Hello Dog Lovers!
With 2023 now solidly behind us, we wanted to talk about our big plans for the game as we rev up development for Lost Paws this year. Many things have changed since we initially released the game. We have gotten a lot of good feedback and looked at what we have produced to this point. After spending a good bit of January reviewing it all and planning, we decided to make some major changes to our original plan for this year.
The Changes
Originally we wanted to work on expanding the world and RPG skill tree as outlined in the roadmap. Finishing up the RPG systems was originally a big focus, as well as expanding the city, alongside fixing whatever remaining bugs might be there. As we got more feedback, we discovered that while more RPG Skills would certainly be welcome and a bigger city too, other problems arose. What we noticed when putting together all the feedback was that various interactions were being missed and additional behaviors were getting lost in doggo's translation. Strategies on ways to play the game were falling through doggo's food bowl, and we began to realize that certain things needed more improvement before we just continued. To address this, we will be making additional support systems that will help out with doggo's tricks both audio and visually. These systems will do more than just help play. They will give the world much more life with NPCs now interacting more and the world giving you more clues about what is going on in addition to more visual improvements. We will also be doing a rebalancing pass on the game to further optimize what we already have done.
But that is hardly enough! We want to make the doggo experience last longer and give all of you a very expansive adventure. After all, Doggo has to face a big wide world out there and it will take time to figure out all the ins and outs. So instead of working on the preexisting systems (which we will expand in the future), we will now add brand-new systems to the game. The main ones will be in the form of a new adversarial system and a specialized trading system just for doggo. We will also include an early form of crafting alongside some surprise new ideas that we will showcase more as we get closer to the main updates.
As for the world itself, we will be expanding it to support the new systems that are currently planned. Doggo City will receive more districts in addition to specialized zones that will work specifically for trading and crafting. We are also planning on adding new instanced zones that will give you new levels of doggo freedom. These changes among many more will make the world feel even bigger and more alive. Ultimately, we think that by making these changes the game will evolve into the doggo experience we've always wanted to create. The new plan is up on the roadmap, which you can read here.
The Schedule
To accomplish all of this, our update schedule will have to change a bit. We did release another update today (more on that in a moment), but these plans will take longer than 1 month to complete. As a result, we plan to release these changes in two phases. The first phase update will be out in early spring. It will mainly deal with the support systems that will make the game more readable and vibrant. That update will be a normal release, and we will announce it when it comes out. The second phase update will likely come out in the middle of summer. This one will be huge, and we will run a special beta for it, so keep an eye out for that! The content for the second phase will be enormous, with several additional locations and all new systems being added into the game.
In between the updates, we will do weekly game-dev tidbits in our discord. We will try to let everyone on there know how things are going and show off a little of what we're working on every week. Beyond that, we do plan when hitting major milestones to run a stream or make announcements on our progress. Outside of that, we will be more focused on working on the game to make it as good as possible.
The January Updates
For our updates in January, both 0.6.9 and 0.7.0 are now live! The main highlights include updated controller support, improved physics for certain objects, and a new chew toy for the doggo to play with, among many other minor additions and bugfixes. You can read about it here.
Thank you for reading! We wanted to thank everyone who has played the game, every person who visited our booth at conventions, everyone who signed up for our newsletter, our discord community, every streamer who played it, every YouTuber who checked it out, every reviewer who took the time to take a look at the game, and all of you who are reading this. All your feedback has been amazing, and we have made it this far because of all of you. We want to make this game into the ultimate doggo experience for everyone to enjoy. Please come along with us to the next phase of doggo's journey! See you all in the next one!
