Intermission - Let's talk plans!
- Christopher Tiller
- May 29
- 3 min read
Okay, so as I'm writing this I'm currently minus a dog, and consequently, minus the ability to train. Missile is, in fact, living his absolute best life where he doesn't need to use his brain. *
But being minus a dog gives me an excuse to reflect on something I find super interesting.
The interesting thing
Remember the plan I had at the start? It's okay, I've got it:
My current blueprint looks like: 1. Pick up the sword 2. Hold the sword (build duration) 3. Swing the sword 4. Hit objects with the sword. (Preferably another sword and not me)
Pretty straightforward, right?
In my head that looked something like this:
Yeah, so we definitely did not end up following that. Like, at all. What happened?
Running face-first into reality
The thing is, I did my best with the information I had at the time, and all I knew was:
Missile can pick things up
I can shape Missile to pick things up
Missile can move around while holding things
Missile can move his head around while holding things
That was it. I had no clue about any difficulties or pleasant surprises, and I had no idea what would happen once we got started. (Okay, maybe a little bit, like 10%)
And so I just... tried, and saw what happened.
I did that because I figured the best way to learn was through experience, so we dove right in!
Don't believe me? Let's look at some of the adjustments I had to make.
Mistakes were made
Taking a look at the first adjustment, we had to move from our original shaping plan. I just sorta, expected him to figure out grabbing the sword at the right spot through shaping. That didn't work.
Even after landing that, I learned very quickly that yes, he can hold things, but he really doesn't want to hold something unless it's food or a toy that he knows how to play with. After accounting for these misses, the plan looks just slightly different.
He was capable of holding any toy, but the sword was too hard. So we added a bunch of steps. The goal here was to completely isolate his ability to just hold something in a stationary position for an extended period of time. Even getting this was a lot of work since by default he wants to, ya know, move. But if he moved he would drop the toy. So that was fun.
Of course, this is when I realized that he defaults to dropping things at the slightest confusion. Because of course he does. So we had to fix that too. Remember When I added all of those perturbations and jostles, etc? I had to split that up because when I move a toy away from him he defaults to tugging, while moving towards him would cause him to want to spit it out. Essentially, every direction I moved the toy in, something different happened, so I had to address each of them differently for good measure.
Yeah. NEW DIAGRAM!
But... Okay! We're doing alright. This got way out of hand, but we're doing alright!
Wrap up
That's it for this week! This post actually got pretty gigantic, so I decided to split it into two. Next week we're going to finish up and cover everything that happened after we got the basic hold down.
In the meantime, I'd like to know more on your experiences! What are some training plans you had to change? How did you manage to adjust? (Leave a comment!)
As always, if you enjoy seeing this kind of stuff, join us over on DogKatas! Lots of cool training happenings, and some neat things to try. It's free and in beta, so I'd love to see you join and show off what you're up to!
See you in part 2!
Happy Training!
* Shoutout to Mythic Bones LLCÂ for taking good care of him. If you're in the area, give them a look!