Latest on Project DogWalk

Adding some small last features and elements. Apart from that mostly bug fixes and preparing for the early access launch of the game.

This week I finished the final full version of the "petting" animation between Chocomel and Pinda. This features 10 distinct animations that are needed for the gameplay where the characters come together (from 3 different states) and enter a cute randomised petting session. For ease of viewing I combined them into one video with and added a version of Pinda alone and also a version that's 90 degrees rotated to demonstrate how it might look from a different angle.

This week we made a push for more recognizable landmarks in the game, so I did some design scribbles for that, painted some additional asset textures, helped with the "inner tree stumps" that show up when the trees fade away and probably annoyed people with deadline-anxiety-fuels nitpicks :D

This week I modeled additional assets that should help the player orient themselves in the world.

This week we were wrapping up the last challenge: the Pond Challenge. As Julien had implemented the core mechanics of this challenge, I was able to start making the animations for it. The main challenge was to get the cone and character in the right position for it to work properly in the game. There are still some tweaks and fixes to be done, but we're almost there :) .

There were mostly just lots of error fixes on my agenda. But apart from those, I modeled and rigged a fish asset for the pond. I also took Vivien's cardboard logo designs and turned them into a virtual rigged asset that can be put into the game.

This week I finished the "Pinda shovel pickup" animation. There was some fun bug hunting and bug fixing, of course. Then there was the big task of animating a multi-faceted "Pinda petting Chocomel" performance, which needs to feature multiple loopable segments but will also be triggered by two very different scenarios. This means there need to be alternative "ins" and "outs" of the performance, a fun task for next week!

this week was mostly polishing animations and creating small ones needed for the game

Illegal fish contributions were made and I started adjusting textures and adding some last missing ones like the shovel. AHH and the logo! I now have a companion logo next to my desk that wobbles in the radiator updraft - such is the delightful life of a temporary papercraftist.

I'm slowly switching gears to the next production, so I only did some geometry adjustments to the creek and the gate locking mechanism (apart from little texturing work here and there)

This week I finished the treat animation and we started to work on the gate challenge animations, in my case, i did the 2nd and 3rd spot, where Pinda is going to check if there is a way in the fence

This week was mostly all about the birds. The main constraint was to keep the location contained so there are multiple "loopable" animations where the bird never moves from their spot. Then there's a couple of "strolling" ones where the bird moves a bit around (within a small radius) before returning to their starting spot. There's also ones that allow them to turn left or right 45°, to add more variety. Finally there's two animations where they fly off.

The ice movement is finally back and there's a first pass on the pond challenge to get an item off the ice.

This week we tackled the 'Gate challenge' in animation. This challenge consists of a couple of steps where separate animations were required to complete this part of the game. Once the player solved the gate challenge, he would be able to find the tennisball, this animation has also been updated accordingly and is ready for implementation. Next to that, smaller polish tasks to be completed.

This week for me was mainly about implementing more FX. I polished some of the existing ones a bit more and created new ones for environment interactions. Besides that I worked on the intro a bit to implement more of the animations coming in.

Lots of small random leftover tasks got tackled this week like cleaning up the emote animations, some concepting, some texturing, some messing with fx textures that finally made it into the game. I also reanimated the mouse cursor, but I have no footage of it, whoops! (I'm also starting on another ongoing project one day a week now so my DogWalk time is reduced from now on!)

This week I finished animating the Outro scene, addressing all notes and giving it a final polish pass. I also animated Pinda pulling on the dog leash. On the rigging side, I rigged the three bird characters, hopefully they will take flight soon.

This week I wrapped up the textures for Chocomel and Pinda! After that I explored some alternatives for the missing item iconography and messed around with the snow fx system, testing and providing some particle graphics for that.

My main goal for this week was updating the lighting. We wanted to get rid of SDFGI (which wasn't doing much anyway) to improve performance. I added many many more lights in the world environment to add highlights, more depth to shadows and individual areas of interest. I also detailed the set dressing in the south of the pond around the willow tree and the fence area.

This week, it was time to polish the assets texturing and adding normal maps to make the objects more tangible. Aside from this task I worked on set dressing the Clearing area and play-testing to see how the environment feels.

This week for me was focused on a mix of adding some of the more important initial FX and implementing the intro sequence, which nicely glues the gameplay to the main menu and also serves as a tutorial to introduce the player to the main game mechanics.

Another week of small fixes and implementing new animations. There was also finally some work on the "Gate Challenge" in the east of the level, as well as some improvements to Pindas logic.