WolfQuest: Anniversary Edition News

UPDATE: And it's released!

_________

Like elk hunts, game launches are not 100% successful on the first try. Thank you all for your patience and support as we persevere. We are working on it!

We have released the game on itch.io so if you purchased it there originally, it'll be available on your download page. Instructions here: https://support.wolfquest.org/help/get-wolfquest-anniversary-edition

Still working to get it released on Steam. Very sorry for the delay!

https://youtu.be/wLAY8q2c-yw

WolfQuest: Anniversary Edition will offer three difficulty levels, which we hope will make the game fun and engaging for a wide range of players. Today we look at how we’re crafting the hardest difficulty level. Most of this work has been done by our summer intern George, who is a college student (majoring in computer science), competitive Counterstrike player, and coincidentally, my son. So he’s how he tackled it:

When I first started designing the Accurate difficulty, I had two primary goals. The first was to create a difficulty that increased the challenge of the game, without turning hunts into lengthy, boring slugging matches where player skill is secondary to simple time spent on the hunt. The second was to try and replicate the success rates of real wolves in the wild.

The core changes that make Accurate different from other difficulties reside in the multipliers Player Damage Dealt and Player Damage Taken. As a reference point, for the Challenging difficulty, the default difficulty of the game, these numbers are both set at 1. On Accurate, Player Damage Dealt is set to 1.5, meaning the player deals one and a half times as much damage to prey, and Player Damage Taken is set to 2.7, meaning the player takes more than two and a half times as much damage from prey on Accurate than on Challenging.

Those are some big changes, and they make Accurate feel like a very different game. Hunts tend to be shorter but require more caution and active thought. Even the most skilled players won’t succeed on every hunt. Knowing when to give up the chase is crucial, otherwise your wolf might not survive the harsh wilderness of Yellowstone.

Accurate is not for the faint of heart and is by no means necessary to enjoy WolfQuest: Anniversary Edition to the fullest. The game is designed to be engaging and well-rounded on Challenging, which offers a test of skill without being overly punishing, and there will also be an Easy difficulty, for those who want a more relaxed experience. But for the bravest souls, Accurate offers our most realistic, most difficult representation of the life of a wild wolf.

_______________
We are releasing the first episode, Amethyst Mountain for PC/Mac on Steam and itch.io, as Early Access on July 25. That will be followed by multiplayer and Slough Creek some months later, then followed by the mobile versions. We’ll then resume development of the next episode, Tower Fall.

WolfQuest 3 will be a free update to players who own WolfQuest 2.7.

https://youtu.be/dMHqkrI-24U

There are so many elements to make a vast open-world environment believable — from the ground textures to the vegetation to lighting, fog, and weather — but one of the most important is shadows. But shadows are very expensive (that’s game dev term for “slows the game down”), so we’re always trying to use the least shadows we can. In a big map like Amethyst Mountain, that means we can only have shadows extending out 50-150m from the player — beyond that, nothing casts a shadow, which often isn’t even visible or noticeable, but with long views it becomes quite apparent and detracts significantly from realism.

In the old game, we could “bake” shadows into the textures, which is great for both performance and visual quality — but that only works when the sun does not move. With our dynamic day/night and weather systems, it’s not an option. I’ve been looking for more than two years for a way to have distant shadow but had given up hope until last week I began talking to Georges Pax, a graphics and rendering wizard who developed the special type of shadows we use for grass and rocks in the game. He’d been working on an amazing new technique that draws shadows out to the horizon — and no more “expensive” than what we already are using for grass shadows! So today’s video looks at how his innovative technique makes WolfQuest’s recreation of Yellowstone look even better.

If you’re curious to learn more about his work, you can find him on the Unity forum, where his username is tatoforever.

_________

We are releasing the first episode, Amethyst Mountain for PC/Mac on Steam and itch.io, as Early Access on July 25. That will be followed by multiplayer and Slough Creek some months later, then followed by the mobile versions. We’ll then resume development of the next episode, Tower Fall.

WolfQuest 3 will be a free update to players who own WolfQuest 2.7.

https://youtu.be/fQcbkopST48

We’re seeing more questions from players about what kind of computer hardware is necessary to run WolfQuest: Anniversary Edition. Given how much bigger and better this game is compared to the old version, that’s a good question — so that’s what we’ll look at in today’s devblog post.

First, I’ll note that general game code is quite well optimized and runs on a wide range of CPUs (Central Processing Unit — the “brain” of the computer that runs the game code), so we don’t have any worries about that. It’s the game graphics that pose the bigger burden on a typical computer. Computers use a graphics card (or GPU: Graphics Processing Unit) to draw (or “render”) the visuals on your monitor. Many modern computer games require a dedicated graphics card — a special microprocessor that is fully responsible for that task — rather than the more basic GPU which is built into the computer. Today’s video looks at WolfQuest’s graphics, particularly why grass and trees are so demanding on a computer, and what we’re doing to make the game run on as many computers as possible.

How do you know what graphics card your computer has? Follow the instructions here:
https://www.wikihow.com/Find-Out-What-Graphics-Card-You-Have

And here is the bar chart of common graphics cards shown in the video:
https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/common_gpus.html

What about mobile? We’ll do our best — stay tuned!

_________

We are releasing the first episode, Amethyst Mountain for PC/Mac on Steam and itch.io, as Early Access on July 25. That will be followed by multiplayer and Slough Creek some months later, then followed by the mobile versions. We’ll then resume development of the next episode, Tower Fall.

WolfQuest 3 will be a free update to players who own WolfQuest 2.7.