https://youtu.be/7S-doGWQLOs

The game is really coming together, but we’ve still got a long to-do list. Some things on it are frustrating, like the occasional pauses and stutters you see in today’s video, and some of them are moments of delight, like the new Photo Mode that let’s you freeze the action and move the camera around to take the perfect screenshot of your gameplay. We created Photo Mode to help us take exciting promotional screenshots for our new, soon-to-be-launched WolfQuest.org website, but we like it so much that we’ll include it as a feature for players to use if they like. Check it out in the video!

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

___How much will WQ3 cost?
WolfQuest 3 will be a free update to players who own WolfQuest 2.7.  If you are buying WQ 3 for the first time, the cost will be more than the current game 2.7 (so it's cheaper to purchase it now and get WQ 3 as a free update). The Tower Fall expansion will be an in-game purchase (DLC).

___Will WQ3 be available on mobile?
WolfQuest is available for Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad, Android & Kindle. So yes, WolfQuest 3 will be available for mobile phones and tablets...at least some of them, and/or in some form. Bigger maps and more animals may be too much for mobile devices with limited RAM memory. We'll do our best, but some low-end mobile devices will not be powerful enough to run the game. We will keep WolfQuest 2.7 (the current game) available as well (for both computers and mobile).

Enter WolfQuest's April contest to win a free copy of WolfQuest 2.7!

Four lucky winners can choose to get any version of the game (Mac/Windows, Android, iOS, Kindle).

Here's how to enter: https://www.wolfquest.org/bb/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=84835

Yellowstone has a host of hungry carnivores. Everybody wants a piece of the carcass!

https://youtu.be/AatLM1BkRRc

As if it wasn't hard enough taking down an elk to feed your family! Armed with fierce teeth, claws, or loads of patience, there are plenty of Yellowstone animals, big and small, waiting to take your meal. There's a reason why wolves wolf down their food!

While a wolf's biggest worry is other wolves, they never underestimate the dangers of North America's biggest predators: bears and cougars. Coyotes are always harassing and waiting to grab a share. And while smaller scavengers like eagles, foxes, and ravens aren't dangerous to grown wolves, they can easily gobble up your hard-earned kill.

Did we mention dangers to your pups? Most everyone is happy to take out the competition before their teeth get too big.

(Character artists: Steve Adamson, GIM Studio, and Ben Guerrero)

________________________

We are getting closer to releasing the first episode, Amethyst Mountain, for PC/Mac on Steam and itch.io, as Early Access. That will be followed by Slough Creek some months later, then followed by the mobile versions.

https://youtu.be/Mckcny6579s

A wolf lives — or dies —by its sense of smell, relying on it to find prey, whether still alive or already dead. We’ve shown the new scent system in previous devblogs, but in the past few months we’ve been overhauling that system to make it more performant (e.g. require less computing power). Our crack Unity developer Nick first tackled the floating scents and then, in March, dove in deep — a lot deeper than any of us expected — to improve the ground scents (the smelly tracks that animals leave as they move around). When playing the game, you first follow airborne scents until you find the ground scent-path that animal feet have left behind, and follow that until you encounter the animal itself. So, both airborne and ground scents are critical elements to make the game fun and playable.

However, having many thousands of these rendering at any given moment when on a scent trail (and especially when following a big herd) was having a serious performance impact, so Nick spent much of March engineering a new system to render these scent particles. What made the task so complicated is that the scents vary by color (indicating species) and alpha value, or transparency (indicating how long since the animal laid down the scent). These variations normally boost the number of draw calls (rendering hits to the graphics card) tremendously, but Nick used a new technique called GPU instancing which allows us to render many thousands of particles at minimal cost.

We think you are going to love the new and improved scent system! As always, thanks for your patience as we get closer to releasing the first episode, Amethyst Mountain, for PC/Mac on Steam and itch.io, as Early Access. That will be followed by Slough Creek some months later, followed by the mobile versions.

https://youtu.be/nLzjSa-hthY

Mark Twain once said, “If you don’t like the weather...just wait a few minutes.” Yellowstone weather can cover quite a range, often in the same day. Our challenge in WolfQuest is to create believable weather effects that make you feel like you are out in the elements (even though wolves don’t mind bad weather half as much as humans.)

We’re using a Unity plugin called Enviro to create all our sky and weather effects. It’s amazing how far this tech has come since we developed the original game. Enviro gives us tremendous power to create realistic lighting, clouds, precipitation, and more. In today’s video, I spend some time tweaking many variables that controls the specific effects in the game, from fog and atmospheric haze to rain and snow.

https://youtu.be/q5pwF3H9U2E
This week’s devblog is a variety pack of things we’ve been working on:

ELK HERD NAMES
A huge thank you to everyone who suggested names for the elk herds! We loved reading all your suggestions and appreciate the thoughtful comments (and sometimes humorous…e.g. hostile elf'‘s "the buck street boys") comments. In review, choosing a theme for elk herd names presented some challenges:

• There are 18+ herds just on the Amethyst map, so the theme needed a good variety of names.
  
• Names need to be short enough to fit in the GUI and each distinctive enough that you can read them at a glance and remember them.
  
• Since elk roam around quite a bit, place names wouldn’t be meaningful for long.
  
• Herd size and composition shifts over the seasons so herd names can’t meaningfully capture that info.
  
• As fun as it may sound, having the player name the herds in-game would get annoying – constantly interrupting your game to type in names (and we also imagine some…umm… inappropriate names).
  
• Most importantly, we do want names that fit our theme — the life and ecology of Yellowstone wolves.

So after much discussion, we decided to go with the popular suggestion of (drumroll….) Yellowstone vegetation names. Because:

• Elk love vegetation! They will be so pleased.
  
• There are lots and lots of kinds of plants in Yellowstone so we won’t run out of names.
  
• We can even vary the names thematically by map and season.
  
• Using plant names for elk herds best fits our theme — the life and ecology of Yellowstone wolves. And we love that players will get familiar with names of plants that grow in the park.

Amethyst Mountain elk herds will be named after bushes and grasses such as willow, gooseberry, ninebark, bitterbrush, sweetgrass, fescue, and pinegrass. Slough Creek and Tower Fall can include flowers in bloom.

We have now added the new elk herd names to WolfQuest 3: Anniversary Edition and, as we hoped, they really are helpful in tracking the various groups of elk, especially when scents mingle and the elk roam.

NEW MUSIC!
Today’s video features some of the new music by Ben Woolman, whose fingerstyle guitar playing builds on WolfQuest composer Tim Buzza’s themes. Ben worked with Tim on some tracks in the original Slough Creek soundtrack, and we’re delighted to have him back to create music for WolfQuest 3. Hear Ben’s other music at http://benwoolman.net/

NEW TREE!
Check out the new whitebark pine trees that we are adding to WolfQuest 3! These ghostly dead trees are remnants of a once thriving subalpine tree that have been decimated by a fungus and beetles.  See more work by talented 3D artist Toby Fredson at https://www.artstation.com/tobyfredson

It's time for WolfQuest's monthly contest to win a free copy of WolfQuest 2.7! Four lucky winners will receive a free copy of any version of the game (Mac/Windows, Android, iOS, Kindle).

Here's how to enter the contest: https://www.wolfquest.org/bb/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=84811

https://youtu.be/CuDFNmpPRiM

Everyone on the team has been so focused, working on various aspects of the game, that we haven’t actually played the game much in the past few weeks. So today, Tommi and I have each been playing through the Amethyst Mountain mission arc, looking for trouble. And we found plenty — not in the form of stranger wolves or grizzlies, but in various bugs and quirks and unexpected things that need tweaking, fixing, and polishing.

Today’s devblog is a condensed video of highlights from my playthrough, particularly the trial period with the mate, the questionably skilled Wapiti 3F. This took me a big chunk of my day because, as I played, I paused repeatedly to examine issues. I even got Tommi on Skype screen-sharing  a few times to figure out what was going on and I created a bunch of new bug tickets as well.

The game is finally far enough along that it is really fun to playtest, despite my irksome mate, that tenacious spike, and the other unexpected details.  Hopefully these issues also have some amusement value, so enjoy!

We really are getting closer to releasing the first episode, Amethyst Mountain for PC/Mac on Steam and itch.io, as Early Access…but no date yet. That will be followed by Slough Creek some months later, then followed by the mobile versions. After that, we will resume development of the next episode, Tower Fall.

https://youtu.be/QZq6zc4b6hk

I’ve been working on the cliffs of Amethyst Mountain and Specimen Ridge for way too long, but they’re finally looking pretty good. So now it’s time to focus on how animals, specifically the player-wolf, interacts with them. Seems like a simple matter, right? Longtime readers know what’s coming next….. there are various complications in getting the wolf to behave naturalistically on and around rocks, mainly because we have several intersecting systems, particularly how the IK (inverse kinematics) system interacts with the rock forms. Also complicating matters is that a big rock is both an obstacle (wolves can’t go inside them) and a surface (wolves can walk on them), and how the wolf deals with the rock depends on specific relative angles to each other and the world in general. So we got some unexpected results as we refined the behavioral logic.

Along with this, we’ve added a sliding action on steep slopes, so wolves cannot walk up a cliff face — instead, they’ll slide down the slope until it’s more manageable. A simple feature, yet strangely enjoyable. And finally, this video reveals that in WolfQuest 3, you can indeed jump off a cliff to meet your fate. Kids, don’t try this at home!

Of course, all this talk of rocks and cliffs will remind you that the winner of our “Vote for a New Animal” contest last year was bighorn sheep! They will certainly appreciate the barriers to wolves that rocks and slopes provide, and will most likely eye you from above. Bighorns might not make it into early release but we haven’t forgotten about them!

https://youtu.be/PX55cEqfA4Y

As a central feature of Yellowstone’s Northern Range, the Lamar River is an important landmark for wolves, so we’re glad to finally include it in the Amethyst Mountain map. Today’s video looks at how we’re creating the river in Unity, using several new tools for Unity — River Auto Material and Lux Water — as well as good old-fashioned hand-carving. More remains to be done to this riparian stretch of the game map — adding more vegetation, rocks, and driftwood, but it’s coming along, and we think it’ll be an attractive place for an afternoon nap — as long as you can find a peaceful spot away from stranger wolves!


Got questions? Here are some answers!
* Yes, your wolf can drink (but no thirst meter)
* Other animals might get to drink too. But this is not that day.
* NEW! River current!
* No, adult wolves are strong swimmers so they can’t drown.
* No fish. Maybe beavers. Some live in riverbank dens. We’ll see.  Otters are the dream.
* Wet fur effects might be added someday.
* The Lamar River might freeze over in deep winter. We hope to add a deep winter map someday!