Moonbones for the Masses

It’s been a while, so I’m pretty excited/nervous to finally update the public build and share all the things I’ve been working on.

As for other interesting news, I went to GDC and saw someone wearing a Flock of Dogs shirt! Then I came home and got COVID, then I broke my ankle playing soccer and had to have surgery. I would say those things delayed me a bit, but only slightly.

(As I type this, I’m headed to physical therapy, got new running shoes, and am expected to return to soccer in about a month, so I’m in a good mood.)

Here’s a recap of the features added since February 15th:

• Moonbones

• Reworked the tutorial/treehouse area/fork area

• Dog breeds have different starting stats now

• Holding down input no longer required on menu, if only 1 local player

• Support for controllers without triggers

• And a “simple aim” option, if you don’t have two thumbsticks

• Minigame Park has some picnic tables (they kinda act like maps)

• Minigame Park has some new minimap icons

• Warp pipes in the Open Skies

• Blue Blobs Land (unofficial name) now comes after Rossmoor (unofficial name)

• Constructable/repairable nests (highly controversial!)

• Boxing arm attachment

• Bow and silverwarrow

• Hatman now wears many hats

• Hotdogs!

• Better shadows!

• Better mopping!

• Slightly better caves

• The Bolf (unofficial name)

• Purple goo

• The Seblobba (unofficial name)

• The Foot Blob (unofficial name)

• The Blob Web (unofficial name)

• The Bullet Grid (unofficial name)

• Spike rain, geyser, fan bullet obstacles made (unofficial names)

• Sockman kinda works (unofficial name)

• Better summoning stone ritual visuals

• Better menu visuals

• A graphics menu!!!

• Reworked the photobooth minigame

• Redid whale controls and created whale dashboard UI

• UI numbers pop up to show damage, gaining/losing water, healing whale etc

• ToolRack with grabby hand

• Saving your hat preference 🙂

• “Villages” (very basic area that are between biomes along the Air River)

• LootPot to eat up your loot and spit back money at “villages”

• Dogs ascension (still haven’t finished Dog Heaven yet)

• Much improved whale-getting-dirty visuals

• A ton of redone lineart to more to have more consistent/higher resolution

Also, a monstrous amount of my time has been fixing network bugs. I know you’re all clamoring to see the 300+ commit logs from the past 7 months detailing this work, but that’s a lot of copy/pasting. You’ll just have to go without.

Anyway! Today we go from version 0.4.3 to 0.4.125. Pretty exciting stuff.

Thanks for sticking around. The dogs continue to fly higher and higher. And a huge thanks to Scrubbles, my chief playtester and #1 Twitch fan.

-Max

P.S. If you want to ask questions about all those bug fixes, playtest on the beta branch, or talk about Georgism, please join the Talk of Flock of Dogs Discord: https://discord.com/invite/fYZFNTB