Latest on Project DogWalk

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.

I mainly focused on bug fixes small improvements this week. There was also quite a bit of playtesting and overseeing the vast amount of work from the team :D

This week was all about blocking out and animating the outro. On top of that we discovered a couple of animations had weird "scaling" artifacts going on. After some investigation we realized that Godot has a hard time dealing with bones that stretch (which is normal to use for a typical IK setup). After a couple of experiments with mixed results, I ended up updating the problematic IK with a "two bone" solution that replace the stretch bone with two bones at each end that track towards each other.

I worked on detailing the set dressing in the Hub area, added path crossing textures and new sign assets.

This week I mostly focused on refined a bit more the intro animation, is a big chunk of animation so is taking a bit longer to finish

This week I was concepting the sign board and the map for the game and provided button/click prompt animations we can use to clue the player into digging the kid out for example :) I also improved Pinda's tear graphics so they are more chonky and readable in the game!

This week I finished the intro animation on Pinda, and started back on the treat animation

My goal for this week was to settle on the textures for the various paths around the world map. I also worked on adding detail to the goat shed in the fence area and managed to make the frozen pond more interesting.

This week was a bit split between project Dogwalk and preparing for the Playgrounds Event in Eindhoven. I took some work from Pablo, adding animation cycles for Chocomel for the introduction.

This week I finally implemented some of the things that make our little project feel more like a game. That's a user interface for menus and saving/loading. besides that, this week was the `playgrounds - the art department` event, where I gave a presentation, so I spent some time on preparing and then being there for the event.

I got to focus a bit more time on bug-fixing and refactors. Especially in preparation for play-testing the game at the Playgrounds event in Eindhoven. A couple of new features found their way into the game that will be essential for work on the following week.

This week there were some rigging tweaks and new rigs for props. Also polished the animations for Pinda attaching the tennis ball and the shovel to the snowman. Furthermore I did a rough mockup pass of the outro.

Somehow it was a productive week, despite the extra preparations that went into the Playgrounds Festival in Eindhoven! I got to do lots of menu mockups, already using our custom font (made in Fontra) and animated some emotes for further testing and implementation + some stray leftover concepting work.