Lost Paws Blog — Roadmap

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!