Pets DLC Devlog #3 - The science of pet behavior!

How are you today, Flippers?!

Welcome to the third devlog for the upcoming House Flipper 2 - Pets DLC! In the previous devlog, we asked you to choose the next topic, and we gave you two options:

The behavioral system for pets OR New items in Pets DLC

The votes were extremely close, basically a tie, but in the end, The behavioral system for pets managed to get a very slight lead, so that's what we're discussing today!

If you haven't seen the previous devlogs, make sure to check them out: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1190970/view/675130991105279813 https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1190970/view/715659582307830847

Let's delve into the behavior system for our beloved companions, and start with the initial steps. It all began with tons of research... as always!

The first objective was to figure out all the little details about how a dog, a cat, or a rabbit behaves when all of its needs are fulfilled. We really wanted to make the animals feel natural in this state, and that's where we started creating the very first behavioral trees that look like this:

This, my dear flippers, is the process of decision-making of a given pet, represented in a diagram form. That's how we work on the majority of the behaviors and the choices behind them. Some behavioral patterns are rather simple to program this way, like the one you see above, but then some... are terrifyingly complicated!

This one in particular represents the thought process behind the mentioned "no current needs state". As you can imagine, there are many different options here, and the inclusion of some randomization creates behavior that is never fully predictable.

Fun fact! At the moment, the entire behavioral system in Pets DLC consists of a little more than 3,000 nodes - every single one is a decision point for your pet! But let's not get ahead of ourselves and get back to the creation of this system!

After we figured out how the animals should function without specific needs in mind, we started designing a needs-based system by first listing the needs we wanted to include in the correct order, creating a structure that holds multiple need variables and ranks them by priority.

That's how we shaped the pyramid of needs , which looks like this:

At this point, we knew how a pet behaves with no needs, and we had the needs sorted by priority - it was time to start messing with the numbers and experimenting!

Think of it like this: Each need in the pyramid is represented by a number from 0 to 100. We now knew what the priority for each of the needs is, and we had to figure out how fast they grow, and whether they all should grow in a linear fashion. We figured out they definitely shouldn’t!

Then we also had to consider that some regular player actions would be able to shape or interrupt the behavioral processes. To add to the whole experimenting process, on top of the current design, we started introducing animal traits - additional variables that would make your pets more unique and further influence their decision-making! Check them out:

Here’s an example of how a trait can affect the behavior of, for example, a dog: The system calculates the chance that after the first bark, the dog will bark again, and if it does, again, and so on.

This means:

• If the dog has the Quiet trait and its excitement is above 60/100, there’s a 15% chance it will bark again.
• If the dog has the Quiet trait and isn’t excited, the chance is 10%.
• If the dog has the Loud trait and its excitement is above 60/100, there’s a 60% chance it will bark again.
• If the dog has the Loud trait but isn’t excited, the chance is 40%.
• If the dog has neither trait, the chance is 40% when excited and 20% when not.

As you can probably tell, balancing all the variables and getting different behaviors to work as intended required an insane amount of trial and error! The adjustment process was out of this world, but in the end we are very happy with the results! There are still many little quirks that we're working on, constantly introducing and testing small changes.

Last but not least, after all this scientific blabbering, here's a doggo that behaves differently depending on where you pet him!

We really hope to give you some lovable companions that feel authentic! Can't wait to see your reactions!

No voting this time! The next devlog is going to be about New items in Pets DLC , as so many of you wanted us to discuss that topic as well!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3680100/House_Flipper_2__Pets_DLC/ We’re getting pretty close to the big launch on December 3, can’t wait! See you next time, share your thoughts and feedback in the comments, and have a wonderful time flipping!