Welcome to streetdog.life

Hello world.

Welcome to streetdog.life.

I have been living with a rescue dog, Dan, for over a decade. He is an amazing dog and is the inspiration for the stories and games published on this site. He is not just a rescue dog, however. Dan is a street dog. He spent the first year of his life living on the streets of Puerto Rico, without a proper home. He did not grow up trusting people. He loves our family fiercely, of course. But the rest of you, you will need to earn his trust. When you earn that trust, well– there is nothing quite like it. Street dogs are special. A huge thanks to the people at The Sato Project, who rescued Dan from Dead Dog Beach, and helped him find his way to our home.

Why the website, you ask! Why now?

Funny you should ask!

I am getting closer to finally launching my “help street dogs” game, and I need a place to share information about the game with the rest of the world. This is that place.

I also needed a place to share the hundreds of very short stories I had written about the precocious street dog Sandy and his robot companion ARC9. The stories were previously on Twitter. I fired Twitter. Now that streetdog.life is here, out of the archive they can come.

Game Status

I spent the better part of a year working on a full 3D version of the game. The few people I showed that version to confirmed that the core idea had promise. It’s actually fun finding dogs and making them your friend. However, I was starting to worry that as a solo dev I was going to have a hard time polishing the game enough for a full release. Even with some good asset packs getting the roads, and buildings and vegetation to look good was proving difficult.
So a few months ago I decided to spike a 3/4 view, tile based version of the game reminiscent of the Ultima games. I felt this might be easier to polish as I could more naturally separate the work of making a good tile set, from the mechanics of the game. The spike came together pretty quickly and has turned into something I can show people (soon) so that I can further validate the core game ideas (there are many explore/discovery ideas beyond the “find street dogs” that I can’t wait to share.)
That said, there is still A LOT of polish left to do.
And I have a backlog of maybe good ideas that I want to build. Some I will try to knock out rough versions of over the next week or two. I’ll start including them in my updates.

How can you help?

If you are super eager to be an early tester, let me know. It’s still rough but I’ll be adding some test accounts to TestFlight next week hopefully.
If you are an artist and have experience making tiles and animations and want to contribute to the game let me know. I’d be happy to look at some tile sets (houses, buildings, props, animals, etc) and animations you have built.
Similarly if you are a musician and want to see your music in a game, let’s talk.

-greg