Flock of Dogs
Co-Op Fest is Almost as Cool as the Festival Inside Flock of Dogs!
Happy Co-op Fest! I bet there's going to be some great games. I set out on this project in 2016, in part, beacuse I was mad there weren't more co-op games. Now there's a bunch, which...maybe means my game in particular hasn't done as well, but..I'm looking to forward to Co-Op Fest nonetheless.
While the title claims this is a "Major Update", I must confess this it isn't very spectacular. I've added a "flight report card" after every flight (aka run) and there's now a poster in the treehouse that displays your top 10 "highest flights" (aka high scores). There's a few bug fixes (but plenty of bugs left), aaand you can now name the whale.
While I was hoping to do more in anticipation for Steam's Co-op Fest that starts tomorrow (the 10th), I've really lost motivation the last few weeks after I traveled to attended my grandma's funeral. Very strange the perspective death provides. It's also very strange how, whether I had sold 2 million copies of Flock of Dogs or 2, my family and my cousins would treat me and love me just the same. I think my loss of motivation was impending, regardless of the traveling. A pretty good chance this is the last FoD update.
Anyway, not that anyone's asked, and all my friends and game dev buddies have heard me drone on and on about this, but I thought I'd just like to post a long, boring public documentation of some of my bad business decisions with this game..........
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If you weren't following the development of Flock of Dogs for the last few years, then maybe you're not aware that it was in Early Access and it was free for almost 2 years. My plan was for the base game to provide the Minigame Park and the Friend Pass for free and then charge a "premium" amount (like $10) for the campaign in the form of a DLC. In other words, FoD was never a typical F2P game (you know, with lots of microtransactions). In Early Access over the last 2 years, about 60,000 people did claim a free copy of Flock of Dogs. Of those, about 15,000 actually ever installed the game. Of course, they weren't able to actually play the roguelike portion and if you think the tutorial is confusing now, it was much less clear then.
If I could do it over again, I would never have done free Early Access. It may sound obvious, but one of the few metrics Valve has openly stated they use to determine a game's early viability is how much revenue it is generating. Since I didn't want to do microtransactions and the game was free, I generated no revenue.
Not only that, but since the game was free, I figure some of those 60,000 people maybe would have wishlisted the game, then maybe bought it launch, rather than "add to library" and forget about it. Who knows.
When I launched, I only had 2.5k wishlists after having a Steam page up for 4+ years, so I pretty much already knew the game wasn't going to do well. Some might say the problem was the game. Hard to disagree. I have learned from reading different resources about marketing on Steam that really your best bet for success is to have at least 10k wishlists from within 6 months or a year of putting your page up. Then you have a chance of a lot of people, all at once, buying your game. Then you have a chance of Steam featuring your game on its New & Trending list and then, if it catches on with the wider Steam audience, you can do quite well.
Anyway, I got scared that my sales model with a free base game + paid DLC for the campaign would be confusing and ineffective. I switched to a paid product. The Valve team warned me this would reset my 97 reviews with a Mostly Positive rating to 0 reviews. They also said those 60,000 people would immediately be granted a full icense of the game. I bit the bullet and converted to paid product. At this point in my journey, I don't know if that was a bad choice, but pretty much the game couldn't have had a much worse launch, so maybe it was.
I also released in the middle of the holiday season, just 2 days before Winter Fest. I knew this was all ill-advised, but I had promised myself I'd get the game out in 2024.
I'm proud that I've released a game on Steam and I think it the game does offer something special.
It came as a surprise that the 60,000 people who suddenly now own a free copy of the game didn't get a notification email when I released into 1.0, and that really upset me. Like, I know those people are unlikey to just donate me money or something, and I know that any reviews they write now won't show up, because they "received the product for free", but damn man.
If they thought Flock of Dogs looked interesting, I'd love for them to actually see how it ended up.
I worked very hard on the Festival at the end of the game and it does bum me out that a lot of people who were interested in the game will probably never see it. Maybe this message will reach some of them/you, but maybe this message is too long.
Also, the decision to add network multiplayer was bad. It's a great feature, but it cost me probably 2+ years of development time and then after working on it for a year, Valve released "Remote Play Together" as a free feature. I remember when I read about that, I just laid down on the floor for like half an hour.
TL; DR READ IT. Hehehe.
Yours truly,
-Max
P.S. I will be applying for jobs, priotizing game dev and I will be working on some other game ideas, and I will be continuing my Georgist and sortition activism. You know, to save the world. If you don't know what either Georgism or sortition is and you're curious, or you do know what they are and you think they're seriously flawed, send me a message!
Flopdate #2!
Anyway, hope you had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
- Fixed the submission feedback form losing focus, if you're playing with a controller
- Fixed playing with multiple controllers on the Steam Deck
Please submit logs or message me whenever you have map desyncs! (Or any bugs at all, ofc) One of the things I didn't realize when I decided to add online multiplayer when making this game was how hard it is to recreate network bugs, even if you know they exist.
-Max
Flopdate Dec 26, 2024
Anyway, here's a list of stuff I did.
- Added "Flight Report" score card, so each run now gets a score, i don't track your high scores yet tho
- Ramed 'Carnivore' to 'Monstervore', bc it's more funner
- Fixed several issues with final boss!
- Put sundial and ffwd button at festival to make it clearer how to fast forward time
- Fixed dogs leveling up every time they eat a bone after getting 1 Big Bone
- Fixed ui issue on treehouse ladder
- Fixed visual issue with nighttime emotes
- Fixed issue with collecting coins during level transitions
- Tweaked generatoin amounts of flowers, hitchhikers, puppies
- Added "dirty whale" warning to help people understand why they move slow on whale
- Increased bosses' hps
- Fixed faucet-pups interaction
- Fixed mop-pup interaction
- Fixed mop-water bowl interaction
- Fixed duplicating returning small flowers to pool in final stage
- Fixed typos "Deliverty" and "Busness"
- Fixed day counter regression
- Fixed network issue with disbanding group
- Fixed network loading issue with photonnetworktime wrappinrg weirdly
- Fixed network bug with "Cancel Flight" aka "Return to Treehouse"
Note: many other known issues, but if you have any kind of desync or get errors, please press F9 and submit feedback. If you crash, it's more effort, but you can access your previous log through the menus and send that to me, but...just press F9 and tell me what you were last doing :)
Yours truly,
Max
Fixed Chasing The Vile Intruders
-Max
Flock of Dogs 1.0 Release
It's a Tuesday afternoon. Look up and you might see a flying dog or three.
-Max
Flock Launch Delayed
You can now play through the game, reach the Festival, and experience something very much close to what I envisioned. And it's all available to anyone who owns the games or buys it now in Early Access. So you can go play now! You can reach the Festival!
However, the frequency of bugs is just too high for me to feel comfortable releasing into 1.0. Just this morning I ran into a bug that would just end the game very early on. I fixed (I think, people have tested it and it hasn't reocurred).
I've been working a long time on this game many years and it's very close, but I hate how inconsistent the experience is and it seems like I could get a lot done in the next few days or a week.
If you're interested in group playtests, please join the Discord.
Thanks for your understanding.
-Max
Narwhal's Favor
The narwhal horn let's you blow up moons. Spoiler alert.
I made a bunch of icons for them. My favorite is the "fat and happy" whale. I've said that if anyone wants to get a tattoo of it, I'd pay.
-Max
Flock of Dogs 1.0 Launches December 10th (like...98.5% sure)
So.
DECEMBER 10TH....probably maybe most likely will be release day.
I've been in quiet crunch mode for weeks.
I've decided to convert the game to $9.99 with no DLC.
This means all of you who had the free game in your librabry, you now own the full game!
Please consider either gifting a friend a copy, buying the hat DLC, or buying some Flock of Dogs soap.
https://shopofflockofdogs.bigcartel.com/product/floral-hand-body-wash-for-the-flock
So, new build is now live and the demo is synced to it. You should be able to play with a friend who doesn't own the game, if they download the friend version (the demo) from the Steam page. Please please let me know if you try this and it doesn't work.
I didn't mention this last time, but I shrunk the game install size down from 4 gb to just over 2 gb. Hurray. If I knew what I was doing, I'm sure the game could be 1 gb. Although, more music and art will be added soon.
The day/night cycle is back in the game. Took some inspiration from Majora's Mask for the clock UI elements. This did involve a bunch of tweaks to the game for lighting purposes. I made it quite visible at night on easy and normal, but on hard you're going to have to make sure you have items/equipment that provides lighting. Sadly, camping and dream world won't make it in the 1.0 release.
The whale now fires fruit as cannonballs, instead of iron balls. And so the whale is now healed by pluckable flowers, rather than eating fruit. This was a systems change I had long been thinking about. Players had repeatedly asked if they can pick the flowers and this was a fitting purpose fdor them. The whale already sleeps in flower beds, or in the giant flower cocoons. And getting players to recognize the crates of cannonballs was next to impossible! So now the trees are filled with fruit and the whale can be readily supplied with ammo.
Can't remember if dwarfs are even in the current main branch of Flock of Dogs? Idk, but dwarfs are a big deal. They now make little squeaks. They're the little critters you're mostly trying to help get to the festival. They now give you a purple star when you pick 'em up. This is used to unlock the minigames in the park.
A bunch of minor visual updates that maybe all togteher will have a positive effect.
Wrote some goofy poems that I put in the game.
Not going to bother listing all the fixes, in the hundreds since I last updated you. It's remarkable to me how easily I've become the low communication developer I never thought I would be.
I think, in part, it's because I'm embarrassed by how long this whole shebang has taken, the feeling that no one really cares that much, and then feeling judgmental about devs who talk about their interpersonal struggles in public a lot. Welp, there you go. My hypocrisy is laid bare. Anyway, it really would like for this game to do well so I can justify spending more time working on it.
Yours truly,
Max
The Flight to the Festival DLC Now Available in a Store Near You
That's because I consider the Flight to the Festival DLC to really be the main game in Flock of Dogs. It is the co-op, roguelike experience I've been working for 7 years. The Minigame Park and the (all new) beginning area are still free. I did this whole Steam thing in a weird way, I know. Also, the game is still in Early Access, so the DLC is still basically also Early Access.
What's new/mostly new/mostly finished are:
- New biomes
- New dog tricks
- New tool upgrades
- New bosses
- New clouds
- New beginning area/tutorial (I don't like calling it a "tutorial")
- New difficulty levels
- New poems
It Comes With 1 Friend Slot
Purchase of the Flight to the Festival DLC includes 1 Friend Slot. With it, you can have 1 friend join you at any time. They just need to download the free base game. For additional Friend Slots, my plan had been to create another DLC called "Friend Slot" and then you could buy up to 6 copies of it, but Valve said that's not feasible. So I guess I'd have to create 6 DLCs titled Friend Slot 1, 2, 3...6. Or setup in-app purchases? Idk. On the to do list.
Situation Report (Er..."Flight Status?")
It's kinda embarrassing that it's taking me so long to get here, and I'm still not done, but...oh well. I have also just about finished a launch trailer, but I'm not launching, so you don't get to see it now. Heheh. I have spent a lot of time fixing bugs and working on the netcode, so, as always, if you find any bugs or have any feedback, please let me know.
-Max
P.S. Just want to say I'm very happy with the new clouds. I'm happy about the other things too, but I just didn't think the background clouds would add that much, but boy oh boy, I love 'em.
Weekly (Sorta) Update: Flashy Minimap, Literally
So, sure enough, although I never promised anything, my weekly build update streak ended. This is partly due to the fact I’ve been working on a new trailer and partly my failure as a human being.
Also, this update isn’t terribly exciting either. I’ve shown my game at a few, small more in-person events in the last couple weeks and still felt like I needed to make some changes the beginning sequence to help players understand. I refuse to just put giant text chunks and instead, each time I see someone struggle in a way I don’t want them to struggle, I make inch by inch “concessions” in my “tutorial.”
Anyway, build 0.4.155 is now available.
- Minimap now flashes the first time you get on the whale’s saddle
- New approach for dog damage that I may revert: when they lose their last heart, they buck their riders and auto fly back to whale and cannot be shot down out of the sky and are invincible, unless the red ring count down to 0 and there was no nest available/they couldn’t reach it in time.
- "no hearts" and "no kiting yet" better layout
- New saddle wording on prep list
- Summon whale hint added at fork
- Initializing reticle aim upon equipping tool properly
- Increased item mass and drag on ground
- Increased stick trigger size to large circle
- A bunch of custom behaviors for making_trailer purposes, but should be quarantined behind the making_trailer check
- Solar panel absorption visuals
- Fixed ladder facing direction bug
- Summoned dogs try to pick nest right away now
- Battery visuals made
- Suns at the treehouse finally
- Buried key
- Whale parking added at fork