Spawning Food and Foe

Configuring animal spawning in WolfQuest 3

Yellowstone is called “The Serengeti of North America” because it’s home to so many big animals, at remarkably high densities. Watching videos from Yellowstone, it looks like you can’t hardly turn around without seeing a wild animal. Of course, reality is not quite like that. Last year we hiked into the areas depicted in WolfQuest and weren’t exactly tripping over wildlife. We’re big noisy mammals, certainly scaring off many animals — but so might wolves.

So in designing the game, we need to strike a balance between accuracy and gameplay. How frequently should you see other animals? How hard should it be to find an elk herd? Making the world dense with animals would boost the excitement in the game — at least initially — but would not represent the environment accurately, and perhaps over time would make animal sightings too mundane. But making animals (especially prey animals) too scarce and difficult to find would of course make the game too frustrating for all but the most determined players. Striking the right balance is a major focus of beta testing, and we’ll undoubtedly continue to tune that once the game is in Early Access for PC/Mac. (And yes, we’re still aiming to get it out in Early Access by the end of the year.)

We’re taking a first crack at this now, as we configure the animal spawning systems. We’ve created two types of spawning systems:

* Persistent animals: We create permanent elk herds and packs of stranger wolves, which persist as long as you’re on that game map. Typically we have three stranger packs in Amethyst Mountain, each of which has staked out a fairly large territory, leaving a small no-wolf’s-land in the middle of the map. Only in that area are you truly safe, but you’ll usually have to venture into stranger pack territory to hunt and find a mate. These stranger wolves persist, which means if you manage to kill one (unlikely as that may be as a lone wolf), you won’t see it again, while you will continue to see the surviving members of that (and other) packs. And same thing with elk herds: We’re creating a number of herds, and these will slowly shrink in size as you prey on them. (But what happens if you kill a lot of them? Well, nature abhors a vacuum….)

* Non-Persistent animals: These use a rule-based spawning method, so we can determine how frequently they appear in the game. We set the minimum and maximum distance that flock (a group of animals, from one to many individuals) can spawn from the player. Naturally, small animals like snowshoe hares would spawn closer to the player than big animals like moose. (Why? You can’t see snowshoe hares at long distances, but you can see moose, so this ensures that we don’t spawn animals at greater distances than they’re visible at.) Furthermore, to ensure that there's always a certain distance between flocks of a particular species, we have another pair of variables that control the minimum and maximum distance between spawns.

All this gives us great control over the density of animals in the game, as we test and tune the game to answer the question “how densely populated should the game-world be?” What do you think the answer should be?