Blender Studio has released a free-to-play game on Steam that is designed not just to be fun to play, but as an example of what you can create in the games arena using just open source software.

Dogwalk is top of the charts on Steam with a majority of the 800 reviews being "Very Positive". The game is very simple; you play the role of a fluffy dog walking through a snow covered woodland with frozen ponds, accompanied by a small child holding you on a leash. The objective of the game is to build and decorate a snowman using objects you find as you wander around the forest. 

The game should take a maximum of around twenty minutes to play, as you explore the snowy woodland, frozen ponds, and quiet trails. That sounds very simple (and it is), but different elements are designed to encourage you to work cooperatively with the child accompanying you so you don't get the leash wrapped round trees, or run too fast and have the child fall over. Many of the reviews say the need to take your time and enjoy the task in hand provide a therapeutic escape. 

The thinking behind the development of the video game project by Blender was to think more broadly than just a simple game. They wanted to have a game that could be played in a single sitting, oriented around a single mechanic, extended primarily via replayability and player expression, and reliant on a reusable & modular asset library.

Blender's first game project Yo Frankie was created in back in 2008, which helped test and develop the Blender Game Engine. The new game was created with the Godot Project, which is designed for the creation of both 2D and 3D games. The choice of Godot was driven partially because of Blender's position as an open source studio. The company runs its workstations on Linux and they restrict themselves to FOSS tools and software to create their projects.

The team set up a pipeline for producing the game with Godot as the engine and Blender as the DCC (digital content creation) tool. The ideal was to use Blender as much as possible and have a pipeline in place that would allow asset creation, scene assembly, animation libraries and basic game-specific definitions like collisions all from Blender. Godot would be mainly used to validate how things look in the game and to implement the game logic. 

To make the Blender team's assets available in the game files they settled on glTF as the exchange format as it has native support integrated into both Blender and Godot for assets such as materials, animations and custom mesh data. It is also highly extensible meaning the Blender team could could build their own functionality on top. 

To provide the necessary control to enable the art team to ship assets to Godot and iterate over them from Blender, custom code was used on either end. There was a Blender extension that would handle setting up and executing the export of an asset, and a Godot plugin that would make sure on every import that the data provided was used to re-create the asset correctly and generate the required game data.

Each asset exported to the game files only contained its own immediate data. If another asset was nested inside (e.g. collection instancing) it was replaced with a reference and that reference was recreated in Godot on import.

That way an tree asset and its parts could be defined in one file, and the instancing and placement of the tree can be defined in a separate set file. 

Dogwalk is available now on Steam. 

More Information

Dogwalk On Blender Studio

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