Boomer shooter dev discovers his dogs have been barking on an “unbearable” loop for years

Sometimes dogs are hard to shut up. Over a year and half after releasing Hrot from early access, the developer of the Quake-inspired shooter has fixed the dogs after discovering that a few of the canines have been, for some players, barking in a hideous and endless loop.

“A lot of people have complained about some barking,” said developer Spytihněv in an update post. “There are some negative reviews about it, but I’ve always thought that it’s just some people who don’t like the dog barking while [firing guns]. Today I found out that on some PC configurations there was a looping unbearable barking.”

Here is how one dog is meant to behave in the game. And here is an example of the same dog, but infinitely barking. You can shut the pup up for two seconds by feeding him until he vomits, but then he just starts yapping again. Then again, is this too not normal dog behaviour? Who can say. Judging by some of the Steam comments, it looks like this bug was affecting Linux-based systems.

“It’s a shame that such a bug survived there for almost 2 years,” said the developer, “levels with the ratters must have been awful, even downright unplayable, brrr.”

I haven’t played Hrot (to my shame, as a Quake-liker) but I do know that the “ratters” mentioned here refer to those same puppies that hunt rats for you in this level. They are very cute, but it wasn’t the highlight of the game for Rick, who wrote our Hrot review. He preferred the opening episode:

“Here, the game’s socialist parody and nuclear anxiety are in perfect sync. As you wander through Prague’s abandoned streets, gymnasiums, and cultural centres, you’ll encounter pictures of Czechoslovakia’s first communist dictator Klement Gottwald, which you can kiss to show your allegiance to the nation. Later, you’ll descend into some subterranean chamber lined with desiccated corpses, as that Geiger-counter crackle rises to an overwhelming crescendo.”

This makes it sound very high-brow. It is also a game in which you shoot a horse wearing a gas mask with a double-barrelled shotgun. It is a game where you fight a doppelganger of Putin riding a bear. Since finishing work on the shooter, the developer turned his sights to the strategy genre, releasing a retro RTS set on “a sandy planet with horses, tractors and techno music”. It is called – let me check… ah, Shrot.