Long Puppy

Christa Mrgan: who’s a good dog? You are! In Long Puppy, you play as a very good dog who will grow to any length to fetch the ball thrown by your clumsy owner.

Welcome to the Playdate Podcast, bringing you stories from game designers, developers, and the team behind Playdate, the little yellow game console with a crank. I’m Christa Mrgan. . Today I am talking with Jonas, also known as Indiana-Jonas, about his game Long Puppy. Heads up that there will be spoilers about gameplay mechanics, some secrets to discover, and the game’s main enemy. But, let’s get cranking!

Jonas (aka Indiana-Jonas): My name is Jonas. But I go by Indiana Jonas on the internet. I’m a cartoonist and game designer. and I, I made the Long Puppy all by myself.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, he’s another one of those people who are good at everything, and can make a whole game by himself. Honestly, good for him!

Jonas (aka Indiana-Jonas): In Long Puppy you play as a long dachsund. And you go out to play fetch with your clumsy owner who is really bad at throwing balls. The ball often ends up in weird places, like sewers or in someone’s cabin. You still have to fetch the ball, so you have to like sort of climb there as this long puppy. So you have to eat food and, become longer until you can reach the ball.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, you can move your front half up and down, but your body has to be long enough for your feet to touch the next landing point. Then the rest of you kind of follows along. So the game is a bit of a puzzle and a bit of an action platformer.

Jonas (aka Indiana-Jonas): But I don’t really see a Long Puppy as a platformer. I didn’t think of it as one as I was making it, because to me, a platformer is a little guy going left and right and jumping and you don’t really do that in this game. It’s more like an alternative controls type of game, like, Katamari or Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy.

Christa Mrgan: Oh, but I guess I do see Getting Over It as a platformer. An unconventional one, for sure. But anyway, how did the idea for Long Puppy start?

Jonas (aka Indiana-Jonas): I’m not completely sure where it started. I started making the game as a side project while I was working on another much bigger game called Surmount.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, Surmount is a climbing roguelite, and also kind of a platformer? Actually you should go play it and then let me know. There’s a link in the show notes!

Jonas (aka Indiana-Jonas): I started tinkering a bit with a Playdate to see if I could get something running on the console, and following some YouTube tutorials, I got a sprite to spin using the crank, so you could rotate it in different directions using the crank.

Christa Mrgan: Oh, just a reminder that in games, sprites are images or animations that have some kind of interactivity-- so like the character or certain objects-- and they move independently of background images. Okay.

Jonas (aka Indiana-Jonas): And then I made it move in the direction that the sprite is looking. And then I was like, what if I add body parts around it and it became like a snake thing? And then I thought of dachsunds because I grew up with a dachsund. And my, family has a bit of a history with dachsunds. We’re on the fourth dachsund currently.

Christa Mrgan: I did not ask what happened to the first three, so I’m going to imagine that they’re all actually happy and healthy and fine, and his family just likes to get new dogs from time to time and stack them on top of the old ones to see see how high they can get. Anyway.

Jonas (aka Indiana-Jonas): Yeah. Yeah. So in the level, you eat a lot of food and become longer depending on how much food you ate. And then once you have fetched the ball and returned it to your owner, the owner tells you it’s poopy time. And Then you have to spin the crank to poop out all the food that you ate. And it makes like this tower of poop. And like that’s your score. The height of the poop is your score in the level.

Christa Mrgan: Yes, poop is always funny! But in a game that’s all about a dog, I was really hoping to pet the dog. But since I’m playing as the dog, I guess I was hoping the owner could like pet me?? But, alas.

Jonas (aka Indiana-Jonas): I never thought about it. Now I wish I had put that in the game. Unless I do an update for it.

Christa Mrgan: We need an update where the owner just tells you you’re good and like scratches behind your ears. Perfect.

So Jonas is an experienced cartoonist and illustrator. And he’s designed games and logos and icons, but converting his style to 1-bit pixel art was a little more challenging than he expected it to be.

Jonas (aka Indiana-Jonas): It was a little tricky 'cause I draw a lot with black and white, just ink in my sketchbook a lot. So I thought I could just do the same thing on the Playdate. Draw as I normally do, but in low-res, one bit, pixel art, but didn’t quite translate like it, it felt too messy for my taste.

So, I thought about the intro sequence, the place when you open the Playdate for the first time with patterns and movement. I thought it, it’s so nice, like it looks so colorful, even though the screen is one bit. So I wanted to recreate that in the game a bit.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, the Playdate launch animation was created by some super talented folks at Chronosphere in L.A. I love it so much. And there’s a color version that the team created. You should check it out. There’s a link in the show notes.

Jonas (aka Indiana-Jonas): I looked at that animatic a few times and tried to incorporate the different patterns and tried to go for sort of a patchwork quilt kind of, feeling with the sprites. The dirt is zig-zaggy and yeah, trying to go for patterns in materials rather than trying to make them look, look real.

it’s the first time I make a game in 1-bit. I did the one bit pixel fan art, like of Mario like a long time ago, but that was the only thing I ever did, aside from that. I think the trickiest thing is getting the, like the camera moving and using dithering and patterns, like it created a flickering effect, which was not so desirable, but I found a thing on the Playdate forum, where someone had figured out that if you snap the camera movement by two pixels, then will remove the flicker of, most dither effects, so it got pretty safe after that and I focused on, instead of line art, I went for more of like solid things are really black and dark and things that you would just pass through, they are a lot brighter. I think that helped a lot.

It’s harder to say how I designed the dog exactly. Because it felt like there was so many small steps and just intuitive decisions along the way. But, I feel like I found a hacky solution to the way it draws the body. Like I feel like a good programmer, they would have, uh, used like a spline or something to draw the body in a nice, smooth curve, but I just place sprites along the path of the dog because that’s a lot easier for me. and then when you go back, I just move the head to each previous body part along the way, and it remembers the rotation of the head along the path. So there’s no fancy math for anything about it.

It’s just a really simplistic way to do it. I did figure out one mathy thing, which was to like, make the last few pieces of the body follow a little bit, like a chain, follow the head so that there is some sense of, weight or fluidity to the body as well. And that also smoothed out the curve just by accident, too.

Christa Mrgan: Nice. I love a happy accident. well, like I mentioned at the top of the episode, Jonas made the whole game himself, including the music, so I asked him what he was going for there.

Jonas (aka Indiana-Jonas): I was trying to convey like the silliness of being a dog, but each part of the game is a little bit different. So I think the main menu to me is like a little introduction to the whole game. It’s just the dog owner and you, Long Puppy, walking and deciding where to go. The music is quite energetic and like, peppy. At the same time there’s a little bit of a huff and puff, like the owner is running out of breath. I try to add little hints of what is going on in the music. You could play the music in the background when I describe it.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, good idea.

Jonas (aka Indiana-Jonas): Okay. and then like, I was listening a lot to the Katamari soundtrack and I like to mix in weird little sounds I don’t like it too much when you can hear what instrument it’s supposed to be. I am not much of a musician, so it’s a lot of just figuring it out as I go along. It took a really long time to make the music. I almost never do it. It’s only when I have to. Not because I don’t like it, I love doing it, but it’s, it’s, painful ’ cause it’s so difficult.

It’s just a FL Studio and like all the instruments that come with it. I drew the notes in the little piano roll thing. That’s all I know how to do.

I used to have a little piano connected to the computer, but I can’t play piano, so it doesn’t help at all. Then I have to learn to play an instrument, but this way I can just avoid it and just focus on composing.

I think writing the music for the poop sequence was really funny. It was really what made that sequence come together. And it feels like the poop is the punchline in the game. That’s when I realized oh yeah, this is not a serious game. It’s just a bit nuts.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, it’s a silly game, but in a great way. And while Jonas spent a lot of time on the music, his approach to sound design was more pragmatic, mainly using existing sound effects without changing too much. But he did do a little bit of original recording when he couldn’t find what he needed.

Jonas (aka Indiana-Jonas): I think like 99% of the sounds there is stuff I grab from free sound.org and some of them I had to tweak but it’s almost completely from there. When you hear the dog getting longer and shorter, when I added that in the prototype, I was like, oh yes, I wanna make this game just because I like hearing that sound and that, that’s very satisfying as a developer, to get that to work and hear it. And the sound for the dog owner, those are like the only ones I actually recorded myself because it was too hard to find anyone who was doing the little chirps and screams.

I tried to make it a bit silly and ridiculous. Like when you, when you start a level, the owner, he throws a ball and the sequence is like, almost like an intense anime moment where he, he grabs the ball and throws it and there’s like lines going everywhere.

Well, like intense lines. And then when the level loads, you see the ball land and it just falls straight from the top of the screen and it just lands like, no, no bounce or anything. It’s just really stiff. I like that kind of contrast. And then I want people to feel a bit like they are a dog as well.

I just think it’s funny. This is a dog simulator, but it doesn’t care about being realistic. It’s a funny dog simulator.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, and one of the funny, ridiculous aspects of it being a dog simulator that he’s about to mention is a bit of a spoiler. So just a heads up!

Jonas (aka Indiana-Jonas): So there’s like a, a pee journal where you can find hidden pee spots in the levels. If you approach them, you can sniff the pee, and because you have a such a refined sense of smell, you can tell exactly what and who peed and why. So there’s like a, a loafing cat, an ant who drank soda, and a guy who worked in the supermarket and had a very tight belt and he couldn’t open the belt. So he, he peed himself in the basement of the supermarket.

Christa Mrgan: Everybody loves bodily functions, c’mon! But Jonas thought making a silly dog simulator wasn’t really enough to make the game fun. He knew he had some fun elements and an interesting core mechanic in the game, but he struggled at first to create a gameplay loop that he felt was actually compelling enough for people to want to keep playing.

Jonas (aka Indiana-Jonas): The hardest thing about making the game, or like what took the longest, was the gameplay loop. Because at first, it was just find enough food in the level before the time runs out.

And that was not fun at all because there was no reason to look for food or anything. Nobody felt motivated to play or explore. It just felt so pointless. It took a while to figure out what to do about it. I guess if you’re trying to become longer, the goal should probably be to become long enough to reach something in level.

So when the idea of having the goal being to fetch a ball came in, the whole gameplay loop fell into place because I had something to base it on. People had a frame of reference to, and it also helped me describe what you do in the game: you play fetch.

That’s what you do in the game. So the loop is: eat food, grow longer, reach ball, and return to owner. And that made the game a bit better already. And then I made like a lot of friends tested and one of them, he reached a point where he had fetched the ball and he was going to return it to the owner. And He felt like it was really boring to return the ball because it was still just, I think it was still just the timer. It just continued or it stopped. I can’t remember. But either way, he was just moving through the entire level and it was, it just felt like a chore. And he said like, you should try to recontextualize the, the level somehow, mix it up a little bit, make it more interesting. And I couldn’t think of a way to mix it up, I guess I’ve had it in the back of my head, what he said. And then when I was solving a different problem of the timer— like when the timer ran out, you would get a game over. And that really sucks. You play a level for two or three minutes and then the timer runs out and you just lose all your progress. And if you wanna pass the level, you have to redo it completely again. So then I thought of Spelunky. In Spelunky, they have a three minute time limit in a level, but when the time runs out, a ghost starts chasing you and that makes it really fun instead of just losing right away. So I did the same thing, basically. There’s a ghost dog who shows up when you fetch the ball in the level.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, so just finding a lot of food and growing longer and even fetching the ball isn’t quite enough. You also have to avoid your undead nemesis.

Jonas (aka Indiana-Jonas): This is actually the previous dog of your owner. He comes back because he’s extremely jealous and he loved to play fetch with his owner.

So he tries to steal the ball back from you. So it becomes like a little chase sequence when you fetch the ball. And that solved the problem with Recontextualizing, the level as well. ’ Cause now-- now you’re being chased. It became a chase sequence.

And, I loved writing the dialogue, as well. I didn’t plan to have any dialogue, but then I had to make the tutorial and it was just so much fun. Normally I don’t like making tutorials, but for this one I managed to tie it in with a dog simulator. You have to stretch, stand on your legs, and you have to sit and look at me all tricks that the dog owner tells you to do. And then I made him a bit unlikable and sketchy. I kinda hint through the game that he’s the reason His previous dog is dead because he, he makes you do really risky stuff to fetch the ball. Like there’s one level where you play fetch while doing aerobics. There’s like spikes around. I added physics to some food. You can dig in the dirt or look through cup words and stuff, and then food comes, like bouncing out of it.

I had to make that, physics thing by myself and I’m really proud. it was just like, a few if statements and a tiny bit of simple math and, uh, I’m so proud I got that work because I don’t think of myself as a, a great programmer. I was on a roll that day!

Christa Mrgan: Nice! But, so here’s something kind of wild: instead of this silly, stretchy dog simulator where you grow really long to fetch a ball and then poop out a bunch of food that you ate, the premise could have been very different.

Jonas (aka Indiana-Jonas): I wanted to make a more artsy and ah, emotional story to begin with. I wanted it to be a little depressing, I guess. I wrote it down an entire story and I wanted it to be sort of like you live with a family and you get up to all this bad stuff. They live with you doing all this bad stuff, like stealing their food and, and such just because you’re cute. Then you grow old and ugly and you start to become annoying to them because you become a burden and stuff. And then when you pass away, they get a new dog and you start playing as that dog. So the game is like a loop where they keep getting a new dog.

Christa Mrgan: What? It’s so unhinged. That would be so depressing. Oh my God. Uh, okay. So he didn’t make that game, he made this one, fortunately! And one thing it needed was a lot of play testing. Because even after he’d solved the main problem of the gameplay loop, the game still needed fine tuning.

Jonas (aka Indiana-Jonas): Arisa did quite a bit of testing.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, Arisa Sudangnoi is the head of Playdate Developer Relations. And of course a bunch of people worked on Season Two, but she was the main force behind curating the games, coordinating with the devs, and making it all come together.

Jonas (aka Indiana-Jonas): And got some feedback from Sweet Baby Inc. and that helped a lot.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, the Sweet Baby team has worked with us on several games and also created a few of their own games for Playdate: Lost Your Marbles in Season One, plus Reel Steal and Recommendation Dog!!, which are free on Catalog.

Jonas (aka Indiana-Jonas): And I did a bit of testing in person, too. Like I would just bring my Playdate to parties and when we would see friends and stuff. The main problem was that the levels were too long, so long that people just ran out of patience when they lost, and they would not, pick the game up again. It was Sweet Baby, Inc. said you need to make shorter levels. They basically said that, and they suggested that I could keep the long levels that I had, but keep them interspersed throughout the game. So they are sort of like bigger story beats, or boss levels, or something. So I added a lot of smaller levels, and that made people actually finish the game. Everyone struggles with the controls when they pick up this game, at least a little bit. Depends how used you are to playing games and stuff, but it used to be even worse during development because I made it so that you had to press a button to jump somewhere.

Like when the dog can go somewhere, his post will attach to the ground below. At this point in development, you had to press a button to jump there and people would just get stuck. They wouldn’t remember to press it or press the right button or anything.

And then Jasper, who was making Surmount with, he tried the game for like five or 10 minutes and he was like, “you should just make that automatic.” I made that change.

I wish I could have come up with something smarter for that part. It was already hard, like for people to get used to the controls and to endure through the levels. So it was mostly about making the game easier.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah. Getting used to the way you move the dog around takes a minute, but it’s actually fine to me. I can imagine that also trying to hit a different button to jump there would’ve felt very cumbersome. So I think that was probably a good call.

Jonas (aka Indiana-Jonas): I think making it interesting was a bit trickier to me. I’m not used to doing level design, and there are so few elements going on in the game, like there are a few, things I threw in there to make it a bit varied, but overall, it’s mostly just like a bunch of geometry and there are foods scattered throughout the level. And I had to think like, “okay, at this point you might be this long in the level and I should maybe plant a seed for them to be able to go back here in the level, like to remember a ledge they couldn’t reach before” or something. And trying to constantly think of that and think of many twists on such a simple thing, that was really tricky. That was one of the most challenging parts, the level design for sure. Lots of frustration and anxiety about making the levels, but I’m pretty happy with how they turn out.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, it did work out in the end, with Long Puppy becoming a part of Playdate Season Two!

Jonas (aka Indiana-Jonas): On my previous game Surmount I was working with Popagenda. They were co-publishing that game. It was through them that I found out that Season Two was gonna be a thing cause Jurge from Propaganda was working with you guys.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, shout out Popagenda. They’re awesome! They do a bunch of marketing and PR work for Playdate, and for the other games we publish for console and pc. They also publish games, too! And I know Jurge Cruz-Alvarez listens to this podcast. So, hi Jurge. We love you.

Jonas (aka Indiana-Jonas): So, I showed him my prototype at some point. I was like, " do you think maybe you could show this to, to Panic or something?" And he was like, “yeah, I can do that if you write a little pitch document that I can send along with it.” And I was really like, “will they take this seriously? Because I’ve described this, this poop mechanic, like describing it as a spaghetti machine.” And yeah, I was not sure, but then I got an email and, yeah, that was a good day. I’m really glad that I got to be part of this. It’s been a really great experience.

Christa Mrgan: Yay!

Jonas (aka Indiana-Jonas): I hope you will enjoy Long Puppy and that you will enjoy Season Two, as well!

Christa Mrgan: Me, too.

Jonas (aka Indiana-Jonas): I hope there will be a season three as well at some point.

Christa Mrgan: That would be awesome. I guess we’ll see! In the meantime, have fun cranking your way through Long Puppy, and stay tuned for more episodes about Playdate Season Two, Coming soon to the Playdate Podcast feed. Thank you so much for listening.

Jonas (aka Indiana-Jonas): Thank you. Bye!

Christa Mrgan: The Playdate Podcast was written, produced, and edited by me, Christa Mrgan.

Cabel Sasser, and Simon Panrucker composed the theme song.

Additional music was composed by Indiana Jonas and comes from Long Puppy.

Huge thanks to Tim Coulter and Ashur Cabrera for wrangling the podcast feed and working on the website, James Moore for making me an awesome Paydate audio extraction app, Kaleigh Stegman for handling social media, and Neven Mrgan, who created the podcast artwork and site design. And thanks as always to everyone at Panic. Playdate Season Two is available right now on the website and on Catalog! And of course, Playdate consoles are available at play.date.

Jonas (aka Indiana-Jonas): I don’t see myself as a fan of platformers, but I have played a lot of platformers anyway, like, Hollow Night. I really love Hollow Night. And Guacamelee is really good, too. Celeste!