Meet your dog

What's new

• An adoption screen before play begins. Eight breeds: Doberman, Pit Bull, Retriever, German Shepherd, Rottweiler, Belgian Malinois, Siberian Husky and Australian Cattle Dog. Each one has a live animated preview, stat bars compared against the average of all breeds, and its own signature skill. Name it with the keyboard, or with the on-screen keyboard on a controller.
• Every breed is good at something and weaker somewhere else, so there is no best dog. The Pit Bull has the most health, the Retriever has the best nose, the Doberman is the fastest and bites hardest, and the Husky carries the most and shrugs off the cold.
• Signature skills: the Doberman's Takedown knocks a raider down with its first bite, the Pit Bull's Lockjaw pins a human for 3 seconds, the Malinois' Wire Cutter blinds a scout mech, the Shepherd tracks raiders back to their camp, the Rottweiler guards your base and can scare raiders off, the Retriever fetches from twice as far, the Husky wears a cargo harness, and the Cattle Dog turns up extra forage.
• Orders: hold Q (or hold L1 on a controller) to open a ring of orders: Follow, Stay, Attack, Search, Hunt, Fetch, Guard, Go home, and tricks once you have bonded. Press G to send the dog at the enemy under your cursor.
• Your dog fights with you. It bites on command and jumps in when something hits you. Human raiders take full bites, scout mechs take less, and heavy mechs and bosses can't really be hurt by a dog, but it can pull their attention away from you. Enemies fight back, and stray shots can hit it.
• Search and fetch: the dog sniffs out loot inside its nose range, including buried caches that only it can find, and carries the finds back to you. Sent home, it drops them into your storage crate instead. Its pack holds 4 to 7 stacks depending on breed, more with saddlebags, and you can open it from the inventory screen.
• Hunting: rabbits and deer now roam the world. Send the dog after one and it brings back meat and hide.
• Health: the dog has its own health bar, shown above it and next to its portrait in the corner. It heals slowly when out of a fight. Feed it Scav Snacks (cooked at a campfire from meat and berries), cooked meat, or patch it up with bandages and splints.
• At 0 HP your dog goes down instead of dying. You have 30 seconds to hold E (or Cross) next to it to get it back up. If you don't make it, it limps home to its bed and is back to full after a day. If you want it harder, tick Hardcore on the adoption screen and a downed dog is gone for good.
• Bond: petting it (hold E or Square), feeding it and fighting side by side build your bond. Higher bond unlocks tricks (sit, play dead, and howling at night) and small stat boosts.
• Gear: armour vest, collar, saddlebags, gas mask, boots, a lamp collar that lights the way, and a radio collar that shows your dog on the map.
• Early warning: the dog growls at enemies and traps you can't see yet, with an icon on screen and a rumble on the controller, and barks when it smells a buried cache. It also reveals the fog of war around itself.
• New buildables: dog bed (where it recovers and where you can rename it), food bowl and kennel. In cold weather the dog shivers (except the Husky), and in a storm it sticks close to you.
• New sounds: bark, growl, whine, panting, bite and a night howl.

How it was made

1. The dogs are drawn in 2D, like all of the game's animals. A Higgsfield image of a Doberman on one shared body became the master, and the other seven breeds were edits of it: different coat colours, ears, tails and builds on the same skeleton. Every frame was then finished by hand in Aseprite on a 32x32 grid, and each breed was checked against the survivor for scale.
2. Each dog runs on a simple state machine (follow, stay, attack, search, hunt, fetch, guard, go home, downed). It finds its way around walls with the same route finder as the survivor's point-and-click walking.
3. The adoption screen is its own scene, so the character creator can include it later.
4. The sounds were generated from short text prompts with ElevenLabs' sound-effects model, with no voice acting.
5. 154 automated checks run the real game with a real dog. They cover each breed's stats, adoption, every order, search and fetch into your inventory, hunting, pack limits, damage and healing, snacks, going down, revive, limping home, bond, gear, early warning, fog, weather, renaming at the bed, and saving and loading all of it.

Tools used

How to try it

Known issues

• At this size several breeds read alike: the two black-and-tan dogs, and the grey ones. More distinct ears, builds and coats are planned.
• There is no settings menu yet, so Hardcore can only be turned on when you adopt.
• The Cattle Dog's herding only adds forage for now. There is no livestock to herd yet.