IT. IS. TIME! [previewyoutube=n110ULoE1w0;full][/previewyoutube] Paw Pirates is officially RELEASED! After a long year of development, some part-time, some full-time, and through many trials and tribulations, we made it to the finish line. Paw Pirates is now available on steam for free. When I started working on this game, my goal was to release a proper game, and I am immensely proud of myself and the team as we have accomplished that goal. Thank you to those who have been along for the ride, reading our updates and supporting us along the way. And thank you to all of our friends and family who have supported us during development, playtesting and encouraging us. We hope you enjoy the game with friends. That is why we went through with this. Thank you -Murray

[ 2025-01-17 03:05:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi all! I just wanted to create a quick post to let you know that due to delays in the steam review process resulting from a late submission on our end, the game's release will be delayed by a few days. Sorry about this, but stay patient! we're really excited for you all to have the opportunity to play. -Murray

[ 2025-01-04 04:24:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello Paw Pirates nation! We are beyond excited to finally release the game, and the release date is in less than a week! This past year of development has been such an incredible journey, and we can't wait for you to finally get a chance to play the full release! We've been hard at work adding the finishing touches to the game! Remember to play the game on January 3rd, 2025 when it releases! There are few BIG surprises waiting for you in the full game...
Thank you for your support!!! -Murray

[ 2024-12-27 19:05:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

Demo Release

Hello all! I'm really excited to announce that the Paw Pirates Demo has officially released! You can find and play the demo at this link I really hope that you enjoy playing the demo with your friends, locally or remotely via steam remote play. We'll be updating the demo over the next month, and we'd love your feedback! If you have any notes about the demo (bugs, issues, annoyances, compliments), then please leave them on this google form. Have fun with the demo! -Murray

[ 2024-08-30 20:02:51 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello! Did you miss us? It's been a while since our last update, but that doesn't mean we've been slacking off! We've got some very exciting updates to share with you today:

1v1 Mode

We've been thinking about how to make the game as accessible as possible, and we didn't like the restriction of needing 4 players to play. That's why we've decided to add a 2-player mode to the game! We've adjusted some of the levels to be slightly different in 2-player mode, here's a sneak peak:

Demo Release

You won't have to wait long now to try the game! The demo for Paw Pirates will be dropping this coming Friday, August 30th at 6:30 EST!!! This Demo will include levels 1-3 in 2v2 and 1v1 mode! We're so excited to share this game with you all, and we're hoping the demo will give you a good idea of what to expect when the game releases in full. Until then, stay tuned! We'll have more to share about what's coming in the next few weeks. So long! -Murray

[ 2024-08-29 00:16:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

We're back! The team took a short hiatus to rest and recharge, and now we're coming back at you with some updates from the past few weeks!

Beautifying Our Levels

One of the things we put a lot of time into recently was making our levels look prettier! We've had one of the artists for the team sculpt a set of docks that really make our levels pop. We don't want to give everything away, but here's the before/after for level 1: Before:
After:
We're also adding some more decorations for the levels, here's a sneak peak (seals!):

Performance Improvements

In the last dev log, we showed off a little bit of how we're doing the ripples effect in the water. The method we we're using turned out to be a little slow, so we updated it to improve performance! We don't want you to have a beast of a computer to play this game, so we're putting special attention on the performance. Hopefully this will help all of the people with a potato for a computer play the game (we've all been there) :)

Demo Updates

You may have noticed that a few weeks ago we mentioned we'd be dropping a demo soon. Our original goal was to have the demo release on June 21. However, we gave it some thought and came to the conclusion that the version of the game we have right now isn't up to par with what we'd like to put out there. There are a lot of games out there in the world, and we think it's really important that what we're making is worth your time as a player, and right now it just isn't there yet. Because of this, we've decided to push the demo back to release at the end of the Summer. (August 2024) We didn't make this decision lightly, as we're all really excited to get this game out into the world. Thank you for understanding. We'll be back with more updates next week! -Murray

[ 2024-06-24 21:46:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

Welcome back to the devlog! We've got more to share about our visual updates this week: Water Updates We spent a lot of time this week updating the water shader for the game! The previous water shader we used had poor-quality ripples at shallow areas of the water. We fixed this using some creative math tricks, and here's the result:
In addition to this, we've made some coloration updates, added surface reflections, and improved the underwater decorations to give each of our scenes a better look! Here is the before/after for level 1: Before:
After:
Lighting Improvements We also added shadows to our game, and better support for additional light sources. We're still figuring out how to make it look cohesive with the game, but here's a little demo:
If you're interested in the boring technical details of any of the above, check out my twitter for some behind the scenes content: https://x.com/MurraySmithDev/status/1797702032553578538 That's all for now! Stay tuned for more updates next week! -Murray

[ 2024-06-04 20:43:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey all! Here's our update for this week: We've spent this week working on visual updates! We're trying to spice up the look of the game to make it more appealing and clear for players. Here's what we did:

Color Correction

This week we dived into the wild world of Colors in an effort to make the game more appealing to look at and easier to play. Here's the before/after of these changes on our character select screen. Before:
After:
Here's the result on the first level: Before:
After:
We're really happy with our efforts, and we're hoping it will make the game more enjoyable for you all :)

Decorations

We also spent a good chunk of this week working on some extra decorations for the backgrounds of each scene. While most of this isn't yet ready to share, here's a sneak peak of the new clouds and wind particles we've added to the level select screen:
We've also reworked the fire particles to make them match the game's cartoony style a bit more:
That's all we've got to show for now, but stay tuned for next week's devlog! Thanks for reading! -Murray

[ 2024-05-28 21:56:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

Welcome back!

Hello all! Welecome back to the Paw Pirates weekly devlog! Here's what we've been up to:

Meet the Team

Are you curious about who's behind this game? Good news! We're creating a series of posts on socials to give you a better idea of who's developing paw pirates. We will be posting these once a week on our instagram, tiktok, and youtube shorts, so make sure to follow us on all those platforms! Here's the first one, showing off our game's team lead: Murray Smith (aka the guy writing this right now!)
Thank you to one of our wonderful artists, Vanessa, for illustrating this (https://www.instagram.com/nessckie/)

Online Multiplayer

We're pleased to announce that the online multiplayer prototype is complete! We ran our first playtest today (May 21) with the team and it went pretty well! Still some bugs to sort out, but we're really excited to show this feature to your all when we release our demo (more info on that next week :) )

New Trailer

If you haven't seen it yet, we dropped a new trailer for the game last week! the trailer is live on our steam page, so check it out if you haven't already!!! (also remember to add the game to your wishlist) That's all for now, thanks for reading! -Murray

[ 2024-05-21 22:10:16 CET ] [ Original post ]

This week we're excited to be dropping a brand-spanking-new Gameplay Trailer!!! Check it out! [previewyoutube=oL2Bv4D1iRg;full][/previewyoutube] We wanted to show off some of the new UI assets for the game, including indicators for the bombs, and player number hovers! The trailer also features our fancy end game screen, which was inspired by the victory screen in Super Smash Brothers: Ultimate.
Aside from this, we're almost ready to share more with you about the online multiplayer features we've been working on. We think you'll have fun with them, and hopefully invite your friends to play. That's all from us this week, but keep an eye on our instagram and twitter for more posts this week: https://www.instagram.com/pawpiratesgame/ https://twitter.com/PawPiratesGame -Murray

[ 2024-05-14 22:26:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

This week we're diving into the technical stuff to give you a look into how we're implementing online multiplayer in the game!

Lobbies

For invites and lobbies, we're piggybacking off of steam's built-in lobby system, which integrates directly with the steam friends list and game invites! This has been a great tool for us, as it helps us avoid making our own bespoke lobby and invite code (which is something we always try to do).

Netcode

For our netcode, we're taking advantage of Unity's "netcode for gameobjects" toolset, which gives us the foundation on which to build our netcode. For those who aren't familiar, netcode is a broad term used to describe code that synchonizes the game across the internet between multiple players. Since each game has different rules, each game needs custom netcode. We ran into a lot of snags, as this was our first time implementing netcode like this, but it's turning into a great learning experience!

In other news...

Other than netcode, we've been hard at work continuing our visual updates we discussed last week (check out our last devlog for more on that). We're also starting on some more visual updates which I won't share now. That's all for this week! -Murray

[ 2024-05-07 01:05:28 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey all! This week we've been hard at work bringing online multiplayer to the game, and going over visual updates we've got planned. Here's what's in the works:

Online Multiplayer

The first big change we have planned is adding online multiplayer. We've been able to take advantage of Steam's lobby system to create player lobbies for peer-to-peer networking! Here's an demo of the invite flow:
We're still working on this, but we're excited to share more when it's ready!

Visual Updates

We've gone over our existing assets and made a list of what we'd like to update. Our fantastic concept artist, Iulia, has put together a quick sketch of what it might look like once we've got these updates in. Enjoy!
We won't share everything we have planned yet, but let's just say we're burning with anticipation ;) (okay fine we're making fire levels).

New Level Designs

We're also looking at desiging some new levels to fit in with our new mechanic, which we won't share with you now. The basic shapes of the levels are coming together, and we'll begin prototyping this week. Here's an idea of the shape:
That's all we've got to share for now, but tune in next week for some more juicy details about Paw Pirates! -Murray

[ 2024-04-29 20:52:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

Today we wanted to share with you everything about Paw Pirates; Who we are, what we're making, and when you can play.

What is Paw Pirates?

Paw Pirates is a 2v2 party game! Grab bombs and blow up the enemy team's pirate ship, last team standing wins.

How much money will this game cost?

Paw Pirates will be completely free. No features will be gated behind a paywall, and we have no plans to make money off the game at this time. This game is passion project for us, and we want to make sure nobody has barriers for access if they'd like to play. Our decision to make this game completely free comes from our hope that you all will enjoy the game with others!

Is Paw Pirates for me?

Paw Pirates might be for you if you enjoy fast-paced party games, such as Mario Kart, Overcooked, or Smash Brothers. You also might enjoy Paw Pirates if you like to get competitive with your friends (maybe sometimes too competitive). We're designing the game to require very little previous gaming experience to enjoy, so it's a great game to play with friends or family that might not usually enjoy games (we've actually won an award for accessibility, which you can read more about here).

When will Paw Pirates be released?

We're aiming to release the game in Q3 2024. No fixed release date has been set at this time, and we'll have more updates for you as we approach Q3. This estimate is based on a number of features that we'd like to add to make this game the best it can be.

Roadmap

Here is our rough roadmap for paw pirates. These are (broadly) the features in-order that we'd like to include before release. (1) Online Multiplayer In order to make this game as accessible as possible, online multiplayer is a must. The reality is that most players don't get together in the basement to play games anymore, so we need to include online to allow players to play the game. (2) More Levels Currently, there are five levels in the game. In order to deliver the vision of the game, we need more levels to give players options for replayibility. This means we need to add more levels and more worlds. here's a hint: we're working a very, very menacing penguin >:))) (3) Visual Updates While we're very proud of the artwork on the game (and proud that it was all done in-house without the use of generative AI), we recognize that there are some elements that we'd like to improve before release. We'll be hard at work updating our assets to fit the cartoony style that we're aiming for, and adding additional VFX to make the game feel responsive and rewarding. (4) 2-Player Mode We won't share much about this here, but just know that we're working on ways to play the game with less than four players. Stay tuned!

Wrapping Up

As we wrap up this first announcement, I want to take a quick second to thank the community for giving us early signs that you're interested in our game! We're getting some pretty good results on our early wishlists, and we're really excited that you are excited about this game! Paw Pirates is developed by a small team of students, so we're really happy that there are people out there who are looking forward to playing. We can't thank you enough for your support!!! That's all from us, thanks for reading and we'll be back soon with more news! -Murray

[ 2024-04-23 19:20:03 CET ] [ Original post ]