Wobbledogs News

Ghosts have arrived!

• Ghosts will now auto-spawn occasionally from Dog Memorials. They'll be more likely to spawn if the room the memorial is in is decorated with Spooky objects, carpets, and wallpapers. (You can turn off ghost auto-spawning in the Gameplay Options menu.)
• These dogs aren't technically yours, so while you can give them commands, you won't be able to do things like breed or store them.
  
• Play around with them and have fun! There's still a few more things I'd like to add, but they already have some special behaviors and properties!
  

Game Adjustments:

• The base size of baby teeth has been increased so they'll be a little easier to see and click on.
  
• Dud eggs are now easier to get. They're still not going to happen every time you have a dog with lots of Scaph in its gut, but they're easier now than they were before. I'll be keeping an eye on this and can increase the chances even further if folks still have trouble.
  
• In preparation for ghosts, Dog Cores and Memorials now store dog personality data. Past cores/memorials will not have this, but if a core is created after this patch, both it and the memorial created from it will. This data is passed along to spawned ghosts. If it doesn't exist, the ghost will have no personality traits.
  

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a few bugs surrounding hacked and unstable dogs. It should now be way less likely for these dogs to softlock the game. This also means that their bodies finish generating, so they may look very different than before. Please welcome them into your hearts.
  

Audio:

• SFX for when a dog is selected in the storage screen.
  
• Update for the SFX that plays when a goal is claimed.
  
• Audio for opening/closing the goals and storage screens.
  

I know this patch took longer than usual to come out, so thanks for being so patient with me! There's some exciting stuff brewing and I can't wait to share it!

Bug Fixes:

• The last patch introduced a bug with opening the second page of dog commands. The center button was missing a newly added reference and error'd out when instantiated meaning no actions would display. All commands and actions should now once again be accessible.
  

Adjustments:

• Added a small buffer to grabbing and clicking on in-world physics objects while using the gamepad. There's now a slight window of time after the cursor leaves an object where the game still thinks you're selecting it, which gets wiped if you select something new instead. This should make it a bit easier to interact with smaller in-world objects while using a gamepad.
  
  
• Increased the size of the need icons on dog thumbnails. After the recent UI re-implementation I had to do, some of these icons got set way smaller than they had previously been and were very hard to see.
  
  
• I did a global audit of all in-game models and adjusted some settings that were causing their shadows to have visible seams. Issues may still exist, and to some extent this might not be reasonable to ever fix 100%, but overall the in-game shadows should should now be much cleaner and nicer to look at!
  

Game Adjustments:

• The UI flow for dog pupation has been slightly adjusted. In the past, when you clicked on the cocoon thought-bubble above a dog, it would instantly pupate them. This was great if that's what you wanted to do, but it was easy to accidentally click on, often resulting in unwanted pupation. To try and address this issue without completely revamping the UI flow (which would be confusing for existing players), clicking this thought bubble now opens up a list of self-commands just like clicking on a dog directly. When a dog can pupate, they will now have a self-command to do so. The command should hopefully stick out to everyone as it has its own special cocoon icon attached to it. The tutorial text has also been updated to reflect this change.
  
  
• I've added a slight lockout timer to sneezing. Dogs that sneezed a lot in the past will still do so now, but they should no longer chain-sneeze to quite the same degree.
  

New Content:

• Younger dogs will now enter a teething period during which they'll get a score boost towards behaviors that involve biting or grabbing things. The score boost isn't massive, so hopefully this doesn't result in chaos, but I'll be keeping an eye on it just in case. During this teething period, there's a slight chance that dogs will leave behind a baby tooth. These teeth are, of course, edible and come with a new flora.
  

Audio:

• SFX for opening/closing the dog storage screen.
  

Bug Fixes:

• The pipe entrance suction sound loops were sometimes getting stuck playing even after an object left the entrance. I audited this flow, made some adjustments, and I believe this issue should now be fixed.
  
  
• You could mess up the camera view if you entered a dog den, entered build mode, and then pressed play. The camera will now respond to this correctly.
  
  
• The camera would often recenter on the starting pen after exiting build or placement mode. It should now correctly refocus on the pen you were last looking at, as long as that pen is still around.
  
  
• You could previously click on a dog's cocoon thought bubble while inside of placement mode. The bubble now hides itself in this situation.
  
  
• If you switched active dogs while the actions window was up, you'd still be controlling the dog you opened it for, but the UI would indicate that the command affected the newly selected dog. Even fixing this bug, the expected behavior was a bit confusing, so now this popup closes itself when you switch active dogs.
  
  
• Certain behaviors, like choking, were marked as non-interruptible. This stopped the player from canceling them by petting or scolding the dog while they were running that behavior, but did not stop the player from interrupting these behaviors by commanding the dog to do something else. I've fixed this issue and thus you can no longer command a dog to stop choking.
  

New Features:

• Partial gamepad support!
  
  Almost all of my time since last patch has gone towards setting up gamepad support. I've never had to do this before and it was more complex and tricky than I expected it to be, but as of this patch you should be able to use almost any (reasonable) gamepad you have access to to play the game! In order to set this up without adding special case gamepad handling in a bunch of places, I had to rebuild a large chunk of the game's UI from scratch to use Unity's UI system instead of an old custom one I started the project with. This needed to be done regardless in order to support multiple resolutions later on down the line, so while it was time consuming, it was also a good excuse to get to it! I used InControl for gamepad input handling, and while it works great for that it does not have any native support for virtual cursors, so I had to build one from scratch and get it integrated with Unity's UI system. This was not trivial, but it's finally in a fairly solid place.
  
  I list controller support as "partial" for now because there are a few things still missing, namely the game does not currently update its text dynamically when listing out controls depending on if you're using a gamepad or a mouse and keyboard, so gamepad players will have to figure out the controls on their own. Button remapping and gamepad specific control options have not yet been implemented either. All of these features are still coming, however! There are also a few UI display issues with the virtual cursor, but from my testing they should all be minor and not disrupt your play.
  
  The last thing I'd like to mention for now is that if you're running into heavy performance issues with this game, using a mouse will be a better experience for you. Since the gamepad uses a virtual cursor not the system cursor, it will be affected by lag in the same way that all other on-screen motion is. There are also a few weird edge cases when using a gamepad when the framerate dips too low. These are related to the execution order of the custom UI event handling I had to implement, and are things I will continue to look into as they come up.
  
  Even with these caveats, I think the gamepad support is in a good place for now! I personally prefer to still use a mouse and keyboard, but if you usually like to use a controller then try giving it a go!
  

Audio:

• SFX for den construction.
  
• SFX for dirt collection.
  
• SFX for trying to grab immovable objects in Placement Mode.
  

Bugfixes:

• When the game is soft paused a dog's capsule timer was still active, and because needs do not decay in this situation it meant that leaving the game soft paused for a while could result in an absolutely unreal amount of capsules being laid. The game now pauses the dog capsule timer while soft paused.
  
  
• If a dog encountered a memorial while walking around, errors would spew because of a missing tag in the object handling code. This could have been causing lots of little unrelated issues, but has now been fixed.
  

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a soft lock that could occur after the previous update. The pipe audio added temporary objects that would parent themselves to objects inside the pipes to play appropriate locational sounds. If one of these objects got parented to a part of a dog's leg, then some of my collision code would fail when a new dog was created, causing the game to soft lock. This fix adds an appropriate null check to avoid the issue.
  
  
• Fixed a few errors surrounding pipe audio. Nothing that would cause noticeable issues beyond some improper sfx timing. Still a few minor lingering issues here, but I wanted to get a fix in for the above soft lock.
  
  
• If you tried to pet a cocoon that loaded into the game with a full heart meter, the meter would not display correctly.
  
  
• Fixed the spelling of "Occurrences" inside the gut flora field guide menu. How did you all let me get away with this for so long!
  

Audio

• Added sfx for when the camera moves into and out of a den.