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UPDATE 17Dog breeds

Eight dogs you can tell apart

The eight dog breeds looked too much alike at normal game zoom: two black-and-tan dogs, three grey ones, and nearly all with the same pointed ears. Every breed now has its own size, coat and shape, so you can tell your dog from across the screen.

The line-up up close, left to right: Doberman, Pit Bull, Retriever, German Shepherd, the survivor, then Rottweiler, Malinois, Husky and Cattle Dog.

What's new

  • Size: the big dogs are now visibly big. The Rottweiler and Pit Bull stand a couple of pixels taller and a lot wider than the lean breeds, and the Cattle Dog is the smallest of the eight.
  • Coats: the Pit Bull is now copper-red with a white chest blaze, the Husky a bright silver with a white face mask and belly, and the Cattle Dog a speckled blue with tan legs and a dark eye patch. The Malinois is pale fawn with a black mask and black ear tips, and the Doberman is blue-black with small tan points. The Rottweiler is sooty black with big mahogany markings.
  • Shapes: the Doberman has tall cropped ears, the Retriever floppy ears and a feathered tail, the Rottweiler a round head and a docked tail, the Pit Bull a short muzzle and broad chest, the Husky its tail curled over its back, and the Shepherd a black saddle on a tan body.
  • The back views of the plain-coated dogs got a darker spine line, so they no longer look like flat blocks when they walk away from you.
  • The Pit Bull's colour on the adoption screen and the dog portrait now matches its new coat.

How it was made

  1. The dogs still share one animation rig: the same 56 frames for idle, walk, run, bite, sit, carry, downed and petted. The changes are a new pass in the art build, so every frame of a breed gets them the same way.
  2. That pass sets each breed's height and width before the art is shrunk to game size, then swaps its coat colours inside the game's 32-colour palette. Last, it edits a few pixels on the head, ears, back and tail. It finds those parts again in every frame, so a bite or a sit pose gets the same ears as the idle pose.
  3. The old art is kept as version 1. After each change an image model was shown the line-up without the breed names and asked to name every dog. It named all eight correctly, including the Malinois and the Cattle Dog, which it had mixed up before.
  4. All 154 dog checks and the other 22 test suites still pass.

Screens

Before (left) and after (right) for all eight breeds: idle, walk, run, bite, sit, downed, front and back.
The same line-up at normal game zoom.

Tools used

Python + NumPyThe per-breed pass: size, coat colours, ears, tails, masks, saddle and speckle.
Aseprite 1.3Outline, ground shadow and export of the eight sheets.
Godot 4.7The in-game line-up screenshot and the automated checks.
Claude + HermesBuilt the pass and ran blind breed checks on every screenshot.

How to try it

  • Start a new game and flip through the breeds on the adoption screen. Each one now has its own colours and shape in the preview.
  • Adopt a big breed and a small one in two saves and walk them past each other's spots. The difference shows at normal zoom.

Known issues

  • The front and back views are still narrow, so ear shapes show best from the side.

Ironfall dev log · Update 17 of 18 · All updates

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