Lost Paws News

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.

Hello fellow Dog Lovers!

Due to popular demand, we have decided to extend the beta by another week (6/1/2023 - 6/8/2023)! We wanted to give all of you a chance at some more doggo fun. As before, play as much as you want and when you feel like you have some opinions or feedback you'd like to share feel free to do so on the feedback survey. If you want a key or were expecting one from filling out the confirmation survey feel free to contact us on our discord or at [email protected] and we will do our best to help you get sorted. Thanks for all the interest and feedback so far and excited to see what you all do with your doggos!

Hello fellow dog lovers!

We are happy to announce that our initial wave of beta keys are now out! Instructions about what to do, how to use them, and where to provide feedback are provided in the email. If you didn't get one but believe you should have gotten one please feel free to contact us in our discord or at [email protected] and we will do our best to help out. Thank you for all your interest and help in making the game better!

Hello fellow dog lovers!

The closed beta is nearly upon us! If you had signed up at one of our previous events for access to the beta the confirmation email should be well on it way by now. If you don't see it please check your spam folder to make sure it didn't end up over there. If you are still having issues and can't find the email, please feel free to email us at [email protected] and we'd be happy to get you your confirmation email! If you want to join the beta there is still time if you fill out the signup sheet on discord before 5/24/2023 (upcoming Wednesday). Thanks again for all the interest and looking forward to the beta!

Hello dog lovers!

Welcome to our latest doggo filled devlog! In this one, we will be going over the progress made in April and what to look forward to this month.

[h2]Lighting[/h2]

Firstly, the main focus for this month was a revamp of interior lighting. We felt like the experience wasn't as cohesive when going from building interiors to the rest of the world. It created almost two distinct lighting environments which we wanted to unify.

To do that, we first trashed our simple lighting setup and started to pick the kind of light (either spot of point) based on the type of fixture. We then would add a second light per fixture that would affect the area around it like the roof. After that we would add an area light near the floor and sometimes walls to simulate external light coming in. Lastly, we would bake a reflection probe for the interior. All these changes were made because we needed a performant template that we could put in each interior. Below are a couple samples.

Vet Lobby:

Apartment Lounge:

[h2]Performance and Bugs[/h2]

Another big focus for us this month was performance. While it is still ongoing, we have already managed to massively improve stability and most importantly FPS. The primary way we did this was leveraging our boxed off building designs. Most of the lights in the scene are located in interiors with the exteriors mostly lit by sun light. As a result we can effectively create our own light level of detail (LOD) system. We check based on a light's distance to the doggo and then depending on how far we turn on and off light and lighting features like shadows to prevent them from adding performance costs when the player is too far away to see them.

Speaking of LOD, we have added it for various buildings with a lot of details as well as bake and atlas the buildings to lower the cost down further. Props and other details have been added to the LOD system so that they are culled from rendering when at distance even when occlusion can still see them but being too far for the player to notice. Combined this has jumped the FPS by over 50% allowing for it to run on even more PCs then before.

Lastly, here is a highlight of some bugs/requests you all found either at the conventions or mentioned in previous demos:

• Make Angry Old Man drop an item when defeated
  
• Allow begging to convert from sit to stand up
  
• Allow players to adjust zoom of camera with mouse wheel up and down
  
• Fixed Beg detection for Friendly Old Man
  
• Improve physics interaction on balls and inventory
  
• Fixed the Vet getting knocked out on occasion during respawn
  

[h2]Future[/h2]
We wanted to wrap up by providing a little update of what can be expected this month. Dog breed selection is well under way and we currently are working on adding our first new breed a Doberman!

Here is a brief sample:

[previewyoutube][insert gif here][/previewyoutube]

We are hoping to add more breeds in addition to more building interiors and a new adversary in the forest this month!

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!