The week after finishing the Frogger challenge was pretty tough. It was the first time I could say with some measure of confidence that I had completed a project, but the usual doubts came back with a vengeance. I still don't feel confident, but at least confident enough for a blog with "small and miscelaneous things".

My recent chore is walking my sister's dog, and with this inspiration I've been working on and off on a prototype involving that activity. First I spent a while drawing dogs, actually. A miscelaneous thing that emerged as a result:

Today I finally got down to prototyping in earnest, in 2D, but I probably want to eventually switch to 3D, which I consider my stronger suit.

You walk between waypoints (or can take a rest with the "Stop" button). I thought this would free the player up to focus on other things such as commands for the dog (which I haven't gotten to work yet), but now I see that it would be much more natural to just point and click to go to a spot.

Anyway, I don't yet know... well, a lot of things. Ideally there'd be an element of training. And the small matter of displaying the leash, especially combining it in an intuitive way with the length slider.

Maybe there is a grain of fun to this. I certainly like an AI companion, regardless of how primitive its behavior is at the moment. Except I'm afraid that a big part of the charm comes from the clean 2D look, and I don't know if I'll be able to transfer it to 3D.