Lost Paws Blog — Discord

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 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!