Running of the Wolves - Phase 1


Finally! Only a few weeks late.

First off

Apologies, the download is now a Google Drive. Itch only supports uploads of up to 1Gb. I can speak to them to get extra space allocated, but it's christmas, so unlikely to get any movement on that for a few weeks. The first build that went out to Patreon was 1.5Gb, but I've managed to optimise it down to 1.17Gb which isn't great, but it is significantly better than before. I think I might be able to get it below the 1Gb mark with a few more days work on it, but I think it's time to be released.

The motherfuckin' updates

  • Levels added
    • Pineridge
    • Release
    • Forest Worldmap
    • Open Forest
    • Forest Shop
    • Music added to all levels
    • Physics props in Pineridge
    • Dungeon stylised/updated
  • Quest System added
    • 5 quests added
  • NPCs
    • NPCs in Pineridge and Shop can now be interacted with properly.
    • 20 Characters with unique dialog
    • Several characters with branching and context specific dialog
    • NPCs can wander around the town
  • Enemies
    • Female enemies chase and alert male enemies
    • All enemies now howl when they spot the player (even the badgers. I'm working on that)
    • Analyse functionality now restricted to range defined by game difficulty
    • Badgers
  • Game Shit
    • Save/Load system - Only 1 save file. When you die, you lose the file and have to start again.
    • Game Modes added (choose when registering for Event with Chobb - currently only supports Casual)
    • Game Difficulty - Set on Character building screen
  • Other Stuff
    • Camera no longer drops when crouching
    • Camera position moved further bck
    • When completing Forest World, you now return to Pineridge. Head past barn to re-randomise levels and play again.
    • Animations now unlock. Every time you encounter a new animation, it unlocks and can be viewed in the barn in Pineridge
    • Rocks added to possible item spawns
    • Added guaranteed item spawns. 1 in Pineridge.
    • Fixed falling deaths

Yeah, thats a lot of stuff. The main thing is we now have an actual gameplay loop that can be repeated. There's still work to do in most of the levels. Pineridge is maybe 30% completed. The Release, Shop and Worldmap are fairly close to complete, they might need some tweaks. The dungeon will be getting some updates, as will the open forest.

Updates to levels

First up, the dungeons.

I've rebuilt how the tiles spawn in the dungeon, so tilesets can be swapped out depending on what world is currently being played. This ties in to plans for adding more props and details into the dungeons. Right now they're just rooms and corridors. I'd like to make it so there's also more interesting rooms in there, as well as several levels of dungeon to give some verticality. In the end though, that's just set-dressing and down the priority list. I would 100% like to improve them and make them more interesting, immersive and fun to explore. Also traps.

Next, the Open Forest.

That damn forest needs a devlog of its own, and I'll probably do one soon, unless I already have. The last few weeks have been a blur. I've optimised it a load, but there are still areas that experience lag. Unfortunately, it's in areas of dense foliage which a forest needs, so I'm chipping away at that one. The upside is that it is playable.

Eventually, I want props and areas of interest added in there as well. So there might be a windmill in a clearing, or a ruin or something to climb and explore. Again, possibilities, but constrained by a rapid development cycle.

The Bugs

Not gonna lie, there's bugs in here. I've playtested each time I've compiled and squashed the ones I can, but there's a few persistent ones that are being difficult. They're not gamebreakers though, so I'm content to make people aware they exist and promise to keep working on fixing them.

  • Opening inventory removes clothing - This is the biggest bug, and the one that's been annoying me for weeks. When you open the inventory, it should get the current clothes you are wearing and only change the items you change. It doesn't load the clothing initially, so it removes all the clothes in the character save. However it doesn't remove them visually. You'll only see it when you change level or reload. The way to get around it is to reselect all your clothing each time you go into the inventory. It's annoying, but you usually only go in there to change clothes anyway, so it's not too bad...
  • Exploded clothes don't remove immediately - This one is tricky. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and I'm still trying to figure out what causes it. When clothing loses the last of it's damage, it should explode and be removed. Sometimes it doesn't, but in the game logic, it has gone. Usually when this happens, it'll still appear in the inventory as a broken piece of clothing until you try to equip it and it explodes a final time then vanishes. It's a mystery!
  • Female fox skins have mismatched heads - another mysterious one, cos every other skin works. Female canids have a range of species they can be. Eventually this will tie into body morphs to be more accurate to that species. Fox is the only one it does this to.
  • Dialog bunches up if you loop - Chobb is the main culprit. Once you register for the event, it takes you back to the root dialog, but the players answers get narrower each loop.
  • Players mouth doesn't move during blowjobs / Male badgers mouth opens the wrong way - Yet another annoying but kinda funny bug. All the skeletal meshes show the animation, it just doesn't happen ingame, still figuring out why!

What's next?

Phase 2. We'll be back to the 3 subphases approach again, each in theory taking 3 weeks.

  • Phase 2a - Mechanics
    • Struggle and sex interactivity with mouse movements
    • Combat and fighting mechanics
    • Proper inventory integration
    • Currency
    • Persistent wolves generated at character creation
    • Female enemy takedowns
    • Canid body morphs to allow additional species
  • Phase 2b - Characters
    • Struggle ability for enemies when takedown happens to them
    • Enemies can join in if they catch you while "recovering"
    • Improve enemy AI (been looking at using locations within a cone from enemy location instead of random location within circle)
    • Allow enemies to decide between capture/sex and attack
    • Improve wolf and player movement - vaulting, climbing, swimming, sliding, etc.
    • 2 new enemies
  • Phase 2c - Gameplay
    • Add shop functionality
    • Game prologue/cutscenes
    • Dungeon improvements
    • Male player character
    • Customisable hotbar
    • NPC Tutorial and training - instead of the current text option
    • Forest Boss

And finally

So, that's it. Phase 1 is probably done. I'm anticipating a few weeks of bugfixes, depending on what people find. Some stuff will probably get skipped unless it's major bugs. Animations are probably getting an overhaul in phase 2, so that's not a major worry right now.

The plan for now though is to take a little time off to work on some other stuff, probably returning to Phase 2 mid January.  The main reason for the break is to figure out how to implement some of the upcoming features. There's some tools I want to investigate for animation creation, and I need to research a more procedural style of animation ingame. As an example, at the moment the animations are baked in, so if you hit a wolf with a rock, he'll stagger straight through anything in his way. Adopting an IK based animation rig could in theory allow him to react to obstacles. It could also allow him to capture a player and find a wall to bend her over...

As usual, the game relies on the players feedback to improve and especially to find the bugs I've missed. The easiest way is by pausing ingame and using the Report a Bug button. Failing that, all the links are below:

Bugtracker | DiscordPatreon

Files

Running Of The Wolves -old
External
Dec 25, 2022

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Comments

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How many enemies are there in this game?

At the moment there are Wolves and badgers in male and female flavours. Only the male ones are a hazard so far. Though they all share the same animation sets.

The game is in the process of getting an update to rewrite, optimise and improve pretty much everything currently in there, and once that's done, the second phase of development should bring in another 2 enemy types as well as a boss. The plan is to add enemy types as development progresses.

I've avoided adding more enemies as I want to overhaul how animations work, and any new enemies or animations would be work that just gets thrown away as soon as the animation system is updated. After that, I intend to go nuts and start adding both.

is it good that the game will get a better optimization? 

Yeah, there's some bits that run a little slow, and the countryside levels get laggy in places.

This is my first game, and over the last 8 months of working on it, I've found a lot of stuff on how games should be built. The update that's being worked on is pretty much taking all the individual bits that have been put together without knowledge of how it all works and integrating them into something that should run a lot smoother, hopefully with a smaller filesize and make it easier for future updates to be slotted in. Plus a lot of the individual mechanics that have been added were done without knowledge of similar better systems. 

For example all the animations in the game were done by hand, which means the characters animations lets them go through solid objects. Since then I've learned about control rigs and IK systems in Unreal which would allow characters to actually interact with the ground as they walk on it or use scenery for interactions. 

I've been learning as I go, and unfortunately part of the learning process is discovering that the things you did right at the start were not what you need going forward. Rather than continuing to cobble parts together, the rewrite should make future stuff way easier to implement.

There's a full list of Phases with features that I'm planning on adding here: Trello

it might be my shitty laptop but whenever i try to load into the 1st selectable level, the game crashes

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Was the selectable level Dungeon, Open Forest or Shop? The one that always gave problems was the Open Forest because of the world partitioning loading level chunks too slowly. The open forest is a huge level, so it places the player start in a random location then adds walls, exit, enemies and bushes in that play area, but if the level chunks haven't loaded in yet, it would crash it. That's my best guess...

If it is the Open Forest, I might need to add a bit of a delay until the chunks have loaded first for slower machines. I get a similar thing in-editor when testing on the worldmap going in to Open Forest. I assumed it was a quirk in the editor, as it never showed up for me in the packaged game, but in retrospect it's looking likely that in the editor is more representative of a slower machine. So in theory, if I can fix this so it works in the editor, it should work for you once compiled again.

I'll have a look into that, and sorry it didn't work.

sent in a screenshot of the error screen that pops up

Ah, that's interesting.

It looks like it could be a few possible causes:

  • Out of date drivers - The game is running on UE5.1 which is fairly new, so it could mean it's needing an update that hasn't gone out automatically to your machine for the graphics card.
  • Antivirus - Some antivirus software can conflict with parts of Unreal Engines compiled code, so it might be getting flagged as something dodgy. Try disabling antivirus, play the game and see if it still crashes, then re-enable it because you need antivirus, but if the game worked right, you might need to add an exception for it.
  • Laptop Battery - If the battery is low, it might go into a power saving mode which could reduce the efficiency of the GPU. Try plugging it in and see if it works while connected to a power socket. If that still doesn't do it, wait until full charge and try again.
  • Hardware issues - most likely would be RAM. Try using Windows Memory Diagnostics tool to check all your RAM is working right. I mean, even if something else already fixed it, this ones a good idea to do occasionally anyway!

I'd work down that list from top to bottom. I'm not sure what it could register in antivirus as if it's getting caught there. I've seen UnrealEngine, UE5, and ShooterGame as possible things it could pick up.

But, going on the original report, I've also been working on improving loading. It seems on slower computers, when a landscape is used, it tries to place the player before the landscape can load. This explanation could get boring, so you may want to skip this bit...

Both OpenForest and the World Map use a landscape, but slightly differently. Worldmap *should* be able to load before the world spawns in, but sometimes it doesn't. However the player should always be stood on a Pad which loads instantly, so you won't fall through the map before the landscape loads.

The OpenForest loads in about 256 chunks of landscape. It should start with the one the player is spawning on first, which it does. The problem then is that after the player is place, the game randomises where the spawnpoint really is then moves the player. On slower machines, it looks like it tries to spawn into landscape that has yet to load, so finding nothing, it randomises spawn again and again until it crashes on an infinite loop. The thing is the landscape does spawn in, but it retries about 150,000 times within a couple of seconds, so it's over so fast the landscape still hasn't loaded in.

I've modified the way it now works by adding loading screens to all levels. It also imposes a mandatory 2 second delay before starting to randomise spawn location, and each time it retries it waits 0.2 of a second first. In testing with a slower machine it takes on average 10 loops before it finds a loaded chunk to spawn in. If it hits 150 loops without finding anywhere to spawn, it will just default back to where the spawn started before trying to randomise, so it should now always find a location.

The main thing though is all levels now have a mandatory wait while the loading screen is showing to give things time to load, then removes the screen once everything has initialised. Hopefully that should fix the issues if the hardware/drivers stuff doesn't.

I'm working on a few other bugs and hope to get a patch out tomorrow.

I've updated the download link with a new version that includes loading screens. Hopefully that should fix your issues. If it doesn't, let me know and I'll see what else I can do.

Thanks!

thanks for all the hard work on the game so far, by the way. re-downloading now, will let you know how it goes

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Not sure why, but the download keeps failing :( I get as as far as the google download page and the download started up on my computer, only for it to fail and give me an error message about 1KB in. I have plenty of disc space so I don't think that's the issue...

Other than that, it's not giving me any information besides "error".

Is there something else I can try? :(
Also thank you for all of your hard work in this update!!! I'm so excited to play!

(+1)

It's just google drive because of the filesize. Sometimes it gets flaky, or it might not like the amount of traffic. Hard to be sure.

Possibly your browse might not like drive, which sometimes happens, or drive might have some outages. Hard to say. Try this direct link: Drive Direct LInk

If it's still not working, sometimes trying to download in incognito mode. I've seen downloads work on one browser but not another as well.

The direct link worked, thank you so much !! ♥