Announcing Project DogWalk

This month we started development and pre-production of Blender Studio's second, long awaited video game project. The entire art team moved onto the project and started cooking.

The Interactive Project

That's what we've code named it in 2024 when I pitched it to the team. Not to avoid calling it a game (which it absolutely is) but it helped us think a bit broader. Instead of only focusing on a game that is fun we set our eyes on:

• Compelling interactive storytelling
• Asset creation for real-time rendering

One of Viviens concepts for the dog and playable character called "Chocomel".

At this point, the Blender Studio has firmly established itself as a film studio. So pivoting to video games is putting us in uncharted territory. Also, with 2025 being filled with lots of small projects, we reserved 4 months for the development of this game. That's not a lot. Games usually take years of hard work and iteration. That's why we dubbed the scope of the project a Micro-Game which we define by these points:

• A playtime of a single sitting
• Oriented around a single mechanic
• Extended primarily via replayability and player expression
• Reliant on a reusable & modular asset library

We'll embrace a humble and experimental spirit and also adapt to a new art-style of "papercraft". Overall, it's less ambitious than previous projects, by necessity, while leaning on the strengths of our team as much as possible.

A picture from the art desk where the assets are first designed and painted on paper with watercolors.

A Winter Playground

Project DogWalk will take place in a small snow-covered woods. You play as an adorable big dog who, together with their kid owner, is trying to decorate a snowman with the best things they can find nearby.

While you are a force of nature that the environment cannot stop from exploring, your little companion is very easily dragged and flung around and might get stuck. It's about whacky slip-ups and building a relationship.

An early test render with test papercraft environment assets and lighting from Beau and Andy.

Made in Blender. Powered by Godot.

Blender's first game project Yo Frankie was created in back in 2008, which helped test and develop the Blender Game Engine (RIP). Now there's the fantastic opportunity to work with the Godot Project to make a game happen again. Godot made big leaps in past years and it's exciting to see it being adopted and grow more and more.

Our main focus is and has always been testing Blender, but more broadly we are an Open Source studio. We run our workstations on Linux and restrict ourselves to the of FOSS tools and softwares to create our projects. It's not just Blender. Thus with this project we can finally welcome Godot to our tool-belt.

A first test by Simon to export our lookdev files to Godot and experiment replicate the lighting.

To make sure that our focus is still on testing and improving Blender, we will explore workflows to craft all assets and levels directly in Blender and develop a pipeline to have these seamlessly exported to Godot. Most of the heavy lifting to make this happen is already implemented thanks to the glTF file support and Godot's flexible importing features. Quite some time will be devoted to research how this can be improved even further. More specifics on that another time.

Weekly Updates Incoming!

The project page is now live (WIP) and all our incredible subscribers who support our projects will get weekly production logs, artworks, videos and files which you can download and enjoy.

Our environment assets are painted and crafted in real life, scanned and then modeled in Blender.

There will also be regular DevLog posts in our Blog with more information on the design, art style, production goals and more. We're really excited to share more in the coming 4 months. So I hope you are too and will join us on this exciting new project.

Thanks for reading!