Saga Social Interactions
While Raul, Andrei, Mikko, and I were getting the persistent pack feature ready to release, Tommi kept his focus on some other interesting aspects of the Saga. For the past month he's been working on social interactions within the player's pack. Today's devblog looks at a few of these features.
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First: If you're out on an excursion and some yearlings or other packmates stayed back at the homesite to look after the pups, your packmates will now greet you upon your return, running up to you and wagging their tails enthusiastically. It's very sweet.
A bigger rework involves social interactions in daily life. With so many wolves in the pack now, we needed more complex and interesting dynamics amongst them. So Tommi reworked the communication and interactions system, using dominance/submissive behavior logic to control how a wolf will respond to a packmate's emote. Whenever one wolf emotes to another, the latter wolf considers several things before responding:
1) What signal(s) it's responding to. The same signal can have many alternative responses -- most obviously the Aggression signal can lead to the "Aggression" branch or the "Conflict Dissipation" branch.
2) Whether the wolf is feeling dominant or submissive towards the wolf they're responding to. This is primarily based on pack role (breeder, subordinate adult, yearling, pup), using personality as a tie breaker. A submissive wolf is more likely to pick the "Conflict Dissipation" option above, but lower "ranked" wolves do sometimes ignore their rank and get "uppity".
3) Whether the wolf is fond of the wolf they're responding to. Fondness tends to lead to more favorable / forgiving responses. The Fondness system (originally created for multiplayer only) now acts in single-player as well. Wolves with high fondness for each other are "best friends" and will prefer to go on excursions together.
Because most emotes send multiple signals and most signals have multiple responses, this new system creates varied and unpredictable interactions that you can you can interpret and use in interesting ways in your game-playing and role-playing.
We've made lots of other progress with the Saga that we will be sharing in the new year. The Saga is still deep in development...but we're gonna get there! Stay tuned for updates.
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The WolfQuest saga will continue! Stay tuned for more news in upcoming devblogs about it and other new features!
Once the game is completed on PC/Mac, we will consider porting the game to other platforms.
We do not announce specific release dates. We will release them when they are ready.