"Project Dogwalk" - Blender Studio's second game project.

Each year, the Blender studio picks a project to work on to showcase Blender's capabilities. We have seen films most of the time, in 2008, however, they did “Yo Frankie” in the Blender Game Engine (used to exist but not anymore unfortunately).

Project Gold: A stylised film created in 2024 by Blender Studio

Now there’s a fantastic opportunity to leverage the fantastic open-source Godot Engine to make a game. Godot has been growing over the years, and it’s now at par with engines like Unity. Blender being open source, the studio always strives to ensure they restrict themselves to using FOSS tools, from the OS (Linux) to the application Software. Thus, the adoption of Godot into the ecosystem. For the first four months of 2025, the studio announced a project codenamed Dogwalk, which focuses on:

• Compelling interactive storytelling

• Asset creation for real-time rendering.

  
  

  A recording of Project DogWalk's gameplay.

  
  

  Due to the cumbersome work it takes to make games, they decided to do a microgame defined by:

  • A playtime of a single sitting

  • Oriented around a single mechanic

  • Extended primarily via replayability and player expression

  • Relies on reusable & modular asset library.

    
    

  They are also going for an experimental papercraft art style.

  
  

  A devlog of the project.

  
  

  Project description

  It’s set in a small snow-covered woods. You play as a dog who, together with their kid owner, tries to decorate a snowman with the best things they can find nearby.

  Artstyle

  The game is inspired by a papercraft art style, with a low-poly asset goal.

  It uses PBR shading and lighting, inspired by Jusant and Vane, everything is Miniature and Paperised.

  The animation of the characters and movement in the environment is also at a lower frame rate, akin to stop motion.

  Most assets ended up being primarily designed in real life as painted paper-cutout models. The models are then photographed, taken apart, and scanned. Some paint samples are also created specifically to become tileable.

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