🐕 Notes on "Morning Walk"

Dear friends,

Welcome back to Saturn Peach! I’m taking a brief break from playing Tears of the Kingdom (quick summary: it’s amazing) to bring you the second installment in our Neighborhood theme. Today, I’ll be telling you a little bit about my game Morning Walk.

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Morning Walk was one of the very first games I wrote! The idea for it came from a game design workshop I took through the Tatamagouche Centre. Designer Alex Roberts gave a guest lecture for the first session, and she suggested we try making games out of the everyday things we know.

Right away, I thought about daily dog walks. Although we take the same routes every day, our walks are always different; the season, the weather, and other people and dogs on the sidewalk change the experience completely.

Once I had that basic idea, I considered a few different ways to format the game. In my first concept, one player would play the dog, and another would play the walker, and together, they would make a map of their neighborhood, marking important points as they went. I ended up not using this one because it wasn’t quite the right combination of ideas and mechanics; a lot of the things that make a walk distinct aren’t things I would mark on a map.

Taking some inspiration from Oliver Darkshire, I landed on a solo game. Here’s what the game text says:

It’s a beautiful day, you’re an adorable dog, and your human is taking you on your morning walk!

As a dog, you have 3 scores: Mischief (MIS), Intimidation (INT), and Bladder (BLD). Start your walk by rolling your 20-sided die to receive a Sidewalk Situation, and adjust your scores as directed.

Keep rolling and adjusting your scores until one of the following happens: MIS reaches 10, INT reaches 10, or BLD reaches 0.

Let me break down a few different things from this text:

1. You play the dog! I thought this would be way more fun than playing a person walking a dog (if you have a dog in real life, you do that all the time).
2. I recently changed the phrasing from “your owner” to “your human.” Thinking from a dog’s perspective, that word feels more accurate.
3. I abbreviate the stat names the same way you do with Dungeons & Dragons stats for two reasons: they take up less space that way, and I think it’s silly.
4. The Sidewalk Situations are on a random encounter table. For anyone new to role-playing games, when you use a random encounter table, you roll a die that has the same number of sides as the table has rows. Morning Walk uses a 20-sided die; if you roll a 17, you go to row 17 to see what situation you run into.

Next, you create your Pup Persona! Here’s the game text:

What’s your name?

What’s your size? tiny • small • medium • large • horse

What’s your fur texture? curly • fluffy • silky • wiry • tufty • shaggy

Do you like wearing sweaters? yes • no

Are you a good dog? yes • yes

Size and sweater preference have a slight mechanical impact later on:

1. If you roll a 6, it’s sweater weather! You gain 1 mischief if you like sweaters, or lose 1 mischief if you don’t.
2. If you roll a 12, a small dog barks at you. You lose 1 intimidation if you’re medium, large, or horse-sized, or gain 1 intimidation if you’re small or tiny.

Name and fur texture have no mechanical impact, but help you build a little image of yourself. “Are you a good dog?” is just for fun; I also use this panel of the game as its preview, and the answer options of “yes” and “yes” often draw in new players.

While writing the Sidewalk Situations table, I aimed for a mix of positive and negative effects for each stat. I drew a lot of inspiration from my daily walks with Paul (eat an old chicken nugget for +1 to mischief; delicious) and my family’s dog, Gracie (bark at a mean squirrel for +1 to intimidation). I also wanted to provide a few encounters that give you choices; for example, when your human goes into the coffee shop, you can choose to just chill and pee on stuff (-2 to bladder) or bark at everybody (+2 to intimidation).

Finally, I wrote a little ending for each win condition:

Mischief reaches 10. You are just the cutest little rascal, aren’t you?

Intimidation reaches 10. Yeah, you’re a pretty big deal around here. You can head home in triumph.

Bladder reaches 0. You did it! Everyone knows that this is your neighborhood.

I like to have some kind of an ending for most of my games, even if that ending is quite small.

Design-wise, this game is on its second iteration. The first version took up one side of a sheet of letter-sized paper, held vertically. Once I decided to print a run of this game for my online shop, however, I realized that wouldn’t actually be a great format. I updated it to a two-sized horizontal letter size, folded into thirds as a brochure; that way, it’ll be much easier to mail.

Going from one side to two sides, I had a lot of extra space, and I wanted to fill it with artwork. I found this super cute doggie illustration pack on Creative Market, and played around with arranging the individual dogs together into different groups. I also updated the fonts and colors to match the illustration style a bit more.

If you’d like to play it for yourself, Morning Walk is available for purchase through my itch.io shop. I recently ran a funding sale there to raise a bit of money to do the small print run I mentioned, so I’m working on finalizing the files for that! This will be the first one of my games that I print, and printing a game is one of my goals for this year.

Thank you so much for joining me on this journey through a dog walk! This is my first time really articulating why I’ve made certain design decisions, and I’ve really enjoyed it.

And just a small update to my last letter: the robin eggs have hatched!! The babies are tiny and a little freaky-looking, and I don’t think they can open their eyeballs yet. They’re wonderful.