💭 Pets DLC Devlog #3 – The Science of Pet Behavior! 🧪

Hello, Flippers! 🤗

Welcome to the third devlog for the upcoming House Flipper 2 – Pets DLC! In the last devlog, we let you pick the next topic from two options:

💭 The behavioral system for pets
OR
📦 New items in Pets DLC

The race was incredibly tight, practically a draw. In the end, 💭 The behavioral system for pets edged ahead by the smallest of margins, so that’s our subject today!

If you missed the earlier devlogs, you can catch up here:

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1190970/view/675130991105279813
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1190970/view/715659582307830847

Where It All Began

Let’s take a closer look at how our beloved companions think, starting with the very first steps. As always, it began with a mountain of research! 🤭

Our first goal was to capture the small details of how a dog, a cat, or a rabbit acts when every one of its needs has been met. We wanted the animals to feel believable even in this calm state. That led us to build our earliest behavioral trees, which look like this:

This, dear Flippers, is a pet’s decision-making process laid out as a diagram. It’s how we build most behaviors and the choices behind them. Some patterns are simple to program this way, like the one above. Others, however, are terrifyingly complex! 😨

This one maps out the thinking behind the “no current needs” state. As you can imagine, there are plenty of options here. A touch of randomization also keeps the resulting behavior from ever being completely predictable.

Fun fact! 🤓
Right now, the whole behavioral system in the Pets DLC contains just over 3,000 nodes. Each one is a decision point for your pet! But let’s not jump ahead and return to how the system took shape. 📋

The Pyramid of Needs

Once we had worked out how animals should act when nothing is pressing, we moved on to a needs-based system. We began by listing every need we wanted to include and putting them in the right order. This gave us a structure that holds several need variables and ranks them by priority. 📊

That’s how our pyramid of needs came to be:

By now, we knew how a pet behaves with no needs, and we had the needs ranked by priority. Time to play with the numbers and start experimenting! 🧪

Here’s the idea: every need in the pyramid is represented by a value from 0 to 100. With priorities settled, we had to decide how quickly each need rises and whether all of them should climb at a steady, linear pace.

The answer was a firm no! ☝️🤓

Animal Traits

We also had to account for the fact that ordinary player actions can shape or interrupt these behavioral processes. To make the experiment even more interesting, we layered animal traits on top of the existing design. These are extra variables that make each pet more unique and further influence its choices. Take a look:

Here’s an example of how a trait can change a dog’s behavior. After the first bark, the system calculates the chance that the dog barks again, and if it does, the chance is calculated once more, and so on.

Here’s how it plays out:

• A dog with the Quiet trait and excitement above 60/100 has a 15% chance of barking again.
• A dog with the Quiet trait that isn’t excited has a 10% chance.
• A dog with the Loud trait and excitement above 60/100 has a 60% chance of barking again.
• A dog with the Loud trait that isn’t excited has a 40% chance.
• A dog with neither trait has a 40% chance when excited and 20% when calm.

As you can probably guess, balancing all these variables so that each behavior worked as intended took an enormous amount of trial and error! 🤯 The tuning process was a real adventure, but we’re delighted with where it ended up. We’re still polishing plenty of small quirks, constantly adding and testing minor tweaks.

And now, after all that technical chatter, meet a doggo who reacts differently depending on where you pet him! 🐶❤️

We truly hope to bring you lovable companions that feel authentic. We can’t wait to hear what you think!

What’s Next?

There’s no vote this time! The next devlog will cover 📦 New items in Pets DLC, since so many of you asked us to explore that topic too!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3680100/House_Flipper_2__Pets_DLC/

The big launch on December 3 is getting closer, and we can hardly wait!
See you next time. Share your thoughts and feedback in the comments, and enjoy your flipping! 💙💙

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