WolfQuest: Anniversary Edition News

The main mission for the upcoming multiplayer mode of WolfQuest: Anniversary Edition will be territorial acquisition and maintenance, and we’ve been working on tuning the territory mechanics in recent weeks. Today we look at how players can claim territory, through marking (raised leg urination) and creating more established scent posts, as well as howling, hunting, and winning fights with stranger wolves. This has taken numerous rounds of tweaking and testing as we adapt the system that Tommi refined for the upcoming Slough Creek episode for the Amethyst map, where players don’t have a litter of pups to care for, and so can devote more time to their territories. We couldn’t do it without our dedicated corps of private beta testers, who are working hard to help us get the game ready for a public beta in the not-too-distant-future.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

WolfQuest player communities are found on many social media platforms including Discord:
https://discord.gg/Gbcd3x3

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/WolfQuestGame

Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/app/926990

Twitter: https://twitter.com/WolfQuestGame

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/WolfQuestGame/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wolfquestgame/
______________
We have released the first episode of WolfQuest 3: Anniversary Edition (Amethyst Mountain) for PC/Mac on Steam and itch.io, as Early Access. While in Early Access, we are updating the game frequently with more features, multiplayer, and ultimately the Slough Creek episode with pups. The mobile version will come after the game is completed on PC/Mac platforms. We’ll then resume development of the next episode, Tower Fall (DLC).

Multiplayer is shaping up quite nicely now, though we still have plenty on our to-do list. Some things are new and unique to multiplayer, while others involve changes to core game elements that will appear in both single and multiplayer. Check out today's devblog video:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

This video looks at three such things:

* Balancing the Elk Hunt: We have been revising the elk hunt to be a suitable challenge when 4-8 wolves are attacking an elk. Our first round of difficulty modifiers had little effect, since the elk was unable to break free when so many wolves were biting it simultaneously. So we dug in deeper and have made several more changes: increasing the elk’s flight speed so wolves can’t catch up so quickly, adding a new behavior so elk can better break free of multiple attackers and sprint away with a burst of extra speed, and adjusting several speed and distance variables to help the elk stay in a cohesive herd. These all are working quite nicely together now in our testing.

* Pack Territory Colors: The new Territory mode in multiplayer means that each pack’s color on the World Map needs to be easily distinguishable from the others. It turns out that some of the current colors look quite similar for people with some types of colorblindness. So, with the help of a handy colorblindness shader, I experimented until I found a new set of colors that works for everyone.

* Refining the Wolf Fights: A number of bugs had been keeping us from seeing a full-on fight with a stranger wolf pack — until this week. It really is something! But having 17 wolves all going at each other is a chaotic mess even in Yellowstone, and this presents quite a challenge for multiplayer syncing code. We hope to refine that further before release and then keep looking at ways to improve it for the long run.

Testing multiplayer takes time but our dedicated beta testers make it very enjoyable. It’s exhilarating to run with the pack and see everything (well, almost everything) working together after so many months of hard work by everyone on our team. Playing with others brings so much more to the game.  My favorite moment this week is captured in today’s video: the astonishment of our group when coming upon almost a dozen stranger wolves, each of whom was ready to rumble.

______________
We have released the first episode of WolfQuest 3: Anniversary Edition (Amethyst Mountain) for PC/Mac on Steam and itch.io, as Early Access. While in Early Access, we are updating the game frequently with more features, multiplayer, and ultimately the Slough Creek episode with pups. The mobile version will come after the game is completed on PC/Mac platforms. We’ll then resume development of the next episode, Tower Fall (DLC).

Most game bugs are not particularly entertaining, but we happened to see several that were lately, so today we'll share them for your amusement. These represent several different kinds of bugs:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

1) User Error (or PIBKAC*): The titular bug today's video occurred after Steve (our 3D wolf artist) made a few changes to the wolf models, so I then had to swap in the updated model. Tommi (our lead Unity developer) had made this task quick and easy -- except for the IK stuff, which requires that we manually assign bones in the rig to several IK slots. Not hard to do, but I made a couple mistakes and voila, the bug-eyed wolf.

2) Data Disagreement: The undead hare bug occurred when a bug caused the host and clients (the other players in the game) to have different values for the hare's health, so when a client player killed the hare, it still had a bit of health in the host's game. Since the host runs the game simulation, Mikko (our multiplayer developer) found that "the hare was alive but in the wolf's mouth, while its AI on the client was trying to run away but couldn't, and the remote animal movement code got very confused."

3) Chokepoint: The Elk bug occured during a multiplayer stress test to see how spawning a large number of animals affects game performance. When we had over 150 animals spawned, another player joined the game, so the host had to send them an enormous amount of scent-track data. And that caused the game memory to run out of buffer space, which then threw an error, so, according to Mikko, "proper cleanup was not done and the data was left in the send queue. Then every time the host wanted to send updates, it first tried to re-send the already queued data, which kept failing so it couldn't actually send anything." And that left all the NPC animals high and dry, awaiting instructions.

4) And finally, the Death Trap bug isn't really a bug -- everything is working properly -- but it highlighted a problem that needed some attention: the bison only occasionally moved around while grazing, which wasn't a problem normally, but it becomes a problem if you happen to die right behind a bison. Fortunately, it's easily addressed by making the bison move more often when grazing (though you'll still want to be careful about when your click Revive.)

These and many other bugs have been identified during many, many hours of playtesting by George and Noah (our QA team), along with our dedicated group of private beta testers. We've fixed dozens of those bugs and, while we have many more on the to-do list, we're definitely making great progress with multiplayer. We don't have a date for multiplayer public beta testing and release, but we expect both before the summer is over.

* PIBKAC: Oldschool tech support speak for "Problem is between keyboard and chair."

______________
We have released the first episode of WolfQuest 3: Anniversary Edition (Amethyst Mountain) for PC/Mac on Steam and itch.io, as Early Access. While in Early Access, we are updating the game frequently with more features, multiplayer, and ultimately the Slough Creek episode with pups. The mobile version will come after the game is completed on PC/Mac platforms. We’ll then resume development of the next episode, Tower Fall (DLC).

One of the tough design issues with multiplayer mode in WolfQuest: Anniversary Edition has been sleeping, health recharge, and time acceleration. Those three elements are bound together in the single-player game, and we’ve pondered over the past few years how to make them work when there are multiple players, each of whom might have different ideas about when to sleep. Such disagreements are inevitable, but they could seriously detract from players’ experience in the game. A few weeks ago we dove back into the issue and, after some intensive brainstorming, we finally figured out a solution: the essential thing is to keep everyone’s sleep cycles in sync. Then there may be still be some disagreement about exactly when to sleep, but everyone’s *need* to sleep will be the same. So as players join the game, their Sleep meter will be synced with that of the host, whether it’s high or low or somewhere in between.

But that only solves half the problem. The other half is that sleep is necessary to restore your health. What if your health drops quite low and yet the pack does not need to sleep for many hours. For that, we created a new “Quick Heal” function — a special, if not quite magical, power for wolves in multiplayer. When using Quick Heal, wolves draw on their food reserves to boost their health. It only boosts health to 40%, to minimize potential abuse — just enough to get you back on your feet and through the rest of the day with your pack.

Watch the video for more!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Both these are coming to multiplayer….soon! How soon? We have not set a release date, but it’s a lot closer than it was a year ago!

______________
We have released the first episode of WolfQuest 3: Anniversary Edition (Amethyst Mountain) for PC/Mac on Steam and itch.io, as Early Access. While in Early Access, we are updating the game frequently with more features, multiplayer, and ultimately the Slough Creek episode with pups. The mobile version will come after the game is completed on PC/Mac platforms. We’ll then resume development of the next episode, Tower Fall (DLC).

It's time for the monthly contest to win a free copy of WolfQuest! Lucky winners will receive a free copy of WolfQuest 2.7 (and PC/Mac users will also get WolfQuest: Anniversary Edition Early Access for PC and Mac)! Winners can choose to get any version of the game (Mac/Windows, Android, iOS, Kindle). Or you can also choose the WolfQuest Soundtrack and Music Extras if you already own the game.

[h2]This Month's Contest[/h2]
Email your username and your answer to the question: "What are three interesting facts about wolves?" to [email protected]

[h2]Deadline[/h2]
All entries must be received by midnight (Eastern Daylight Time) on Monday, June 29, 2020.

[h2]Random Drawing[/h2]
Winners are selected randomly from complete entries. Please enter only once in each monthly contest. Each complete entry will be assigned a number. We will then use a random-number generator to generate three numbers. The entries bearing those numbers will each win a free copy of the game.