Home Free - Scratch and Sniff

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The latest update for Home Free which explores life as a dog lost in a randomly generated city.

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Scratch & Sniff

True story: Our wonderful dog, Princess, is a genius and taught herself how refrigerators work. She's known the secret for a couple of years now. The result, predictably, is chaos. Because she's strong and persistent, she's also learned to defeat a succession of child-proof locks we've installed on the refrigerator door.

The lock that worked best was a home brew version of a device used to secure appliances in earthquakes: a long strap with industrial strength velcro that we have to remember to stick in place whenever we leave the house. That version has worked for about a year, but Princess's determination finally won out. With some combination of nose and paws, she's now able to wrench open even a strapped-shut refrigerator door and throw a little party for herself with whatever she finds inside.

Last week, she ate about two pounds of cheese, two whole eggs (including shell), and a about a cup of vegetarian chili. We found another unbroken egg in her bed.

I try to imagine how she must feel when she finally forces that door open, and I can't help but feel a swell of pride in my chest. She must feel psyched. It's hard to think of anything a dog loves more than food, and whenever she opens that door, she gets access to more than she could possibly eat.

For the past several weeks, I've turned my attention to the same part of the experience in Home Free: the details of finding and obtaining food. One of the game design challenges in Home Free is providing videogame reasons for a human to do stuff a real dog would do when lost in a city. Hunger is a great motivator, but I also want to do my best to pay tribute to the sheer excitement a dog can feel for a piece of food. What does opening the refrigerator feel like to Princess? It must feel like opening a treasure chest. What does videogame food feel like to a videogame dog? It must feel like sweet loot.

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In the video above, you can see demo of a new way to find food. Keeping an eye out for promising piles of garbage in gutters is a dependable way to find a bite or two as you make your way around the city.

Focusing on food, and trying to fulfill my design goal of hinting at how and why food is so exciting to a dog, has meant lots of painstaking work. Lots of small but important details fell into place recently: clear highlights for interact-table objects, control fine tuning, particle effects, and, most annoyingly, user interface.

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In the video above, our dog has found a lucky pile of food garbage at the end of an alley. This serves as a good illustration of the overall food discovery process. When you first encounter a piece of food, it's unidentified until you've sniffed it. Sniffing is passive: all you need to do is walk toward sniff-able stuff and you'll start the process. Once a piece of food has been identified, an info overlay tells you what it is and its important details: how big it is, how filling it is, how good it will taste, and more...

It was important to focus on the details in this sequence. It's something you'll be doing a lot in the game, and I think it's a key place to build the player's connection with their dog-avatar. Everything from the way smell particles flow into the dog's nose to the control-feel of switching focus between different food items deserve a surprising amount of attention.

Building out the food-universe of Home Free has been a lot of fun. There's some more interesting stuff lurking in that corner of the game, but I think I've given you enough to chew on for now...