Flock of Dogs
Watermelon Tree(?) Maybe
I'm working on a new trailer for the campaign for Flock of Dogs, so that doesn't fit into a feature/bug list, but here's the other stuff I did:
- Pumpkin patch started
- Melon made
- spig bug wings and improved line work
- thinner slide
- Regression grabbing double mops fixed
- ForkTetro0 removed when coming back from fork to the grove
- Level design redo at the fork (again again!)
- Fixed lingering Show Hints cc for whale pilot
- DashedLines permanently on now
- Fixed no null check for nest dog
- Pit always tries to summon old Flock
- Better arrow nocking
- Put balloon ring on festival
- Preventing CATboxes from appearing when block buffet ends
- Fixed "Injured" appearing on touch and also changed wording to "No Hearts"
- "No Kiting Allowed" pops up at grove now
midweek build (I introduced some pretty silly issues and pushed a build a few days after last Friday to fix them):
- Improved Flock Manual layout/visuals
- Fixed getting on ladder from dogback
- Regression with collision turned off on Fork
- Adjusted area transitioners around Rossmoor levels
- Preventing landing inside tree colliders with dogs
- Can now grab multiple copies of walking mops on Fork
I hope that the next week I can have my trailer done, but the music will be delayed, so not sure when they will be finished.
-Max
P.S. It's 10 pm. I'm dangerously close to missing my Friday deadline for new builds, but I have succeeded! See you next week.
Some quick fixes
Weekly Update: Digitally, Manually Made Manual
Alright, so, you'd be surprised, but people have, at times, been confused about how to play Flock of Dogs. So I created a Flock Manual and made it accessible from the menu at any time. I like it. Fun to draw. I also played a lot of StarCraft: BW and the alpha for Stormgate this week. Sorry not sorry.
- New Flock Manual in menu
- Restructured the Fork area yet again
- Fixed some Build-A-Pup 3000 sounds playing at wrong time
- Whale parking lot at Rossmoor Park
- Plank Bridges are back!
- Fixed issue with dead BlobWebs
- Fixed leaky faucet
- Fixed BlueBirther animation
- Fixed BlueBirther loot spread
- Fixed an issue with SwitchPro controller, but maybe there's still an issue?
- Fixed issue with SkyTrack editing tools throwing a million warnings
-Max
A Week of Mostly Fixes
Build 0.4.143 is now available on the public branch. Kinda a boring week.
- Fixed generalization of birther, rockden, thornyden hp
- Fixed synincg DogHearts count animation state
- Fixed joining players not disabling floaties of already playing players
- Fixed jetengine CAT preventing whale lift off (sooo ironic hahaha)
- Fixed backing out of gavel menu with mouse
- Fixed faucet blocking input and droplets turning on when spouting
- Fixed null ref error in solarstation topdown/profile view
- Fixed EarEel dying RPC
- Warnings and errors will now toss damage nums of "!!!"
- Wrapped some other warnings
- Hiding whale shadow when landing in cocoon
- Slightly better whale HUD visuals
- Fixed overriding cached preset keyboard maps
- Fixed clouds around treehouse with too much water
- Workaround for dogs dashing into giants at treehouse and breaking them
- Fixed popup controls menu highlighting not sticking on options highlighted
- Fixed resetting custom bindings at title menu
- Fixed remapping aiming with keyboard input visual bug
- Fixed regression with faucet
- Increased cloud fluff value
- Fixed indicator canvas player sprite stretching
- Fixed peachland dirt color
- Fixed rejoining after retreating not remembering player prefs
- Fixed some visibility with slides/whale in general when landing/lifting
- Improved vacuum particle lines to blue when its suctioning water
- Fixed some sorting issues with trove pile and some CATs
- Fixed vacuumed clouds still being visible
- Implemented grabbing items out of trove and spouting
- Made basic peach vines trap
Yeah, not much to say. I'm probably going to be recording more footage for a new trailer soon. As always, join the Discord (https://discord.com/invite/fYZFNTB) if you'd like to help playtest or have any feedback.
-Max
Hotfix for Actually Including CATs in the Trader's Wares
I didn't update the trader to sell the new (C)etacean (AT)tachments like the turbine, pencils, vacuum, faucet.
Also fixed an issue with the "Retreat to Fork" option where everyone but the host would get dropped.
Fixed a text wrapping issue.
Defined a previously undefined color palette.
The CAT System
- Cannons save and load correctly with CAT system
- ToolRack tools no longer lost
- FestivalFlyer improved
- JetEngineCATBox improved
- Maybe fixed prep list
- Some levelloading issues maybe fixed, but untested
- Better treehouse island fencing
- Made CloudVacuum CAT that eats clouds for water
- Made Faucet CAT that lets you turn on/off water flow
- Water numbers pop up in specific locations not just the middle of the whale
- Made Pencils CAT that acts barbed defenses mounted on the whale
- Made Turbine CAT that, you know, straps a jet engine to the whale's back
- Fixed some visual issues with the the flower cocoon, but still needs help
- Replaced treehouse fence!
- Made more peach islands
- Some better dev console stuff
- Wild whale generatrion
- HoppingOff forces player to abandon stat
- Solar panel integrated as SolarStationCAT
- Changed tail saddle behavior slightly as a CAT
- Fixed whale inertia problem (whale physics was changing when certain CATs were installed)
- Created some generic CAT ropes
- Fixed flower cocoon withering animation
- Fixed lawnmower shadow
- Better flipper ropes
- Floaties preference saved
So, yes, Flock of Dogs now has CATs. Ahahah.
:)
-Max
And We’ll All Float On, Okaaay
Updates!
Version 0.4.130:
- Floaties animations done!
- “Difficulty” menu option added, with limited capacity
- Minimap icons added in Blue Blobs Land
- Won’t get stuck using ToolRack from dogback anymore
- CarrierAttachment(CAT) boxes replacing the old attachment system
- Cannons now attached to whale through CAT box system
- Fixed whale reins flailing when transitioning levels
- Cloud colors are now biome specific
- New idle animations on players (very subtle, probably not worth the time heh)
- Restructured Minigame Park (brought minigames closer together, shrunk LazyRiver)
- Fixed pup null ref on Build-A-Pup 3000
- Fixed BlueBirther pulsing animation
- Improved “how to fire cannons” tips
- Shelves can now be installed on either flipper
- Whale sinking now brings the group back to the Fork instead of forcing everyone back to title screen
- Can build nests midair now
- Can swipe the water bowl with your mop now
Beta:
- Created placeholder Festival with locked gate
- Defined a purple biome
- Created placeholder DesertOasis
Very happy to finally put floaties in the game. It's always been painful to me when I’ve watched kids play and their little 3 yo sibling was just kinda dragging them down. Now, the question is how easily will players figure out how to use floaties? I think I need to smooth that process.
I appreciate those who have submitted feedback with F9 (or clicking the little box). And, as always, if you want to playtest the beta or find people to play with, join the Discord: https://discord.com/invite/fYZFNTB
-Max
Moonbones for the Masses
It’s been a while, so I’m pretty excited/nervous to finally update the public build and share all the things I’ve been working on.
As for other interesting news, I went to GDC and saw someone wearing a Flock of Dogs shirt! Then I came home and got COVID, then I broke my ankle playing soccer and had to have surgery. I would say those things delayed me a bit, but only slightly.
(As I type this, I’m headed to physical therapy, got new running shoes, and am expected to return to soccer in about a month, so I’m in a good mood.)
Here’s a recap of the features added since February 15th:
- Moonbones
- Reworked the tutorial/treehouse area/fork area
- Dog breeds have different starting stats now
- Holding down input no longer required on menu, if only 1 local player
- Support for controllers without triggers
- And a “simple aim” option, if you don’t have two thumbsticks
- Minigame Park has some picnic tables (they kinda act like maps)
- Minigame Park has some new minimap icons
- Warp pipes in the Open Skies
- Blue Blobs Land (unofficial name) now comes after Rossmoor (unofficial name)
- Constructable/repairable nests (highly controversial!)
- Boxing arm attachment
- Bow and silverwarrow
- Hatman now wears many hats
- Hotdogs!
- Better shadows!
- Better mopping!
- Slightly better caves
- The Bolf (unofficial name)
- Purple goo
- The Seblobba (unofficial name)
- The Foot Blob (unofficial name)
- The Blob Web (unofficial name)
- The Bullet Grid (unofficial name)
- Spike rain, geyser, fan bullet obstacles made (unofficial names)
- Sockman kinda works (unofficial name)
- Better summoning stone ritual visuals
- Better menu visuals
- A graphics menu!!!
- Reworked the photobooth minigame
- Redid whale controls and created whale dashboard UI
- UI numbers pop up to show damage, gaining/losing water, healing whale etc
- ToolRack with grabby hand
- Saving your hat preference 🙂
- “Villages” (very basic area that are between biomes along the Air River)
- LootPot to eat up your loot and spit back money at “villages”
- Dogs ascension (still haven’t finished Dog Heaven yet)
- Much improved whale-getting-dirty visuals
- A ton of redone lineart to more to have more consistent/higher resolution
Also, a monstrous amount of my time has been fixing network bugs. I know you’re all clamoring to see the 300+ commit logs from the past 7 months detailing this work, but that’s a lot of copy/pasting. You’ll just have to go without.
Anyway! Today we go from version 0.4.3 to 0.4.125. Pretty exciting stuff.
Thanks for sticking around. The dogs continue to fly higher and higher. And a huge thanks to Scrubbles, my chief playtester and #1 Twitch fan.
-Max
P.S. If you want to ask questions about all those bug fixes, playtest on the beta branch, or talk about Georgism, please join the Talk of Flock of Dogs Discord: https://discord.com/invite/fYZFNTB
Belated Valentine's Day Update
Many fixes. Network stuff, UI stuff, gameplay, etc. Added a controls menu and an in-game platform I call the "input switcheroo" to view controls and rebind controls, if you're using a keyboard. You can now start straight away at the Minigame Park, the Fork, or the Treehouse, which is cool.
The big news is that you can now also go beyond the gate, into the Air River, and play a demo of the first two biomes.
And the Flight to the Festival DLC page is now up on Steam.
-Max
P.S. Alright, so of course, many things are unfinished, so I won’t even bother listing those. I plan to release an official FoD Development Sky Map (aka road map) in my next update.
I will mention some significant known issues though:
- If you venture beyond the gate, sometimes, after completing the two demo stages, some clients will freeze at a black screen. Sometimes, everyone freeze. Sometimes, the game recovers if one person force quits the game.
- If a dog is flying back to the whale, it can go through walls and a player that joins might spawn on that dog and thus be out of bounds. You can drop out from your PopUp menu.
- Coins are not synced for joining players
- When the whale is landing, other players’ position might flicker a bit
- Sometimes, small tetris pieces are unbreakable/only appear for some clients
- Wingless dogs don’t take off when reaching an island border
- Kites destroy frame rate
- Moons spawn on top of each other
- Mop lady does nothing
- Long neck man does very little, it’s a semi secret, but there’s hardly anyway for you to figure it out atm
- Lawn mower is out of control
- (Throwing items is now done with mouse click or right trigger, not exactly an ‘issue’)
- And many more!
Some of the fixes in the past 7 weeks:
- Showing cursor when game menu opened when 0 players and hiding cursor when
- SpigQueen won't spawn key if gate is open
- Fixed Build-A-Pup being used by mouseless keyboard player glyphs
- Fixed BAP allowing you to make see-through dog
- Fixed BAP t9 clickableness
- Fixed searching for room name T9 input
- Adjusted menu options fill speed
- Added more instructions near treehouse
- Added controls display pressure plate in-game (with keyboard rebinding access)
- Added controls display in menu
- Fixed drifting gamepad input
- Fixed issues with treehouse bedroom
- Improved latency compensation for dogs, monsters, items
- Fixed a sandstorm issue
- You can now kick players out of your room
- Fixed unbreakable giant tetris blocks (but still tiny ones sometimes spawn)
- A few dog behaviors added, like follow the leader, meander, sniff & poop
- Networked the Flower Powers menu, but most Flower Powers not yet implemented
- Fixed some network race conditions in level transitions
- Regression fixed with dogs circling
- Regression fixed with Flower Cocoons
- Fixed saving/loading preferred/customized dogs
- Regression fixed for climbing ladders
- Fixed issues with whale’s belly
- Regression fixed for items disappearing on flipper shelf
- Fixed handling dog landing when transitioning between levels
- Fixed Zzz lingering by where whale was sleeping
- Fixed rebinding keys to already bound keys
- Fixed regression for dog starting to follow another dog when it’s the ‘pup’ in the BAP
- Fixed visuals for UI during night
- Fixed regression with the summoning pedestal and the rocks not being activateable sometimes
- Thorny vines on islands no longer affect flying dogs
- Improved UI flow for players who move with arrows
- Fixed whale summoning chess pieces and not just flock
- Removed System.Diagnostics.Process.Start calls and replaced where possible with Application.OpenURL
- Fixed Sternhalma (aka Chinese Checkers) array error
- Fixed a 2-players-1-keyboard issue
- Stopped every cloud being a rain cloud at the Fork
- Replaced treehouse island fencing
Alright, listen, these are only some of the commits going back to Jan 11. There’s about 3 more weeks to go through and I’m not sure this is interesting to anybody. If you want to hear about more things that I fixed/messed up and then fixed, ask and I will tell ya.
I never intended to go this long between updates. Sorry. This was a significant one, because it involved updating Photon and Rewired, as well as letting players spawn directly at the minigames or at the Fork, which meant letting them spawn without the whale, which meant tons of things that just assumed the whale was there were no longer valid. Then also letting players past the gate and through two levels also meant a lot more work.
If this proves pretty stable though, fundamentally, everything added should be fairly incremental. I make no promises about the timing of the next update, however.
3rd Week EA: All I Want For Christmas is Bug Reports
Santa's brought me only bugs, which I love, because I eat them alive. Also, you can now consistently, successfully kick people out of your game. The menus are prepped for future Friend Slotting. I've done away with the thorny brambles blocking the air layer. This always seemed weird to me, but I wanted some method of trapping the dogs in the treehouse area until they meet the whale. So I've reworked the giant tetris blocks a bit so they're damageable even by slow whale rammings.
You can access emotes with 1 or with the DPad now. They're somewhat limited, but lemme know if there's some emotion you just must convey.
Man, UI tweaking is so fiddly and takes so long. I'll just mention though that it's so nice that I no longer really clench up in fear that my game will break when I'm playing online with a friend and we're transitioning from are to area. So that's some progress.
Keep submitting feedback from the in-game form and considering joining the Discord to really tell me about all your troubles.
-Max
Build Version 0.3.61 Patch notes:
- Cleared up some todo's
- Workaround for dead tiny tetro
- Fixed menu discord link
- Fixed menu dev note link from in-game
- Fixed double joining keyboard players
- Fixed persona rpc argument mismatch
- Fixed some photoner info menu stuff
- Got rid of the space key to submit feedback
- Friend Slot menu options added
- Menu UI improved overall
- Fixed editor logic for starting with better level settings
- Sped up camera
- Fill to click cornerui
- Fixed players not quitting teams when leaving dogpark
- Fixed emotes
- Fixed matching summoning rocks color to player colro change
- Fixed grasslands LMNO being assigned to wrong letter
- Fixed dark gavel menu
- Fixed rad on emote
- Fixed emote input toggling it
- Lance can hit kiting players again
- Mailbox will receive letter if visible for anyone
- Secret Debug menu works from main menu now
- Fixed unassigned air river audio group
- Fixed ring selector hand rotation
- Fixed syncing null collectibles meh
- Added a null quiver arrow check
- Raised ramming threshold
- Reworded TODO list hints
- Defaulting unknown glyphs to ps3+
- Thorny vines effector only affects carrier layer
- Added controls menu explanation for sharing keyboard
- Fixed another bug with sky racing syncing
- Forcing car warp to move transform not just rb
- Fixed inactive items not loading their position
- Fixed attackable dead dens
- Fixed dashed line at dog park
- Fixed some calling dogs issue with whale cries
- Added emoting
- Made thinking bubble menu ellpsising
- Fixed not syncing chess board when showing up at dogpark together
- Moving mouse's dots on the main menu
- Fixed whale crying when summoning dogs by treehouse only if there are dogs to summon
- Redid dogpark entrance