To the Rescue game developer shares more about mission and design process

Dog O’Day talks with To the Rescue game developer Olivia Dunlap of Little Rock Games about her role in putting the project to completion.

Dog O’Day – So what was your kind of specific role in putting everything together?

Olivia Dunlap – So I’m one of the lead developers, and because we’re a really, really small team working on this game, I do programming, writing, design and a little bit of production work – you know – organizing the team and that sort of thing. So a little bit of everything. That’s the thing about small indie teams like this, you have to – if something comes up and it’s not something that you specialize in, sometimes you just have to handle it the best you can.

Does anyone on the team have any pets right now, or is that not really a good lifestyle choice at the moment? Did any pets kind of inspire you along the way?

OH MY GOSH, YES! We first came up with the idea while taking our dog to the dog park, we were sitting there on a bench talking about how cool it would be to have a game like this. We have a Great Dane named Keanu Reeves, he’s seven, and at this point he’s only a couple years older than the game, since we started working on it in undergrad. So he’s been with us the whole time and he’s constantly been our inspiration.

I think all of our team members have at least a pet, some of them have dogs, some of them have cats, so we’re definitely pet people.

So would you say the Great Dane is one of your favorite breeds?

I’d say so, yeah. But I try not to think about dogs as breeds, and so that’s something that we put into the game, because a person shouldn’t really expect to go to a shelter and find a purebred Golden Retriever or whatever.

So we don’t actually talk about them as breeds in the game, we just put them into categories – this is a large Retriever, it kind of looks like a Golden and may behave like it in some ways, so you can think that if you want – but we just don’t really want to perpetuate that idea of wanting purebred dogs to come into shelters.

But in terms of temperament, I’m a large dog person, so Keanu, he’s just a sweet gentle giant, and I do love that about Danes. He’s actually on the small side for Great Danes, he was part of a litter of 18 puppies, and he was the tiny little runt of them all, so he’s “only” like 115 pounds. He’s tiny, we call him Tiny all the time.