Big Changes!

This month we tackled something that we’ve been struggling with for a while in To The Rescue!. The interaction system. If you’ve tried the game at one of the events we’ve attended then you might remember the 2-handed interaction system we used. Essentially, the idea was that the player had 2 hands that they could use to hold items and interact with the environment independently. We mapped these inputs to the left and right mouse buttons respectively. Interactions were defined by a system of highlights and outlines that you could cycle through with Q & E.

This interaction system was one of the first things that we developed for To The Rescue!. We liked the system but there was definitely a usability issue that we were never quite able to solve. People generally found the system confusing and would rarely take full advantage of it. We could explain how the controls enabled you to carry two items at once but most people still defaulted to only using one hand. As part of our ongoing refactoring push, we decided to take another crack at an interactions system and that’s what I want to talk about today!

An Inventory System !?

The new system is a little more complicated to explain but we think it will be more intuitive to use overall. It’s similar to other games that have a simple inventory system hotbar like Stardew Valley. It consists of 3 parts. The Interaction Marker, Item mode, and Leash mode.

Interaction Marker

Our goal with the Interaction Marker is two fold. Reduce visual clutter and improve interaction clarity. Before, the item currently ‘in focus’ received an outline. This is often layered over or near the current object which received a highlight of some kind. For instance, getting a dog from a kennel looked like this:

There is a lot going on there! With dogs moving around and icons appearing, the subtle yellow outline isn’t immediately obvious when the player tries to change their focus with Q and E. This led to players repeatedly clicking to get to the desired item. Tedious and unhelpful.

Now, there is an onscreen indicator that only appears when there is a valid interaction. If they player sees that marker, they know something will happen when they click. In addition, when they change focus (now with the Mouse Wheel) the Interaction Marker will move across the screen to the new target!

We feel like the Interaction Marker makes a good foundation for us to expand on and it’s a consistent queue that should tip the player off to a potential interaction.

Item Mode

Item mode is the default method of interacting. This is the main replacement for the 2 handed interaction we used previously. Instead of being limited to their own 2 hands, the caretakers in To The Rescue have discovered they have pockets!

With this exciting new invention, they can bring a few objects with them while they work! Incredible. At the beginning of the game, the player’s inventory will be pretty limited, but if you managed to save up some money, you can buy an upgraded apron with all kinds of snazzy pockets to carry even more Items!

The player will have an inventory wheel at the top-middle part of the screen to show what they currently possess and have equipped. They can cycle through the items in their inventory using Q and E and the left mouse button is Interact/Pickup with the Interaction Marker target. The right mouse button is now Drop. That’s right. Now you can drop items on the floor wherever! Just don’t forget where you left them…

Leash Mode

That’s right. LEASH MODE. One of the most… engaging tasks you undertake in To The Rescue! is wrangling dogs between kennels, baths, and new families. And now with the ability to drop things, dogs can end up running all over the shelter if you aren’t careful!

Rather than making you cycle to a specific item to pickup a dog, you can either hold or toggle into leash mode using hotkeys. Leash Mode instantly equips the Leash Ring, your handy tool to move more than one dog at once, and shifts the Interaction Marker to focus on dog interactions.

Just like your apron can get more pockets, your Leash Ring can be upgraded too hold even more dogs at once.

Takeaways

It’s quite a bit to write out, but our hope is that these systems will be more intuitive in practice. We’ve compartmentalized Items and Dogs, simplified the controls, and clarified interaction targets with the Interaction Marker. On top of that, the player also has more flexibility in their interactions and can handle even more than they could in the previous system.

And all of this is the result of listening to feedback. It was really hard for us to consider pulling out the old system because it had been there since the beginning, but it consistently failed to resonate with players. Sometimes you have to read the signs and listen to feedback, and make the changes that need to be made.

Let us know what you think of this idea! We’d love to hear your take on the system! In the coming month we will have a lot to show! We’ll be updating our animations, the adoption system, and more!

– Tanner

Happy Holidays

I hope that everyone is having an excellent holiday season: exchanging gifts, visiting family and/or friends, and spending lots and lots of quality time with your pets! Even though we took a few days off to spend some time enjoying the food and eggnog, we’re still hard at work on To The Rescue! and are making some improvements that we think you’ll be really excited about. But the most immediate exciting thing for us is that we’ve hired a new animator to help us improve the look and feel of the game.

So much talent, such little time!

The process of finding an hiring an animator at really short notice was something that we didn’t really have much experience with. When we first started working on the game, we went to Byron for our artwork immediately, and we hired Belle sort of serendipitously. But since we are in the middle of a large-feature push with a strict deadline, we needed to find an animator, and fast.

Luckily, Byron has social media connections with a lot of talented animators. After posting on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, we received an overwhelming number of applications. As someone who is not an experienced hiring manager, going through them all and carefully choosing who to interview was a lot of work! I have a very hard time saying no to people, and almost every single one of our applicants had incredible work in their show reels.

First we narrowed down the list based on portfolios (hard). Then came the interviews (fun, but it took a lot more time than I anticipated)! Then we had to choose who among the interviews to send an animation test to (extremely hard). We decided early on to only send animation tests to our very top choices, because we didn’t want to waste the time of anyone that we weren’t already fairly certain we wanted to move forward with. I think this was a smart decision, but even just having to say no to a single person who spent the time on the test was a challenge.

All of the animation tests we received (on a very short timeline, mind you) completely shattered our expectations, which made it even harder to choose. As a team, we ended up ranking them by considering the quality of the animations, time estimates, and a few other factors to decide, and it was still incredibly close.

In the end, though, I’m happy to say that we are ecstatic to be working with Kat Higgins as our new lead animator! I have no doubt that they will be an excellent asset to our team and that their work will make for a much more lively aesthetic experience in To the Rescue!.

As part of our large-scale refactor, we are also revisiting our art workflow (and designs) with Kat in mind. Currently, a lot of our animation is a poorly-implemented animation equivalent of “programmer art,” and we’re excited to make some more intelligent changes to not just the appearance of the animations, but in the way they are implemented behind the scenes.

Takeaways

I think we vastly underestimated the time and effort it takes to find and hire new members of the team at this stage of development. Considering our lack of experience and time, though, I think they we did a good job of surveying our options and making a good choice.

However, it’s important to remember that tasks like this are a non-trivial part of development and takes a huge amount of emotional labor. We initially approached it as if it would be something that we did in the background of all of our main development work, but it ended up being a much more involved process. Which is okay!

It’s easy to feel like you know how much non-development work goes into a game. But as a small team, we’re still constantly re-learning just how much work it can be.

Just like all of the dogs you might find at a shelter, all of the animators that we interviewed are deserving of a great home! If you happen to be looking for an animator for your own team, we have a LOT of recommendations, so please reach out and we can refer some options!

Soon, we’ll be providing more details about some of our new interaction mechanics and dog designs. Until then, thank you so much for your continued support.

– Olivia

Hey Everybody!

It’s been a quiet month but we’ve been hard at work! As we’ve mentioned before, To The Rescue is a project we’ve been working on for a while. Our first source control push was almost 3 years ago to the day! In a lot of ways, this has a been a learning project for us. We wanted to take a project as far as we possibly could and push ourselves to learn more about game design, programming, and Unity3D.

And the project just kept working, all the way up to a super successful Kickstarter! We’ve learned a lot since we started. Olivia and I both finished our undergraduate degrees in that time and we are only a few minutes from finishing our masters. Needless to say, there are a lot of improvements we can make to the game under the hood.

So, we are taking a step back and doing some major refactoring of the project. We are swapping to a two-branch system where one version of the project is an active development branch where we can experiment and break things and the other is a production branch where we make sure that everything that goes in is something we definitely want in the final version of the game. This means we can refactor and improve code as we move it over and reevaluate some of our game design decisions.

Making this swap has taken a little bit of time, but we are actively working on both branches now so some more visual updates are on the horizon. Especially because we are in the process of adding an animator to our team! More details to come.

As always, thank you for your support and interest!

Hey Everyone!

The past few weeks have been a bit slower than usual. We’ve been wrapping up some prior obligations in the form of external contracts and trying to get the college semester finished up early.

But, of more relevance to To The Rescue!, we’ve been talking with potential publishers who reached out because of all the wonderful support during our Kickstarter campaign. The excitement that generated was enough to at least open some doors for discussion. We don’t have anything to announce yet, but the whole concept is too exciting for us not to share. This is our first full game. We managed to double our goal on Kickstarter and generate enough support that it at least got publishers to take notice. Even if we end up self publishing, this experience thus far has been a valuable opportunity and a pretty cool one at that!

On top of publisher talks, we’ve also been working on some Kickstarter related aspects like the backer survey’s that should be going out soon and starting the process of ordering the physical rewards.

This is probably going to be a shorter dev diary entry than the last one, which means it will be more in character with what they are going to be like moving forward. We’re hoping to use these as short, to-the-point summaries of the work we’ve been doing so far. If we’re doing them as often as we should, we’ll try to keep them pretty focused on the most recent work rather than trying to play catch-up after going so long without an update. Don’t hesitate to drop some feedback about these diaries, and if there’s anything in particular you want to see next.

For now, we have just one small (but exciting!) feature to update you all on. And that’s Superdogs! If you remember from the Kickstarter campaign, some of our higher tiers allowed for custom Superdogs to get added to the game. We’ve began the process of implementing them, so that rare (and always 5-star rated) dogs can spawn in the shelter.

To elaborate a bit more on how they will effect the game: Superdogs will be rare spawns that can occur that are similar to normal dogs that end up at the shelter through other means. Superdogs, however, as special! While most dogs that end up at the shelter are randomly generated, Superdogs will have predefined appearances and traits (some of which will be totally unique). Additionally, they will always have a maximum adoptability of 5 stars no matter what their traits are, so they will often get adopted quickly.

We really liked the idea of including fun Easter egg dogs (Easter dog eggs? uhh…) in the game that could appear randomly, and we also felt that it could be a great way to give our Kickstarter backers something special in the game, since our backers are dog lovers, too!

We’ll have more screenshots soon featuring their unique features on their dog folders, but for now, know that they are well on their way.

In line with this Superdog news, we are also gearing up to start sending out Kickstarter backer surveys within the next few weeks, so stay posted. And backers, start thinking about what sort of content that you want to add, based on your tier!

Social Media AMA

We recently also held an AMA on Instagram and Twitter, and got some really awesome questions! Be sure to check out our social media channels to check those out if you’re curious, and if you have any other questions and missed the live AMA, you can always ask them in the Q & A section of our Discord channel.

Thanks everyone!

– Olivia, Tanner, and the rest of the TTR Team

Last month we took the game to PixelPop 2019 in Saint Louis which is an indie games festival. You should definitely check it out! It was kind of a milestone for us because PixelPop 2018 was the first time we showed TTR to a large audience and it felt great to see how far we had come in that year. We got to hear from some awesome fans that said they had been looking forward to playing TTR all year and some folks who supported our Kickstarer. Both trips generated a ton of great feedback and really helped us identify parts of the game that work and parts that need some work.

One of those parts that needs some work is definitely the intro to the game and the tutorial. Mainly because they didn’t exist until recently! Our expo version of the game dumps the player right into the end-game shelter so they have access to everything, which is awesome to show off all the cool mechanics the game has to offer, but only if people know how to use them. Building a great 5 minute demo for sim-management games is tough because they often rely heavily on the UI, longer game cycles, and a steeper learning curve than some other genres. Our approach until now has been to verbally guide players through the mechanics until they got the hang of it, but this hasn’t been a great approach for cons and it doesn’t work at all for sharing the game with people remotely. Something had to change.

After returning from PixelPop this year, I decided to shift my focus to creating and polishing the first 30 minutes of the game. In the first 30 minutes of the game these things should happen:

• Establish the story and define who the player is.
• Teach the player how to control their character and interact with the environment.
• Teach the player how meet the basic needs of the dogs in their shelter.

If we can accomplish all three , I think we will have a much more effective demo for people to try the game and ultimately a more improved experience overall as they will better understand the mechanics!

Establishing the Story

A story element has been planned for TTR for a long time but this marks the first real implementation in any substantial form. We want to start out by immediately demonstrating the player character’s passion for dogs. In a town without a shelter, they’ve turned their garage into a makeshift kennel.

We open with the player character bringing home a stray they found in dire straights. This gives us an opportunity to work in some dialog to establish their personality. You’ll get that dog fed and watered, but it’s not long until more strays show up. By the end of this section of the game, they player will find out the city is opening a municipal shelter and is looking for a director to run things.

To give this opening a bit more of a dynamic feel, we are creating an opening cut-scene to give the player some context and a little time to orient themselves to what they’re doing and what their goal is.

Teaching the Player

Conveniently, the methods we want to use to control the camera and scene during story cut-scenes will also work to guide the player through the tutorial! Using the timeline in Unity we can animate the camera, restrict player input, and control other items in the scene. This lets us slow things down and emphasize one element at a time to the player.

Consistently, the two things that most players have struggled with in the game are navigating the queues of items and the player character’s two-handed control scheme. The interactions are proximity based and break down into two categories: Things the player can pick up and stationary things the player can use. Stationary objects can often contain multiple ‘holdable’ items and using those items on stationary items can yield multiple results. For instance, the vaccine cabinet contains several vaccines and you can take those vaccines and use them on the medical table containing a dog to vaccinate them .

So first we teach the player that they have two hands that can contain different items and how to use those items.

And then we will teach players how to cycle through the hidden list of contents of items using ‘Q’ and ‘E’ by guiding them to pick up a specific box of dog food.

There is still a lot of work to be done in this opening segment of the game, but hopefully this opening segment will help acclimate players to the game more smoothly than our current approach!

This is where dog toys come in! If the player has some extra time to spare, they can play with dogs who might be up for adoption soon to give them an extra boost to their adoptability. A dog who is healthy and happy is more likely to be adopted than one laying around in boredom.

Keep in mind, bonus happiness degrades over time until it returns to the average of their other needs. To play with a dog, the player just grabs a dog toy from the storeroom and uses it on any dog they want to play with. When they do, a random mini-game will start. Ideally, we want these mini-games to be under a minute. They should break up the regular gameplay loop with some variety, but not be a total diversion.

The first playing mini-game we designed is good ole fashioned Tug O’ War! The goal is to keep the middle of the rope in the circle until the Fun-O-Meter fills up. The higher the meter gets, the more happiness the dog will get from the game when you head back to the shelter. The Player mashes the ‘D’ key to try and keep the knot in the ring. We wanted to try and invoke the feeling of putting up a fight, but not overwhelming them, just like playing with a real dog. This is just one of several playing mini-games we have planned. If you think of one that sounds fun, we’d love to hear from you!