I just uploaded the first build of the prototype! Since my first devlog I have made the following improvements. 

• Dog Fur Shader Added
• New Dog model - 25% compelte
• Combat System Phase I - 100 % complete
• Combat System Phase II - 25%
• Terrain Digging feature added

I started making my own content for the game and first things first is I need my own dog character. I started modeling him and got sidetracked when researching how to do realistic fur in unreal engine and came to a few choices....

• Nvidia Hairworks
• Unreal Groom
• Hair Cards
• Unreal Marketplace Gfur
• Basic Shader

Sadly, Hairworks a solution that has been used in the witcher 3 and call of duty ghost has been depreciated by unreal since 4.16 or something. Unreal Groom is awesome, and I can get it working using hair splines from Blender (big plus!) but performance is semi bad and to do a dog well with it would not be ideal. A dog with hair cards.... maybe for some spots on the dog but for the whole thing not sure and do not have any experience with it yet. Gfur looks sweet but the free version is hard to get going and it looks like I can get the same effect with groom if I didn't want to simulate the physics which may be an option now that I think of it. I wrote all this to tell you that I went with a parallax shader technique for now. I will play around with groom more in the future maybe a no simulation physics version will look awesome and run really well. 

In the final game humans will only attack you if you attack them three times in a row. But you are seeing phase one complete of the combat system in the download. Phase II will include animals that run away from you and you will be able to use the force pull command when your close enough to grab them in your mouth and shake them to death. 

Finally, I am super happy that I was able to implement a terrain digging feature!!! I do not know may games that have this but am already thinking of fun ways to use this. You can dig under the fence, bury a bone, dig up a bone, bury a dead body.... it’s just so awesome! Shout out to the Voxel Plugin for making the possible!

Phase II combat and the new dog model are the next things I will be working on. Let me know in the comments what you would like to see or worked on first!

Thanks,  

 Mark

P.S. 

If you download and try the game ...

Thanks for Downloading! Just unzip the files and double click on 'BuildProject_0_0_01.exe' to run. Please post any comments you have on the itch.io page or contact me on Discord at Mwparra#7592. If you like the idea or what you played let me know! If you didn't let me know as well, constructive criticism is always welcome.