Stray Dogs was probably one of the most enjoyable games I worked on this semester. I grew up exposed to 2D platformers, mainly Super Mario Bros. 3, so the assignment wasn’t something I was worried about in the design sense. I was more preoccupied about the main restriction of the assignment; that it had to be about something unrelated to media.

As someone who consumes a lot of media, that became a problem early on for me.

It was later that during work, I got a message from my mother. She mentioned that we would get a visit from Tracy. She is a pitbull that my sister rescues some years ago. We tried to take her back home to Venezuela, and while we succeeded, she wasn’t able to get along with our other dogs. We luckily managed to find a home for her, so while thing didn’t end as we hoped, we got her a happy home.

That was the inspiration for my game, I remembered all the street dogs that fill the cities in Caracas. I wondered how they manage to stay alive, especially in the food crisis that the country currently finds itself in.

In the next entry I will talk about the mainly way I focused on the game’s level design.