With such a big expansion and revision as the WolfQuest Saga*, it's inevitable that we'll find problems --with the gameplay, with the arc of your wolf's life, with the visuals. So there's always a couple problems that need to be solved. Today we'll look at a few of those.
First: Once you've played through a year or two in the Saga, you'll have older offspring, who can stay back at the homesite as babysitters. But if they're not out hunting with you, how do they keep from starving? We could make them go off and find food on their own after you return from hunting, but that gets complicated in terms of pack activity, sleep, and such. The simplest solution is just to do the same as with the pups, and have the babysitters eat regurgitant, just as the pups do. Nice and simple -- and happily, I found a paper by Dave Mech (world-renowned wolf biologist and one of our original WolfQuest advisors) saying that packmates do indeed eat regurgitant at times. Problem solved!
Another problem is with dispersals. After a few years, your pack will have wolves of various ages, from pups of the year to yearlings to 2-3-yr old subordinates. We have a lot of behavioral logic about when a pup will decide to disperse -- based on age, personality, size of the pack, and more. But since it takes many hours to paly through year to year, these variables are hard to fine-tune. So Raul, who created the persistent pack system last year, whipped up a nice little simulation. I can load a save with large big pack and run the simulation forward for one year and see who has dispersed. So very rapidly, I can test different variables and see how they play out. Our goal is to usually have 5-9 adults (yearlings or older) in the pack, plus the pups of the year. So this simulation is a tremendous tool to let us tweak things to get close to that goal.
Finally wolf coats and aging. I've talked in past devblogs about this. Like human hair, wolf coats tend to get lighter, and sometimes go white, as the wolf ages. We have a wide variety of coats, and some are quite white since they're based on old wolves. That's always been a bit odd, but it's really odd in the Saga, when your pups get their adult coat in late summer -- and it's white! Someday we hope to implement a real aging-tint effect, but it's quite complicated and not happening anytime soon. So for now, at very least, we have created an alternate coat for the whitest of the coats. Your pups will get this younger version of the coat automatically, and all NPC wolves will get the younger version until they turn five. In the Wolf Customization, you can chose either the younger or the older versions, just click to toggle back and forth. We've also set it up so pups and other NPC wolves who have lighter coats get a darker tint in their younger years, automatically.
So there are always problems to grapple with, but we're making steady progress in solving them. We don't have a release date for the Saga, but it's coming sometime 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.