix, but we're also making hundreds of improvements too. Many of these improvements are suggested by our beta testers, so in today's devblog I'd like to look at a few of those.
1: Companionship with a sick pup. We added companionship long ago to give players some chance of helping their pups recover from sickness. But it can feel burdensome as gameplay. You feel like you really should spend all your time with that pup, but you also have things to do! So betatesters suggested adding a cooldown, similar to social emotes. This has been a great improvement: you can put in some time with your sick pup, but you don't feel guilty if you then go off and hunt and maintain territory. We limit companionship to two game-hours per day (five realtime minutes) before the cooldown hits.
2: When you have yearlings and older offspring, any packmate can decide to go on a hunting excursion. They invite other wolves, including your wolf, by whining. But it can be a bit hard to know who is planning to go and who's planning to stay. So beta testers suggested indicating this "planning to go on excursion" mindset in Pack Info. We created a small double-pawprint, which appears next to the name of those packmates. And then once on a trip away from the homesite, a larger pawprint icon appears there in Pack Info.
This gives more clarity to each packmate's situation.
3: Fights with rival wolves can get pretty wild, with packs of eight or more wolves involved. In fall and winter, pups of the year are involved in these fights, and their older packmates get upset if you bite one of those pups, so it's important to know who's who. So we implemented a beta tester suggestion and added a small yellow dot on the Fight or Flight meter above those pups. So you can go in knowing that you're risking a more vigorous response if you bite one of them.
4: Pup raids by competitors can theoretically happen at any time -- but from the start, we prevented them from happening while the player-wolf was sleeping. This of course narrows the window for attacks considerably -- not when you're sleeping, and not when you're away from the homesite. That really leaves only a few game-hours each day -- and so raids often appear soon after you wake up. We've gotten complaints about that over time, so decided to finally solve it by allowing raids to wake you up from sleep. We put in some constraints, ensuring that you get at least three hours of sleep, and this change did solve the problem. This new feature didn't bother many beta testers -- you get woken up, fight off the raiders, and go back to sleep -- but some beta testers really, really hated it. So after trying to finesse it more, we finally disabled the feature, and again limit raids to your waking hours at the homesite. That's why we test things in private beta before releasing them!
5: Playing with your pups. As your pack grows, it's fun to watch your pups and older offspring play together. In fact, it's so fun that beta testers felt rather left out of the fun. They really wanted to be able to join in -- at least doing the playful, bouncy trot. So we added that (pressing B key on the keyboard toggles on this gait on and off). And furthermore, we enabled a special playbow that packmates often use when inviting others to chase them. So when you're in this bouncy/playful mode, if you do a playbow, your wolf will do this Invite Chase playbow. So now you really can be part of the fun.
All this is coming soon in the WolfQuest Saga -- later this year!
* The upcoming WolfQuest Saga is "the rest of the game," where your pups grow up as you have a new litter each year. Time will continue progressing through the years until you die. We expect to release it later this year (but we have not set a release date).
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The WolfQuest Saga will continue! Stay tuned for more news in upcoming devblogs about it and other new features!
We do not announce specific release dates. We will release them when they are ready.