Many of these are the same body modifications as in WolfQuest 2.7, but we’re using a different method for them in WolfQuest 3: Anniversary Edition which will allow more variety. Now you’ll be able to mix and match as many modifications as you want! Not only that, you can adjust the degree of each one to create a more unique wolf.

Coats: We still have five basic coats, but we created those textures way back in 2007, so they’re overdue for an upgrade. We’re remaking all five coat textures, and here’s the first one, replacing the old Tawny wolf coat. As before, you can adjust the tint of the coats to create lighter or darker variations. All the other coats will still be available as well (and on mobile, your purchases will carry over to WolfQuest 3). Please note that WolfQuest 3: Anniversary Edition will not have additional coats, but we know that many players would like more and are considering options to add more in the future. 

Eyes: As we showed in an earlier devblog, you can choose and tint your wolf’s eye color to create a range of accurate eye colors found in wild wolves, from gray to yellow (with the palest of yellow-green) to gold to brown. See the video and read the post “Eye of the Beholder”.

Howls: Based on our poll from a few months ago, every howl in WQ 2.7 is loved by somebody, so we’re keeping all of them — and adding a lot more! Not only that, but your wolf will have two howls, a primary and a secondary, which you play by tapping the H key or Howl button once or twice. Rallies just got a lot more melodious! 

Ears: We have the same choices of ear customizations (torn, bent, flat, and notched) but not only can you modify the degree of each, now you can combine them, as you like. 

Body: Along with the radio collar option, you can now adjust your wolf’s neck ruff, body mass, tail fluffiness, and even fine-tune the mangy tail options. As before, male wolves are larger than female wolves and you can still vary the size using the strength stat slider. 

Stats: Same as before, with sliders for strength, stamina, and speed. 

Personality: Your actions are how you convey your wolf’s personality in the game, of course. But now you can set your wolf’s personality traits using the same scales assigned to the NPC wolves (bold-cautious, social-loner, energetic-lazy). These settings will then be used in the WQ genetics system and will combine with your mate’s stats to help determine your pups’ personalities. 

Bio: Finally, you can write a short biography of your wolf that other players can see in the Pack Stats panel in multiplayer games.

To learn more about these systems, see the videos and posts:

“For Better or For Worse” (mate AI and personality).

“Genes Behind the Scenes” 

Thank you all for your ideas and feedback that helped guide us as we’ve updated the wolf customization system for WolfQuest 3: Anniversary Edition!

What we’re changing:

Your wolf will be tougher and harder to kill. It’ll take a lot of damage to push the Health meter down to zero. (And instead of eating to restore health, you can simply rest and sleep as it recharges automatically.)

Other animals will be tougher and harder to kill. You won’t be able to kill a coyote with just a few bites anymore, and big prey like elk will take a more prolonged and concerted effort to kill — but we think the improved gameplay will hold your interest. (Hares are the exception, still easy — if you can catch one!)

But the wilderness is a dangerous place and it’ll certainly still be possible to get yourself killed. So we’re thinking about how to handle respawns. First, we will have a Ironwolf option for the player-wolf. In Ironwolf mode, auto-saves and manual saves are disabled, so dying ends the game for you (but doesn’t delete your wolf, so you can start over with that wolf if you like.) We are very excited about how this will change the entire game, making every encounter more dangerous. (We will also have a permadeath option for your mate; if they die, you’ll have to go it alone or find another mate.)

But we know that many players don’t want that kind of stress, so Ironwolf will be disabled by default. You’ll be able to enable it in Game Settings, alongside the usual difficulty levels.

Without Ironwolf enabled, death won’t be the end of things for you. But because it will usually require fairly reckless or careless behavior to die, we are thinking about imposing a penalty for dying. What kind of penalty? Some possibilities:

Respawn at a spawn point. We’ll have multiple spawn points due to the much larger maps, so we can respawn you at the nearest one, but it’ll usually be a fair distance from wherever you happen to die.

Reload the autosave — but autosave less frequently, so you lose more progress when you respawn.

Lose some XP or similar.

We’d like to know what you think, so please vote for your preferences and add any additional comments or suggestions using the link provided below. Thanks!

Now you can grin, whine, or growl without stopping because all of those emotes will now keep playing even if you start moving — just like a real wolf can do!  New players probably won’t appreciate such a natural ability–of course my wolf can do more than one thing at time.  But players accustomed to the current, simpler system (only emoting while stationary) are going to love this additional freedom.  

As with every simple idea and, in this case, the fairly basic technical implementation, there are always complications. Some don’t appear until you’ve spent some time thinking and working on it [selects whining emote while testing]. We’ve worked through most of those now and we can’t wait to see the new ways players communicate!  

And we have one empty slot in the Tail emote panel, so we’re making a new tail wag animation: higher and more confident. If the WQ team had tails, that’s how we would be wagging today!

But seriously, trees are a critical part of the environment, both ecologically of course as well as visually. Douglas-fir are the most common tree species in WolfQuest, because they’re the most common tree in Yellowstone’s Northern Range, which is the heart of wolf country in the park. But they’re not the most common tree in Yellowstone — that’d be the lodgepole pine, which is the dominant species throughout the rest of the park. But Douglas-fir likes the cool, moist, north-facing slopes of the Northern Range, so they predominate there.

Here’s a fun fact about Douglas-fir: the name is hyphenated, and that’s to indicate that it isn’t a true fir. It’s genus name is Pseudotsuga, which means ‘false hemlock” — it resembles a hemlock as well as a fir, but it’s a different genus entirely. Douglas-firs grow to about 30m or 100 ft tall, and can live for as long as 600 years in Yellowstone. Their thick, corky bark protects them from fire so, unlike lodgepole pines, they can survive moderately intense forest fires.

So Douglas-fir is an important tree species for the Northern Range, and for the game. We’ve partnered with Kerry Baldino, one of the best 3D nature artists around, to create some new Douglas-firs for WolfQuest (along with other vegetation like the fescue and sagebrush we showed a few months ago, see link below). We also sent our old WolfQuest senior producer Steve Allison-Bunnell out into the field (he lives in Montana) to take comprehensive photographs of Douglas-fir bark, branches, and needles. Kerry used those photos to create a basic model of the classic Douglas-fir form, and now he’s working variations to give make our forests more realistic. Today’s video shows the first batch of Kerry’s trees in a test scene, which also uses several other tools by amazing Unity developers: Enviro for the sky and lighting system, a new vegetation spawning tool called Vegetation System Pro, and tree shaders created by vegetation shader wizard Forst. 

In future videos we will share more new trees cottonwood and lodgepole, along with the finished forest environment complete with understory vegetation. In the meantime, check out our past videos about making the terrain!

Render in the Grass (New grass and sagebrush) http://wolfquest.org/bb/viewtopic.php?f=97&t=84319

Cliff Notes (Creating cliffs) http://wolfquest.org/bb/viewtopic.php?f=97&t=84037

Texturing the Terrain (Creating realistic ground textures on the terrain) http://wolfquest.org/bb/viewtopic.php?f=97&t=83899

Roughing Up the Terrain (Using new tools to create more detailed terrains) http://wolfquest.org/bb/viewtopic.php?f=97&t=83473

Our goals for this fighting system are the same as for all the new game systems in WQ 3: to represent the complex, dynamic, and active nature of a wolf’s life within the constraints of a game simulation (and our own limited resources). Fighting of course is a common mechanic in computer games, but we want to make sure that our wolf fights are not merely recreational, but truly represent both the reasons for fighting — namely, to claim and defend territory — and the tremendous dangers that fighting presents for wolves. We also want to our NPC personality system to come into play, so a bold wolf responds differently in a conflict than a cautious wolf.

So we’ve designed a system where territory, personality, and the power balance (based on the relative number of wolves on each side of a conflict, as well as their current health) are all factors in how the wolves behave. How aggressive are they? Can they be intimidated by growls and snarls, or do you have to actually fight them, with all the risks that entails? Furthermore, this dynamic changes from moment to moment as the situation changes.

We’ve built the core system now and have been playing around with it to evaluate its fun-factor….and we think it’s pretty fun. For that we’ve been using placeholder animations and doing our best to ignore a lot of awkward moments when the wolves bite each other. Now the next step is to make it look good, by refining all the various ways that wolves can interact in a fight.

This video gives you sneak preview of some of the gameplay. Once we get everything working better, we’ll show more in a future blog post.

Notes:

This is pre-alpha (i.e. very rough!) gameplay footage, just enough to prototype the new fighting mechanics. We’re now working on refining the animations and interactions. 

In nature, wolf fighting is almost entirely between packs, not within packs. While the latter has been known to occur, it’s only in much larger packs than the small family pack in WolfQuest. 

Fighting will be an option in single-player games, and in pup-raising multiplayer games (with your pack against NPC stranger packs). We do hope to add player vs. player in the next episode, Tower Fall. 

Video clips submitted by JayPlays.

Tommi Horttana, our lead Unity developer, created these behaviors, so I’ll let him explain more:

The mate's AI uses a few simple actions: approaching, circling, attacking, and sprinting away. It tries to get behind the elk, though in this one-on-one case it's pretty hard. Every now and then it'll try to attack, but might be scared off mid-way by the elk's counter-attack (with or without getting kicked).

The tricky part is building the AI calculations ("scorers" in Utility AI terms) around when exactly to do each of these things. How often should the mate try to attack, and how much risk should it take? What should it take to scare it away? Should it always keep circling in one direction or frequently change the direction? How far should it circle? If it does land a bite, how long should it keep it?

And how does personality (mainly "Cautious - Bold" but also the other axes) influence this? We decided to give both ends of the "Cautious - Bold" spectrum their own pros and cons. A Bold wolf will waste less time fiddling around while a Cautious one will be smarter about timing and target selection. We also want to use uniform mechanics for other fights, so we can use the same / similar AI."

I’m so excited about how the wolf and elk are in constant motion, circling and turning. It really captures the dynamism of a wolf-elk encounter so much better than we were able to do in the old game. In fact, there’s so much movement that it’s difficult to get all the animation transitions to work smoothly, but we’ll get there.

You can also see some of the gorgeous clouds in our new dynamic skybox, drifting across the sky at sunset. (These are maximum quality; we’ll have simpler clouds for less powerful computers and mobile.)

FAQs

When will WolfQuest 3 and Tower Fall be released? We are aiming to release the first episode, Amethyst Mountain, by the end of 2018 for PC/Mac on Steam and itch.io, as Early Access, followed by Slough Creek in early 2019, then followed by the mobile versions.We’ll then resume development of the next episode, Tower Fall.

How much will WQ3 cost? WolfQuest 3 will be a free update to players who own WolfQuest 2.7. If you are buying WQ 3 for the first time, the cost will likely be more than than the current game 2.7 (so it's cheaper to purchase it now and get WQ 3 as a free update). The Tower Fall expansion will be an in-game purchase (DLC).

Will WQ3 be available on mobile? WolfQuest is available for Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad, Android & Kindle. So yes, WolfQuest 3 will be available for mobile phones and tablets...at least some of them, and/or in some form. Bigger maps and more animals may be too much for mobile devices with limited RAM memory. We'll do our best, but there's a good chance that some mobile devices won't be able to get it, and/or we will have a simpler version of it for some mobile devices.

Will WQ3 be a new game? For PC/Mac, we plan to release WolfQuest 3 as a new app on your computer, so you can keep WQ 2.7 and play either version of the game at any time. (On mobile, we are still working on the plan, since app stores are more restrictive about app upgrades.)

Will my wolves import? WQ3 will use the same player accounts as 2.7. You’ll be able to log into WQ3 and import your existing wolves and they will remain available in 2.7 as well (though you won’t be able to import a wolf from WQ3 back into 2.7). We are still deciding about how ranks and achievements will integrate into WQ 3.