Saga: Young Hunters

Today we're looking at a very important part of the upcoming WolfQuest Saga* -- when your pups of the year learn to hunt! There's no evidence that wolves teach their pups to hunt. Instead, the pack goes hunting, the pups join them and learn at the school of hard knocks -- literally. We are modeling the pups' learning curve with XP, experience points. So in September, when your pups are five months old, they've gained about 1500 XP, and are now ready to live the nomadic lifestyle. The pack abandons the rendezvous site and spends the fall and winter following the elk herds. Initially, pups follow the adults on hunts, but hang back, observing the action. Over time, they gain XP from observation, and soon they start coming in closer and closer, and finally daring to bite an elk. As the pack leader, the player's job is to give the pups enough experience to learn how to hunt while preventing them from getting killed in the process. But this is trickier than we'd initially imagined. The hunt is so hectic, just keeping an eye on your pups is difficult, much less tracking their health and XP. So first, we needed to make it clearer which wolves were your pups of the year, since they're about 90% the size of an adult wolf. To aid the player, we're giving pup nametags special icons (currently simply a bullet point before and after the name) to make them easier to recognize during the chaos of the hunt. But we also realized that, with your wolf, your mate, a couple subordinates and yearlings all involved in the hunt, it simply gets too crowded around an elk. Often there's no space available for a pup to get in there to bite. We needed to limit the number of wolves actively participating in the hunt. But how? Fortunately, science came to the rescue! I recalled this research paper** by Dan MacNulty (one of our WolfQuest science advisors since 2007) and Doug Smith, Dave Mech, John Vucetich and Craig Packer, which found that the optimal number of wolves in an elk hunt is only three or four. So that's very helpful -- but I'd forgotten the best part. MacNulty et al. looked at various possible reasons for this number, and ruled out most of them, concluding that some wolves in the pack are free riders. They're here for the food, not the injuries. They'll participate in the hunt, but they'll try to avoid putting themselves in harms way -- as long as they can be there when there's fresh meat to eat. So that helps us enormously. With that limit in place, there is always some space on the elk for a pup to get in there and bite. But even so, the hunt is still fast and chaotic, and it can be quite hard to know when a pup is biting an elk -- especially since they only bite for a second or so when they're still gaining skill and confidence. So we're experimenting with some feedback, trying to decide on the bare minimum of feedback without too much information overload. So this is very much a work in progress -- we've got the young hunter mechanics working well and are now playtesting to figure out the actual gameplay -- what the player is thinking and doing. So this will likely evolve before the Saga is ready for release. Stay tuned for more in upcoming devblogs! _____________________- * The upcoming WolfQuest Saga is “the rest of the game.“ Your pups will continue to grow into the fall and beyond, learning to hunt under your supervision, and then becoming yearlings when next year's pups are born. Time will continue progressing through the years until you die. The Saga is currently in development but we do not have a release date for it. ** Research paper: Nonlinear effects of group size on the success of wolves hunting elk Daniel R. MacNulty,a Douglas W. Smith,b L. David Mech,c John A. Vucetich,d and Craig Packera aDepartment of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, University of Minnesota, 1987 Upper Buford Circle, St. Paul, MN, 55108, USA, bYellowstone Center for Resources, PO Box 168, Yellowstone National Park, WY, 82190, USA, cU.S. Geological Survey, Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center, 8711 37th Street SE, Jamestown, ND, 58401, USA, and dSchool of Forest Resources and Environmental Science, 1400 Townsend Dr., Houghton, MI, 49931, USA ___________________ The WolfQuest saga will continue! Stay tuned for more news in upcoming devblogs about it and other new features! Once the game is completed on PC/Mac, we will consider porting the game to other platforms. We do not announce specific release dates. We will release them when they are ready.