Lost Paws Blog — Dev

Hi everyone!

Today is the big day! The Lost Paws beta is now live. If you don't already own a copy of Lost Paws, you can access it by clicking on the playtest on the main Steam page. If you do own a copy of Lost Paws, you can access the beta by going to the game in your Library, right-clicking on the game name, and then going to Properties > Betas and entering the code: lostpawsbeta1224 and selecting it from the drop-down. We would love to hear your feedback on our playtest forums or Discord. Don't forget there is also the survey which you can fill out from the main menu! If you do, you will be entered into a giveaway to win a copy of Lost Paws to use as you please! Combined with our UI overhaul and graphics improvements, this is the best version of Lost Paws yet! As for what is in the beta......

The Beta Update

Government District

The most obvious addition to this beta is the new district we have dubbed the Government District. While still inside Doggo City, we wanted to make this place feel special and have a hard differentiation from the prior sections of Doggo City. The first element we focused on was the layout. The goal was to create a central area that served as an open hub to the rest of the district. The hub contains elements like the government city park, city hall, and the apartment entrance. It also contains the most important addition the Cat Trader. It also provides a convenient location to rest up, resupply, and plan between going into the various alleyways of the Government District. The alleyways are divided into north and south each having its own shopping square, places to loot, and special locations that can impact pricing for the Cat Trader each with their dangers. The only major outlier here is the Megsatore which is directly attached to the central hub.

The alleyways were designed to feel like dungeon runs when you go exploring for valuables to sell. In the park area, lower-value items and some resources are present with very few threats. As you go deeper into the alleyway system, more rewards become available at greater risk requiring the use of all the upgrades and storage the game now provides.

To give the district more flavor, we used a completely new set of buildings and props. Many offices and builds look sleek and official, contrasting the run-downness of many alleyways. In addition, we also felt it was important to create a whole new wave of crowd NPCs to make the transition to a more trading-focused district feel smoother. In total 15 new types of NPCs reside in the Government District.

Government Park Sample:

Shadow Cabal

The Shadow Cabal are the new enemies in town! These tough customers are responsible for a lot of the strange happenings in the city and hold the title of the hardest enemies in the game. Besides being more difficult to fight due to their increased attack power, health, and speed, they also function differently than any previous enemy. They cover each other in packs and can call for help from their squadmates and even other nearby squads if the fight takes too long. Initially, they are too tough to take down without equipment and will need to be avoided due to their anti-dog kit. But as you get more abilities and most importantly equipment, your dog will be able to take down even the best of them. When defeated, they may also drop valuable items.

Two types of Shadow Cabal units exist. The first is the Shadow Cabal Enforcer. This unit is a bruiser that uses a bat to incapacitate and capture dogs. They are tougher and relentlessly chase your dog down. The second unit is the Shadow Cabal Ranger. The Ranger uses a dart gun to take down dogs at a distance. They tend to hang back and retreat preferring shooting over melee but can defend themselves if your dog gets too close. Combined, they form formidable teams that will give even the bravest dog a hard time.

An encounter with the Shadow Cabal:

The Cat Trader

Now we get to the most important addition our good friend the Cat Trader! This shifty character will give your dog the means to survive the Shadow Cabal and thrive in the Government District. He is not interested in dollars or human currency but rather wants to trade in Kibble. All items in the game now hold a Kibble value and can be sold to the Cat Trader. Selling gives you Kibble to buy additional items from the Cat Trader that are either unique to him or provide better value than whatever you are holding on your dog. The Cat Trader's stock updates after several minutes. The prices fluctuate but you can keep track and get reminders of these changes in the Cat Trader Info panel. The Cat Trader also provides useful tips on changing the prices and what he likes. As you buy stuff from the Cat Trader, he will trust you more, and when enough trust is gained the next tier of times will unlock. Three tiers are planned, but for the beta, it is locked to just the first tier.

That being said, beware the Cat Trader isn't necessarily friendly. Depending on what you do you can increase the price based on your actions. For example, all items give you the option to haggle increasing or lowering the prices based on the outcome. If you win it will be discounted, but if you lose it will go up. You can modify the chances of what will happen by selling items like catnip, but it is a risk. It is always worth considering if your actions might have some sort of impact on the Cat Trader prices.

Speaking of, it is not always the best idea to sell items right away to the Cat Trader. Sometimes he buys them at a low price; other times it is much higher. It is valuable to wait and see if you feel like the deal is not worth it right now. You can always see the breakdown of why something is selling or being sold at its current price by hovering over the price text of the item. Naturally, you can always attempt to change the value by haggling, doing things the Cat Trader mentions, or selling certain items. Over-selling the same item too often can also cause the value of it to go down. By playing the market your dog can become the richest one that has ever lived!

As for what you can do with that Kibble, the Cat Trader sells many unique items the most important of which is new equipment. This equipment like the Viking Helmet will give you the edge in fighting against the Shadow Cabal and make it possible to engage them more directly. Combined with armor, fighting the Shadow Cabal switches from something to avoid to a viable way to make Kibble. In addition to equipment, the Cat Trader also sells high-value food that can satisfy your survival meters without taking many slots so you have more ability to loot. By playing with the market and getting the right items, your dog will be able to accomplish everything you want to do.

Sample of the Cat Trader peddling his wares:

The Apartment

With all these additions, where can your dog go get some rest? Well, now you can shut out all the dangers of the world by hanging out in your new apartment! You gain access to the apartment by working with Shibu in his new quest line. Shibu will give you a rundown of what is happening in the city and what to look out for. After doing a few tasks you will become the proud new owner of a brand new apartment.

This place is pretty important as it is where you will be able to store more loot for the future. As mentioned previously, prices fluctuate and danger abounds throughout the district. To prevent the worst from happening, your dog can store items here for safekeeping or just to hold them until it is a good time to sell. On top of that, no enemies can reach you here, and the apartment provides a few amenities to help keep you alive a little longer. In the future, we plan on adding a couple of new systems to the apartment. Chief among them includes customization and more you can do with Shibu including one surprise system we will reveal a little later. Combined with everything else it will truly serve as your dog's base of operations against the Shadow Cabal.

Sample Apartment Scene:

Thanks for reading! As a reminder, you can join the beta test on our Steam page or use the beta code: lostpawsbeta1224 to gain access to it if you already own the game. All of these changes result from the feedback and support we have received so far, and we are so grateful for every bit of it. The game is longer, more varied, and more streamlined than ever before. We hope you enjoy the experience and love to hear your thoughts about it. Thanks for your interest in the beta and see you all in the next one! 🐶

Hello Dog Lovers!

The Holiday is upon us, and so is the gift of discounts! Lost Paws is back on sale for 40% off! Now is the best time to pick up the game for yourself or someone you like. Explore the world of Lost Paws this festive time with Doggo! 🐕

We also bring news of our brand new update for the sale! In Lost Paws 0.6.8, you can find new audio improvements, a festive hat, and several quality-of-life changes. Let's have a look!

Audio Enhancements

One of the biggest changes we've been working on is how we've been handling sounds in the game. Sound transitions have been improved between music tracks, which is all thanks to our new jukebox system that now manages these things better internally. You can expect more soundtracks in the game as you explore brand-new areas. In addition, combat music will now also be handled more seamlessly due to the jukebox.

Thanks to the changes above, doggo can now enjoy the new music track we have for the districts of Doggo City. You can see a sample of our new song in the video below:

The last major change we made to the audio was to some of the grunts major NPCs made. We now have a larger variety of them added in, and just about every NPC has its own unique sound they make when doggo is around.

New Hat and Combat Improvements

While audio was a big focus of this update, we also added some more doggo winter goodness. For the cold times, we present to you our newest Wearable: The Santa Hat! This festive hat lets doggo be jolly all year round:

Doggo combat has also gotten an upgrade. Fighting as doggo is now more impactful thanks to a little bit of camera shake. You can check it out below:

We plan on adding even more to the combat in the next update and beyond. As always, if you have any suggestions, we'd be happy to hear them.

Quality of Life Changes

We also had additional bug fixes and improvements to the game:

• Updated tutorial to reflect new controls
• Improved car colliders to make them more accurate to the front of the car
• Fixed an item spawn bug in Doggo City
• Added a collider to the Billboard in town
• Fixed a bug involving incorrect Roll Over item textures

Thanks for reading the story! If you have any feedback, please feel free to join our discord! We plan to have another smaller update and additional information on the next big one out sometime early next year. Until then stay safe, Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and hope you all enjoy the new adventures doggo has to offer! See you all in the next one!

Hello Dog Lovers!

Our next big update is now out! For this update, you'll find new features like the wearables screen, new NPC characters, and more interactions with certain NPC types. Let's get into Doggo's makeover!

Equipment System

Doggo now has a new inventory! Well, not really, but he has more space to carry new swag. By pressing the "y" key by default or by pressing the "B" button on an Xbox controller, it will bring up this panel:

This panel is the equipment screen. From here, you can store hats, glasses, and even shoes! All these new cosmetic types are called Wearables and allow you to give your doggo a unique style. When you equip them, they will be assigned to the corresponding slot and visible on your doggo. You can click on the Wearable again to unequip it. These slots are totally separate from the main inventory, freeing you to explore your doggo's best style unhindered!

To complement this system, a dozen new Wearables have been sprinkled worldwide. They range from a shiny crown to a tail bow to some cool glasses. By putting your doggo's search skills to the max, you'll find all twelve new wearables giving you a wide range to customize your good boy! We plan to add more in future updates, so stay tuned for that!

New NPCs and Interactions

Doggo now has more people to terroize make friends with! Ten brand new characters now exist in-game. Six of them are in the crowds you can find around town, just waiting to get a face full of snout. The remaining 4 are a new group that has moved into the Trailer Park. You can find them lounging around there enjoying their little get-together.

But that is not all! A new personality system is now in the game for static (non-moving) NPCs you can find worldwide. They will react to doggo's presence and barking. When you get your doggo to bark, they will initially either show minor disapproval or even enjoy your doggo's antics. After a while, however, they will get annoyed and start to tell poor doggo off. If you hang around long enough, they might have a nasty suprised for you! Check it out to the nearest unwitting stationary citizen near you!

Other Changes/Additions

We also have done a few additional elements in this update:

• Optimization of NPC patterns: We have tuned the number of types of NPCs that spawn to increase the variety of characters in a given area.
• Ball interactions: Bonking the ball around can now knock down crowds (non-named characters). Give it a whirl to cause some chaos!
• Help page updates: The help page now reflects the new equipment system keys, including moving the world map to a new key mapping for the controller.
• Save/Load optimization: Saving and Loading should be more stable and handle more cases that could have created performance issues.
  
  

Thanks a bunch for reading! We hope to have another more minor update soon before returning to the bigger items. If you have the game, please consider leaving a review, as it helps out a ton! Thanks again for checking out the latest update, and see you in the next one!

Hello Dog Lovers!

Its time for another quick update on doggo operations! So for today we will be focusing on two things: changes to the road map and the first round of details on the next update.

Road Map Changes

The main changes to the Road Map can be found here. The main highlight is the change of the wearable system and various NPC improvements to be sooner. We still plan on doing more NPC work down the road. It will be a rolling means of improvements and of course we are interested in any suggestions all of you may have. As a result, we also had to move expanding the storyline missions and some of the RPG skill additions to early next year. We are doing this to enhance the core gameplay first before moving on and expanding with the current setup. By adding these systems, we hope to enhance what is already there to a higher level making a more solid foundation when we add additional elements to the game which will follow along from changes we are making now.

Update Details

As for the changes, we plan on adding the new wearables system and more NPCs with improved behavior along with various quality of life additions. While the details of these additions will be revealed in full when the update comes out, we will be releasing early details on our discord and plan on showing some of what we are working on in a livestream a few weeks from now. For the wearables, we plan on adding several more items spread throughout the world including new types such as sunglasses and even shoes. To accommodate this, we will be making a whole new system to handle wearables that is separate from the inventory allowing you to have maximum style! The NPCs being added are for the crowds to give more variety to the people in Beaver Town and the Trailer Park. We also plan on giving them more actions to do in response to your doggo antics. Lastly, we plan on doing a variety of small UI and combat adjustments to add some more flair to the game. We expect this update to be out the week of November 23rd.

Thanks for reading! We are super excited to create our first major Early Access update. If you want to put up suggestions for the next round of updates after this one, please feel free to post them in our forum and discord. Thanks for all the support and see you all in the next one!

Hello Dog Lovers!

The Roadmap is now available! We are hyped to show you all what the current plans are for Lost Paws and where we plan to take the game. As always, the Roadmap is a living plan that can be modified through your feedback!

Before going through the highlights of the Roadmap, we probably need to explain some of the assumptions. The first thing is the Roadmap will be updated on the regular for new additions we think we can fit in and of course bugs. Each point given are features we plan on adding with some measure of detail. The explicit details will be given in stories, posts, and discord when we get close to updates. The Roadmap has categories broken down by time with Near Term being the next 3 months, Mid Term being the first half of 2024, and Far Term being long range goals. Everything is modifiable and broad categories will be given specific points if feedback or bug reports warrant it. Finally, the best places to give us feedback would be our forums and our discord.

For the Near Term the goal is to make the game more robust and add more content to expand your doggo experience. The main goal is more RPG skills and the things needed to support that especially in-game achievements. We also wanted to expand the story to give you more doggo adventures. These stories likely will be involving the commercial district and the shops involved as Shibu continues to look for ways to help you. There will also be new places to explore as we open up more buildings and add a street or two to Doggo City. Lastly, we will be adding a new doggo (still deciding so feel free to let us know) and various quality of life adjustments.

Longer term plans are focused on finishing some of our larger scale systems and adding new ones. We want to finish the RPG skills naturally and would like to hear from all of you about what types of skills you might want to see. In addition, we want to add new storage options, advanced trading, crafting, and new NPC types both hostile and friendly to expand your human interaction options. We of course will also wrap up the main plotline and expand out the city. Beyond that the sky is the limit quite literally with new doggo powers, more locations around the world, customization options, and much much more!

For our next update, we will be focusing on various quality of life changes first and fixing the issues some of you have found while playing the game. After tightening up the experience, we will pick from the Near Term items to work on next. We will be posting smaller more frequent updates on our discord so join up there if you want to stay up to date with our latest efforts! Thanks for reading and thanks in advance for any feedback!

Hello dog lovers!

The big day is a week from now! Lost Paws well be releasing September 29th so mark your calendars for doggo antics. We are extremely grateful for the support from our community and are excited to to see what you all think when the game is out!

That all being said we do have out latest update out which will be the one before out release update! This one includes stuff like our new dog (yes we got another in there), two new locations, partial controller support, and several quality of life features.

New Doggo

We have added a third doggo and he is very friendly! The doggo is in the same general class of the other two which allowing you to do very similar actions. This doggo has slightly different physics reactions allowing for a variety of physical reactions that are slightly different from our original good boy. All of this gives you more options to be the kind of doggo you want!

What a handsome boy:

Look at him go:

We plan on adding more breeds after our early access release. Which ones we are still planning on but we hope to present some options for you all when we gear up for it.

New Locations

Two new locations now exist in the game. Both the Mansion and the City Park Apartment are now enterable locations in the game.

The City Park Apartment was added to punctuate the various building that are not enterable thanks to mean humans locking their doors. This place has a lobby and allows you to explore one of the apartment units. Hopefully, you won't run into any baddies in there. The apartment also features many new interactable elements like new bonkable waste bins, decorations, and drinkable fountains. Together it makes it a great stop for the discerning doggo looking for a place to rest from bustling city life.

Doggo is cozy here:

The Mansion is on the far side of town and is there to give a special location for a little world building. If you go in, you might find out where all those falling items are coming from. The mansion is a first class joint with all the luxuries you'd expect from big dinning tables to massive beds. The Mansion also has a special room with many things your doggo can play with. Peeing around in there to find out exactly what we mean.

Be a shame if these were peed on:

Partial Controller Support

This one is a little older but we finally got Partial Controller support approved on Steam! You will be able to run, jump, bonk, use skills, and use your inventory among all other important doggo actions in the game with use an Xbox or Xbox like controller. A few changes has to be made to accommodate the controller mainly with sounds and the UI. For the sounds things should be improved overall as they have been edited for more rapid and varied inputs. As for the UI, the menu's now all have a selection order which in in the main menu start by default. All other menus have it active based on type of device connected . In fact the menus and inventory change slightly in look to adjust for if a controller or keyboard and mouse are active giving you the best experience based on what kind of input device you have plugged in.

Dynamic Controller Help Screen:

Quality of life

A few new quality of life features were added as well including:

• RPG Skill Auto-assign
• Zone text notification
• Tutorial Activation prompt on start of new game
• Audio base volume adjusted
• Retuned graphics for better look and cleaner presentation
• Optimized camera to improve performance

Thanks for reading! We will be unveiling our current planned road map in the next story so we can get to the work of making one of the best dog games out there! If you liked what you read please consider wishlisting on Steam if you haven't already and joining our discord to let us know what you want to see in the future. Thanks again for reading and see you all in the next one!

Hello fellow Dog Lovers!

We wanted to start off this story by thanking everyone who has supported us this far. From our project announcement, to the conventions, to our beta tests; you've all been awesome with your support, and with your much needed feedback to make this game the best it can be! Your feedback and suggestions have allowed us to make more informed decisions and path a course for the future of Lost Paws. We want to share some of those decisions in this story, as well as what we've been working on and what we plan to do for the future, starting with the new Narrative Features.

The World and Mini-Maps

To start with, we have the new World Map. The World Map is a new panel you can toggle via the "M" key by default, which allows you to see a full screen global map. You can see your doggo represented by an arrow, points of interest represented by a question mark, dog pounds represented by a carrying cage, vets represented by a green cross, and main missions represented by a golden paw (more on that later). The map has all the features you may expect like the ability to zoom and scroll as well as dynamically update.

Sample of the world map at farthest zoom:

In addition, the Mini-Map is now on by default. It is synced with the World Map and will update as things change in the world and you explore. It also has all the icons there to help you locate important places nearby. You can toggle the Mini-Map with the "C" key by default.

The goal of these changes were to help with being able to plan in the game. By seeing various places to explore and where interesting things might be, you can utilize these features to help expose all the features Lost Paws has to offer. In our internal testing, it helped improve both the explorability of the game, as well as increased the playtimes with all the new places that seemed interesting to go to! But what actually makes these places worthwhile to begin with?

The Mission System

The Mission System is an unobtrusive attempt to provide a little direction as well as narrative into the game. The system has two parts to it, markers and prompts.

The markers are one of two kinds, either a point of interest or a mission marker. A point of interest is just a cool place that doggo can go to to find something interesting. At a minimum there will be treats that can be obtained some way, and that can go as high as some interesting challenge or a special item doggo can obtain. The other kind of marker is a mission marker. Mission markers are denoted by a gold paw and allow you to advance the main story. While there are instances of linearity for them, many of these missions can be completed in any order, allowing you to strategize how to survive as well as what missions to tackle when. After completing a mission or point of interest, the maps will update to reflect that.

The other part of the Mission System is prompts. Prompts come up on the left side of the screen when you're near a mission zone, which let's you know what needs to be done for the mission to be counted as complete. They are a dynamic system, so when the objective is completed a mission accomplished will appear and the prompt will go away.

Example of the Mission System in Action:

The system works side by side with the current design of the game. We do not want to railroad you too much or prevent you from exploring the way you want to. You can still wander as a doggo the way you want and survive in all the ways you previously could. The purpose of the Mission System is to provide that little extra oomph to help guide your adventures if you want additional goals, as well as give doggo more things to do in the world. It also allows us to add in one of the most requested features for the game, and that would be a story!

The Narrative

The narrative of Lost Paws starts with a car crash. Someone hits your human's car but you are able to get out of the car just in time. And so your adventure begins!

The narrative is all about you finding your missing human from your road trip. You will have to venture further into the world, explore, and survive to eventually reunite with your lost human. The Mission System is closely tied to the story, expanding what happens in the world, giving hints to why it may have happened, and expanding the lore of the world. You will end up doing things like helping repair a bridge to get further along and unlock more things to do in the world.

To support this, many new places have received additional artistic improvements. New locations have been added to the world and new NPCs are now around for you to interact with. Examples include a revamped trailer park with an ongoing party for you to explore, and new NPCs like the construction worker at the bridge to help out. These additions for the core of the new narrative are intended to help expand the world of Lost Paws even further.

Example of a new mission zone:

The main reason we added the story is because it was the most requested feature we encountered at conventions and surveys. Our beta test during the early summer cemented it in our minds to help serve as a guide for players that want one, as well as give more actions and meaning to the world as you go around surviving as a doggo. To be clear, the procedural elements of the game and the random wacky adventures you can find yourself in, as well as all the different playstyles of doggo are still in the game, and even further supported as various ways you can solve the missions. The narrative and Mission Systems are there to provide more direction at your pace, so that you can choose when and how to do these as you wish!

Optimization

In addition to all the narrative elements, we have also made a few small changes and did another round of optimization. The biggest changes we made to optimization was the addition of our new Macro LoD system. In short, it takes a grouping of objects and replaces them with a 2D texture until you get within a certain distance toward the target group. This has caused a massive vertex reduction for rendering requirements, reducing it by millions of verts. It addition to that, we compressed many more scene textures and replaced various high poly count models with cheaper ones. This is especially notable in the forest, which reduced VRAM usage as well as rendering requirements. All together, these improvements made the default high settings in the graphics panel work well on any modern gaming system.

New Release Date and Other Announcements

So now we have the big announcement! Lost Paws now has a definitive planned release date September 29th this year. We know this is later then our original projected date for late August, but we have a good reason for the change in the release date--- we swear! We conducted an internal test about a week ago, which while coming back positive also revealed to us many details we really wanted to get into the game before we released. Ultimately, we decided not to rush it and make one more serious pass at polishing to make the experience as tight as possible. We want to make a game even in an early access state that we can feel proud of releasing, and that means giving it a little more time to polish it as best we can!

We will be adding many little features and new areas, as well as a new mission over the course of this month and the next. All of this is on top of our current work to get partial controller support and achievements into the game. We also hope to add a new doggo before it is all over. We are excited to share all of this with you!

To top it all off, we will run another beta to gather more feedback! We will have more details on this later on, but if you were in the playtest in June, you will be automatically enrolled in the next beta. We are hoping for this beta to run sometime later in August. if you're interested in the beta, let us know in our discord and we'd be happy to ship you out a key when we are ready!

Thanks for reading! If you liked what you saw, please consider wishlisting on Steam as it helps out a lot! Thanks again, and we'll see you in the next one!

Hello fellow dog lovers!

Lost Paws will be demoing at Playthough NC March 18-19 in the Raleigh Convention Center! 

Hello fellow dog lovers!

We got amazing news! Lost Paws will be at PAX East March 23 - 26 in the Boston Convention Center! We will be showing off the demo and giving away convention swag at our booth. If you are planning on heading over to PAX we hope to see you there.

If you can't make it to PAX, fear not! We will be running special digital events during the convention and beyond. Keep an eye out here by following the game on steam or joining our discord! We will be announcing more as we get closer to the convention. Thanks for all the support thus far and excited to show more of Lost Paws in the near future!