Latest on Project DogWalk
#6 Vertical Slice
- March 3rd, 2025
Pre-production is over! We have assembled a "Vertical Slice" to give a glimpse at what the game will roughly look and feel like. For the remaining 2 months of production it's now all about feature & art completion, gameplay iteration and polish.
Since the Vertical Slice milestone was approaching quickly, I continued to work on set dressing and bringing in all the new cool assets Beau was working on. I reshuffled the entire set based on a new design Julien turned over and changed the way the ground geometry is created. Also, new collision objects were made and I scattered grass, reeds and bushes around.
This week I focused on bug fixing and implementing of animations for the vertical slice. The action system for the two characters is also redone to allow more interactions between characters and props.
It was a bit of a messy week with lots of technical issues, but some texturing happened and I added a quick photogrammetry workflow to my tool belt. Also I started on storyboarding the intro animation, did a design pass on the start menu, worked on the menu fonts and researched what kind of visual material we need for a steam and itch.io release!
This week was mostly focusing on finalizing assets or changing them to fit with the overall design better.
We have been working hard getting the list of animation cycles done and where needed, tweaked the cycles to flow better between states. Since we've been aiming for the vertical slice, the target for animation was to get as much in there available for Julien to implement into Godot.
This week we continued with the core animation and also started to do some COOP animations between the characters
Finished a lot of updates for the various character and prop rigs.
#5 Going Procedural
- Feb. 24th, 2025
Assets and animations are finished for a vertical slice of the game. Set creation, animations and our pipeline is helping us to make more things procedural, for Blender and in-game.
Julien gave me the task of set dressing the level for the "Vertical Slice". To enable that I created some setups for making paths, the deep snow patches and of course the creek! I started placing the assets in the level, mainly around the hub area. On the side I refined the texturing of the willow tree, the creek bridge and blocked out the camping table.
This week was mostly refining but also optimizing existing environment assets and props, thanks to detailed notes by Vivien and the team.
More implementation of animations, a full animation tree and procedural animations. More features to vet the animations and if they work well in the game.
This week I transferred a lot of the animations that I did on the layout rigs to the final rigs, also I created a bunch of new animations
I did more pipeline development, as well as making sure that the pipeline we are now actively using is being used properly and doesn't break. Besides that I dove a bit into the game code to optimize the leash collision algorithm.
This week the last missing textures for the game got painted and scanned, almost everything needed for the vertical slice is designed and notes were prepared to finalize assets. I also had some spare time to do FX design and additional Pinda expressions for the animators!
#4 Scattering Trees & Hills
- Feb. 17th, 2025
More animations, more art assets and more of all these things in the game! We're a couple weeks away from having a "Vertical Slice" put together to better test and judge the game as a whole.
This week Chocomel was unwrapped for texturing, I worked on the (UV) textures of the creek bridge and willow tree assets. The willow tree model also received some tweaks to allow the kid to climb into it.
We decided to adjust and export the assets differently without sharpness data. Instead we used support loops and weighted normals to have more artistic control over the edge sharpness. This week was mostly adjusting existing assets and re-exporting. Some additions this week are the birch outgrowths to be placed around birch trees and around the new stone walls, that are created to block a section of the level off.
Some concepting for the snowman assets, some reviewing and drawovers, some fx concepting and then time was already up! A good chunk of my week was spent on contibuting to the Art Style Blog post - go check it out :)
Way more progress was made on the rough blocking of the world level and one of the areas of the game. Apart from that more animations and art assets are being used in the game.
Worked on the final rigs for Pinda (kid) and Chocomel (dog) and the dog leash handle.
#3 Assembling the Game
- Feb. 10th, 2025
With a firs version of our pipeline ready for testing, we are finally assembling art assets into the engine. The level for the vertical slice is being prepared for more testing and filling the gaps to go into production.
Apart from overseeing more work, all the logic for the core navigational challenges is done and ready for more testing. With the levels set up, I started assembling the actual game and making it ready for gameplay testing.
This week I worked on finalizing the topology of the main characters so they can be unwrapped for texture painting. I also managed to sneak in some time for modeling some roots and blocked out the creek bridge.
This week I finally finished setting up our fundamental asset pipeline, allowing us to nest assets into each other in Blender to work on sets and assets separately and exporting everything seamlessly into Godot in a procedural way. I also spent some initial time on exploring our options for shading and communicating with the Developers about solutions to the shortcomings we run into.
A lot of layout rigging updates for the two main characters, the camera, snowman and props. And one simple animation test where the Pinda character puts a tennis ball on the snowman.
Lots of helping out on the characters, lots of painting textures for the characters, lots of reviewing assets, lots of painting textures for the assets, some design for assets - almost running out of designing to do and textures to paint! Kitsu will be spilling over if we don't slow the hell down! ! ! YAY. :)
