Lost Paws News

Hello dog lovers!

The big day is a week from now! Lost Paws well be releasing September 29th so mark your calendars for doggo antics. We are extremely grateful for the support from our community and are excited to to see what you all think when the game is out!

That all being said we do have out latest update out which will be the one before out release update! This one includes stuff like our new dog (yes we got another in there), two new locations, partial controller support, and several quality of life features.

[h2]New Doggo[/h2]

We have added a third doggo and he is very friendly! The doggo is in the same general class of the other two which allowing you to do very similar actions. This doggo has slightly different physics reactions allowing for a variety of physical reactions that are slightly different from our original good boy. All of this gives you more options to be the kind of doggo you want!

What a handsome boy:

Look at him go:

We plan on adding more breeds after our early access release. Which ones we are still planning on but we hope to present some options for you all when we gear up for it.

[h2]New Locations[/h2]

Two new locations now exist in the game. Both the Mansion and the City Park Apartment are now enterable locations in the game.

The City Park Apartment was added to punctuate the various building that are not enterable thanks to mean humans locking their doors. This place has a lobby and allows you to explore one of the apartment units. Hopefully, you won't run into any baddies in there. The apartment also features many new interactable elements like new bonkable waste bins, decorations, and drinkable fountains. Together it makes it a great stop for the discerning doggo looking for a place to rest from bustling city life.

Doggo is cozy here:

The Mansion is on the far side of town and is there to give a special location for a little world building. If you go in, you might find out where all those falling items are coming from. The mansion is a first class joint with all the luxuries you'd expect from big dinning tables to massive beds. The Mansion also has a special room with many things your doggo can play with. Peeing around in there to find out exactly what we mean.

Be a shame if these were peed on:


[h2]Partial Controller Support[/h2]

This one is a little older but we finally got Partial Controller support approved on Steam! You will be able to run, jump, bonk, use skills, and use your inventory among all other important doggo actions in the game with use an Xbox or Xbox like controller. A few changes has to be made to accommodate the controller mainly with sounds and the UI. For the sounds things should be improved overall as they have been edited for more rapid and varied inputs. As for the UI, the menu's now all have a selection order which in in the main menu start by default. All other menus have it active based on type of device connected . In fact the menus and inventory change slightly in look to adjust for if a controller or keyboard and mouse are active giving you the best experience based on what kind of input device you have plugged in.

Dynamic Controller Help Screen:

[h2]Quality of life[/h2]

A few new quality of life features were added as well including:

• RPG Skill Auto-assign
  
• Zone text notification
  
• Tutorial Activation prompt on start of new game
  
• Audio base volume adjusted
  
• Retuned graphics for better look and cleaner presentation
  
• Optimized camera to improve performance
  

Thanks for reading! We will be unveiling our current planned road map in the next story so we can get to the work of making one of the best dog games out there! If you liked what you read please consider wishlisting if you haven't already and joining our discord to let us know what you want to see in the future. Thanks again for reading and see you all in the next one!

Hello fellow dog lovers it is almost beta time again! We are planning to start the beta September 5th and go to the 11th. If you have the Lost Paws Playtest in your Steam library, it will be updated and reactivated during that time frame. If you don't have the game, feel free to join our discord for more information on how to sign up to join. Thanks for checking out Lost Paws and see you all in the next one!

Hello fellow Dog Lovers!

We wanted to start off this story by thanking everyone who has supported us this far. From our project announcement, to the conventions, to our beta tests; you've all been awesome with your support, and with your much needed feedback to make this game the best it can be! Your feedback and suggestions have allowed us to make more informed decisions and path a course for the future of Lost Paws. We want to share some of those decisions in this story, as well as what we've been working on and what we plan to do for the future, starting with the new Narrative Features.

[h2]The World and Mini-Maps[/h2]
To start with, we have the new World Map. The World Map is a new panel you can toggle via the "M" key by default, which allows you to see a full screen global map. You can see your doggo represented by an arrow, points of interest represented by a question mark, dog pounds represented by a carrying cage, vets represented by a green cross, and main missions represented by a golden paw (more on that later). The map has all the features you may expect like the ability to zoom and scroll as well as dynamically update.

Sample of the world map at farthest zoom:

In addition, the Mini-Map is now on by default. It is synced with the World Map and will update as things change in the world and you explore. It also has all the icons there to help you locate important places nearby. You can toggle the Mini-Map with the "C" key by default.

The goal of these changes were to help with being able to plan in the game. By seeing various places to explore and where interesting things might be, you can utilize these features to help expose all the features Lost Paws has to offer. In our internal testing, it helped improve both the explorability of the game, as well as increased the playtimes with all the new places that seemed interesting to go to! But what actually makes these places worthwhile to begin with?

[h2]The Mission System[/h2]

The Mission System is an unobtrusive attempt to provide a little direction as well as narrative into the game. The system has two parts to it, markers and prompts.

The markers are one of two kinds, either a point of interest or a mission marker. A point of interest is just a cool place that doggo can go to to find something interesting. At a minimum there will be treats that can be obtained some way, and that can go as high as some interesting challenge or a special item doggo can obtain. The other kind of marker is a mission marker. Mission markers are denoted by a gold paw and allow you to advance the main story. While there are instances of linearity for them, many of these missions can be completed in any order, allowing you to strategize how to survive as well as what missions to tackle when. After completing a mission or point of interest, the maps will update to reflect that.

The other part of the Mission System is prompts. Prompts come up on the left side of the screen when you're near a mission zone, which let's you know what needs to be done for the mission to be counted as complete. They are a dynamic system, so when the objective is completed a mission accomplished will appear and the prompt will go away.

Example of the Mission System in Action:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The system works side by side with the current design of the game. We do not want to railroad you too much or prevent you from exploring the way you want to. You can still wander as a doggo the way you want and survive in all the ways you previously could. The purpose of the Mission System is to provide that little extra oomph to help guide your adventures if you want additional goals, as well as give doggo more things to do in the world. It also allows us to add in one of the most requested features for the game, and that would be a story!

[h2]The Narrative[/h2]

The narrative of Lost Paws starts with a car crash. Someone hits your human's car but you are able to get out of the car just in time. And so your adventure begins!

The narrative is all about you finding your missing human from your road trip. You will have to venture further into the world, explore, and survive to eventually reunite with your lost human. The Mission System is closely tied to the story, expanding what happens in the world, giving hints to why it may have happened, and expanding the lore of the world. You will end up doing things like helping repair a bridge to get further along and unlock more things to do in the world.

To support this, many new places have received additional artistic improvements. New locations have been added to the world and new NPCs are now around for you to interact with. Examples include a revamped trailer park with an ongoing party for you to explore, and new NPCs like the construction worker at the bridge to help out. These additions for the core of the new narrative are intended to help expand the world of Lost Paws even further.

Example of a new mission zone:

The main reason we added the story is because it was the most requested feature we encountered at conventions and surveys. Our beta test during the early summer cemented it in our minds to help serve as a guide for players that want one, as well as give more actions and meaning to the world as you go around surviving as a doggo. To be clear, the procedural elements of the game and the random wacky adventures you can find yourself in, as well as all the different playstyles of doggo are still in the game, and even further supported as various ways you can solve the missions. The narrative and Mission Systems are there to provide more direction at your pace, so that you can choose when and how to do these as you wish!

[h2]Optimization[/h2]

In addition to all the narrative elements, we have also made a few small changes and did another round of optimization. The biggest changes we made to optimization was the addition of our new Macro LoD system. In short, it takes a grouping of objects and replaces them with a 2D texture until you get within a certain distance toward the target group. This has caused a massive vertex reduction for rendering requirements, reducing it by millions of verts. It addition to that, we compressed many more scene textures and replaced various high poly count models with cheaper ones. This is especially notable in the forest, which reduced VRAM usage as well as rendering requirements. All together, these improvements made the default high settings in the graphics panel work well on any modern gaming system.

[h2]New Release Date and Other Announcements[/h2]

So now we have the big announcement! Lost Paws now has a definitive planned release date September 29th this year. We know this is later then our original projected date for late August, but we have a good reason for the change in the release date--- we swear! We conducted an internal test about a week ago, which while coming back positive also revealed to us many details we really wanted to get into the game before we released. Ultimately, we decided not to rush it and make one more serious pass at polishing to make the experience as tight as possible. We want to make a game even in an early access state that we can feel proud of releasing, and that means giving it a little more time to polish it as best we can!

We will be adding many little features and new areas, as well as a new mission over the course of this month and the next. All of this is on top of our current work to get partial controller support and achievements into the game. We also hope to add a new doggo before it is all over. We are excited to share all of this with you!

To top it all off, we will run another beta to gather more feedback! We will have more details on this later on, but if you were in the playtest in June, you will be automatically enrolled in the next beta. We are hoping for this beta to run sometime later in August. if you're interested in the beta, let us know in our discord and we'd be happy to ship you out a key when we are ready!

Thanks for reading! If you liked what you saw, please consider wishlisting as it helps out a lot! Thanks again, and we'll see you in the next one!

Hello fellow dog lovers!

[h2]New Doggo[/h2]

We now have added both the system to pick new doggo types and a new Doberman doggo! Before entering the game you can now select the kind of doggo you want to be. The Doberman can do everything the original can. Right now this doesn't have a big stat difference other then a few minor collider changes per dog. We will be adding dog types in the future to have a bigger differentiation for different breeds but for now we are focusing on those similar to our big friend.

Sample of the Doberman and the selection screen:

With the system now in place it will be easier for us to add in more breeds and we hope to get more feedback from everyone before and after release to help us make those decisions!

[h2]The Bear[/h2]

In addition, we added a new spawnable enemy in the game, the Bear. Because he is part of the spawner system the Bear will be randomly spawned in on locations you enter but where he is and goes is different each time. The Bear is relatively docile and usually won't bother you unless you get too close. If you do you'll have to run away or try to out dodge him in a fight. Your doggo will always be sent to the vet or pound depending on how you got unconscious.

Sample of the Bear:

[h2]Resolution Support[/h2]
As per requested in the beta we now will have multi-resolution support and the ability to change resolution in game. We support the aspect ratios 21:9, 16:10, 4:3 and many others including the standard 16:9. We also have added support for an additional Ultra setting to augment the High setting which will provide a small visual boost to the game and give greater options on the game look.

Sample of the current state of graphics setting panel:

[h2]Performance Improvements[/h2]

We also have done additional performance improvements since the beta! The main thing is that we started to tackle physics optimization by controlling its operations at distance with a new system. Basically it does incremental adjustments and turnoffs of physics elements like rigidbodies, colliders and other parts when far away. In addition to some minor scripting improvements, the gains seen were significant in the towns and central city.

We also cleaned up certain models in the game to help with performance. Certain buildings have been improved in polycount and large scale parts of the scene (like the distant forests) have also been tuned. Lastly, some new texturing work was done to reduce VRAM usage. We still are planning on doing even more in the future!

[h2]Future Additions[/h2]
The beta showed us that we needed a big shake up in the game to get to the level of polish we were aiming for. To that end we wanted to revamp the narrative by adding some more cinematic features and weaving a better story at the start and throughout the world. We will talk about this more in the next dev log but just know this new storyline and the elements associated with it will not railroad you to do anything in any particular order. It will be a seamless addition that will fit right in with current exploration and open world mechanics.

Because of the inclusion of this new story the cost to add additional languages will be going up. As a result we have decided to pull back Spanish support for the release so we can support a full suite of languages properly after the features have been added and ironed out. Once the narrative gets fine tuned by all of you we will go full force adding as many languages as we can.

Last but not least, we will also enhance the in-game tutorial. Part of this will be modifying features to make them easier to understand. But the largest part is the changes to the tutorial which will include things like pace control, a clearer presentation, and the ability to decide when to terminate the tutorial entirely at any time. Many more details will be available in our next dev log.

Thanks for reading! If you have any interest in signing up to our closed beta you can still access the sheet on our discord: https://discord.gg/3mQnjNSMcW. If you liked what you saw, please consider wishlisting as it helps out a lot! Thanks again and see you all in the next one!

Hello fellow dog lovers!

The beta is officially finished! Firstly, we want to thank everyone who participated in the beta over the last two weeks! It was a great ride for us to get all the feedback and learn more about how we can make the game even better. You all have given us some amazing ideas on what to do going forward and what direction we should take in polishing the game. With all that in mind, we will be posting a story in the future on what we have added before and during the beta as well as some more specific things we plan on adding.

The feedback we got indicated we do need to do a good bit more to polish aspects of the game and provide many more quality of life features. The most important to us is performance since we want to expand the kinds of computers we can support. On top of that, we want to expand the kinds of doggo adventures and how you find and interact with them. Lastly, there are many little things like add more effects in the world and improving feel of bonking that we are aiming to add. As a result we will be delaying the release of the game from Q2 to August this year. With that release date change, we also wanted to mention we may run another closed beta again in the future. We will keep you all updated on any signups or betas opportunities we may have. Thanks so much to everyone again for the feedback and helping us make the best game we can! See you all in the next one.