To the Rescue game developer Olivia Dunlap talks about the game’s mission and the design process.
Here at Dog O’Day, we love all things pet-related, and enjoy pet-themed games. So when we got to talk with To the Rescue game developer Olivia Dunlap via a Zoom interview in March, that was pretty cool to learn more about the upcoming game’s mission and the design process in general.
While bibliophiles and fans of dog writing especially, if they are sympathetic to the plight of shelter animals, will learn a lot about the challenges that come with shelter management’s daily operation from Cara Sue Achterberg’s excellent book One Hundred Dogs and Counting, To the Rescue approaches the same mission of raising awareness from a different angle – that of a simulation video game with some elements of pet care. (Imagine Roller Coaster Tycoon in a blender with Nintendogs and a Saturday morning cartoon animation style.)
To the Rescue is an animal shelter simulator game developed by Little Rock Games and published by Freedom Games, slated for release later this year across PC and Mac (on Steam) and the Nintendo Switch.
Dog O’Day – Hey Olivia! This game started out as a college project, right?
Olivia Dunlap – Yeah, it was. [Little Rock Games co-founder] Tanner [Marshall] and I were the lead devs, and we started working on it as an undergraduate project, just because we wanted to get into games and thought it was a cool idea, messed around with it after class sort of thing.
Did either of you have a background in animal rescue, or how did you decide “hey, managing an animal shelter would be a really cool game”?
That’s a really interesting question, because neither of us had really done anything in that field at that time, but a lot of our friends had, and we were in a situation where we were living with a lot of different people, so it was difficult to do that [foster animals]. But it was something that we really cared about, and we had lots of friends and acquaintances who were constantly fostering animals and volunteering and stuff like that, they were always talking about their experiences and were surprised that this sort of game didn’t exist in the sim management genre already.
We just decided that it would be a really fun and potentially really worthwhile project to take on.
Olivia Dunlap, To the Rescue game developer, talked with Dog O’Day via Zoom about the design process of the project.
Dog O’Day – I was really impressed with how detailed it looks. How did you guys decide to embrace the – I mean, there’s obviously the warm and fuzzy adoption side, but sometimes they do get sick, sometimes you do have to put animals down, that kind of thing. How did you guys decide to include those elements as well?
Yeah, that was definitely – exactly like you just said, THAT was one of the core ideas at the forefront of our minds was to make sure that was what this game was about. Because it’s about a dog shelter, there’s this expectation like “oh, it’s a pet game, it’s gonna be cute” – and it is still cute, there needs to be some relief and be able to appeal to that audience too –
Animal shelters, they’re a real place and they have real needs, and we really wanted to convey part of the experience of what that experience was like. We tend to think a lot here on our team about where to balance that – cause on the one hand you do want to simulate reality as best you can, but on the other you need to make a fun game, so try to find a middle ground there. And in a way it’s sort of a chance for us to put our money where our mouth is, because we really care about shelters and so we want to convey that with the game.
Right, and so that’s why you included elements like how the dogs may not be perfect little fuzzy angels, and you need to fundraise, and all that kind of thing.
Absolutely! So fundraising is really important, but so is positioning the shelter in the broader community. In addition to managing your funds, you also have to manage your reputation, and that’s really important because if you just neglect all the dogs, as a player, if you never feed them and let them just sit around, hope somebody takes one of these poor things home, you can get shut down just from the community deciding that there’s a problem with the shelter. So that’s a really important element as well.
And then if you do manage your resources well, then you upgrade your shelter, right?
Mm-hmm! There’s gonna be some progression there, you start off with a really small shelter, but if you get extra resources – you might accrue donations, do adoptions successfully, and there’s other fundraising things you can do in the game – you can end up with enough money to expand your space so you can hold more dogs, or you could hire help, so there are a lot of different ways you can grow and expand.
From the preview trailer, it was an interesting contrast from the realism of the gameplay with the cute Game Boy Advance style of animation.
We’re really happy with the art style that we have for the game. It’s gone through a couple different variations because it’s been a learning process for us as programmers, working with this specific art style, and also with our artist, Bryon Buslig as he was trying to learn how to pin down the art style and how to make artwork for games, but we found a nice middle ground of cute hand-animated artwork and being able to use that simplistic style to be able to capture movements of lots of different types of dogs, with relatively limited resources.
Is there a technical term for that style of animation?
For the animation in particular…I would just call it “hand animated,” as opposed to programmatically animated things, because each and every single animation is hand-drawn by our animator, Kat Higgins, so that would be how I would describe the animation style.
And how did you decide on the music that was in the trailer, that light bouncy piano music?
It really just suited the tone of the game. We want the game to be that sort of high energy, exciting atmosphere, without ignoring the fact that it does have its share of downer moments as well. But in general we want it to be a positive experience, we want people to be excited about connecting dogs with their owners, cause that’s really important to the gameplay.
So the music in the game itself will be similar in tone?
In tone, yes, probably. I don’t know that that track in particular is going to be in there. I’m not a music person, one of our other team members, Joe Williams, handles that, and I’m just over here like, “Sure, that sounds great!” That’s basically my level of involvement in that aspect of the project.
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.
To the Rescue game developer Olivia Dunlap talks about the inspiration for the game.
Dog O’Day – Looking through video game history, what are some of the games involving animals that stand out as important to you and the rest of the team? I was a big fan of Webkinz, and am really enjoying Animal Crossing right now.
Olivia Dunlap – Yeah, there’s been a lot. But sort of surprisingly, a lot of our inspiration for this game come from games that aren’t about animals, so things like Prison Architect, which is about sort of managing a prison – you’d be surprised at how similar that is to building a shelter from a top-down view.
I played so much Nintendogs growing up, I was solidly in the demographic for that game when it came out, so that was a big one for me. It was really great, as someone who didn’t have a dog at the time, to have a virtual dog to play with and take care of, so yeah, that definitely stuck with me a lot. And I also played lots of pet-adjacent games, like Pokemon and Tomigotchis and stuff like that.
So we definitely took a little bit of inspiration from that genre of pet care games, but it more of a simulation game first, so it’s a little more concerned with the overall shelter, even though you still get that one-on-one interaction with the dogs. It’s a game that overlaps a few different genres, for sure.
Which platforms will the game be available on?
As of right now, we’re only confirmed to be coming out on PC and Mac at launch, but definitely keep an eye on upcoming press releases for more information about that. Steam is our primary platform that we’re using.
[Editor’s note – To the Rescue will be coming to Nintendo Switch later this year as well.]
Do you have an exact release date yet?
It’s going to be coming out later this year, but at this time we’re not quite ready to announce a release date quite just yet.
And 20 percent of your proceeds will be going to animal rescue efforts, right? That’s a cool way to tie into the real world.
Yeah, the first thing we’re trying to do here is raise awareness, right? To put people in the shoes of someone working at a shelter and having to do these really hard things, to struggle with funding, all these kinds of things. And so it felt really appropriate to us to show them [players], “Hey, here’s what it’s like to like to run a shelter without funding,” and we’ll actually be doing something that makes an impact on that real-world problem, talking about real-world issues and grounding ourselves in our community and elsewhere is important to our company, and something that we really wanted to do from the start.
So 20 percent of our profits from the game are gonna go to animal rescue, we’re still talking with a lot of different potential charities right now, but we’re hoping it will go to one that will help fund shelters all over the country.
Have you all [at Little Rock Games] published any other games before?
Well, we’re a bit of a strange company in that we do both physical tabletop games as well as digital games. So this is actually our second game, our first published game is called Galactic Scoundrels, it’s a card-based storytelling game. That was our first game, and it’s already out, and we learned a lot from that game, but it’s a lot different than making a video game! It’s been an interesting journey for us.
We also do lots of small-scale contract work with local businesses and things like that, like we worked with the local hospital on some research projects, making simulations for them, we’ve also worked with a local museum in making interactive exhibits for them, so we do lots of interactive media for things that we enjoy or that we believe in.
So if somebody wanted to learn more about the game, or the company itself, what are some of the ways they could do that?
The best way to learn about and follow the game is just to go straight to our steam page, there you can wishlist it if you have a Steam account, we post updates to Steam and you’ll seem them as soon they come out. And it’s just a good platform that’s all in one place. You can also learn more about us at LittleRockGames.com and To the Rescue at ToTHeRescueGame.com, all of our social media uses the same names. So between the Steam, Twitter, and our company Discord – it’s a chat-based platform where you can ask questions about the game, meet other fans – those are some of the main places we inhabit.
Stay tuned for more information about the game’s release, and be sure to follow Dog O’Day on Facebook at Daily Dog and Instagram at @DogODayFS.