Project & contribution
A dog’s-eye view of war
Dog Of War is a team-developed, third-person 3D exploration game that approaches war through a playful, absurd style. Inspired by an account of a real dog, we wanted to look at war through an observer outside human military narratives. The contrast between light-hearted actions and a serious setting became our way of satirising war and expressing the value of peace.
The main objective is simple enough to make sense to the protagonist: find something to eat. Meanwhile, players can explore, interact with objects, or cause destruction. The ending responds to the harm they have inflicted on NPCs over the course of play. A conspicuous final choice between a medal and a treat exposes the distance between human ideas of honor and a dog’s ordinary desires.
My contribution within the team
My main responsibility was visual design and art assets, and I also contributed to selected gameplay concepts. My work included interface and narrative illustrations, models, textures, and the visual exploration behind them. Beyond asset production, I took part in the initial brainstorming and in revising player guidance after the first playtest. I also documented feedback and archived recordings of the sessions.
- Programming
- MuTian Chen (Mu)
- Level Design
- Jin Kang (Jin)
- Art Design
- Xi You (Merriphel)
Inspiration & narrative intent
Anti-war satire through an innocent observer
What drew me to this subject was a question: humans are always giving war meaning, but what does it mean to other creatures? While we were discussing this idea, our programmer shared an account of a dog that lived on an island, moved between different armies, and survived. That story became a starting point for our game.
Anti-war satires such as Slaughterhouse-Five and Catch-22 informed the narrative direction, while games such as Goat Simulator provided gameplay references. We wanted players to approach this world from a dog's perspective, allowing the contrast between playfulness and gravity to carry part of the satire.
Making the player part of the irony
The story is communicated through the environment, narration, subtitles, cutscenes, and the player’s own actions. We anticipated that a dog facing a shining piece of jerky and a war medal would prefer the food. That expectation challenges the heroic meaning humans attach to the dog’s behavior.
The final selection is deliberately theatrical: choosing the medal or jerky does not determine the ending. The decisive variable is the damage already dealt to NPCs. A symbolic gesture at the end cannot replace the consequences of earlier behavior. Players are invited to question both their use of power and the importance they assigned to the final choice.
Comic-book energy, serious subject matter
Halftone explosion effects encountered during gameplay brainstorming suggested the visual direction: thick outlines, angular shapes, large black shadows, saturated colors, and halftone dots. References included DC and Transformers comics and stylized work such as Persona 5.
This visual language connects the impossible abilities to the interface and illustrations. Its exaggeration makes the dog’s actions immediately playful, while the war setting and consequences keep that playfulness open to a more uncomfortable reading.
Core loop & player agency
Explore, discover, act, and face the consequences
Players can move freely around the island rather than follow a fixed route. Collecting and eating the required amount of jerky advances the main objective and triggers the transition to the ending area. Optional encounters, the camp, the rainforest, and hidden spaces provide opportunities to discover how the dog’s abilities work.
The design asks what a player does when given considerable power before understanding it. The abilities are available from the outset, while environmental encounters reveal their controls and uses. Here, “unlocking” describes discovering an ability through play rather than purchasing a new power. A restrained player and a destructive player can pursue the same food objective while leaving different consequences behind.
- 01
Explore the island
Choose routes through the camp, forest, and hidden spaces.
- 02
Discover abilities
Encounters reveal controls and uses for powers already available.
- 03
Collect jerky
Food advances the main objective; how you pursue it is your choice.
- 04
Enter the final scene
A medal and a treat stage a conspicuous symbolic choice.
- 05
Face earlier actions
NPC damage determines the ending, not the final selection.
Two abilities taught through situations
Tailpedo turns the dog into an exaggerated missile-like dash. The trap scenario teaches players to charge with F and dash with G, interacting with explosives to escape. The situation creates a reason to practice the input rather than presenting a long block of instructions.
Dognado grows out of a familiar canine action: chasing one’s tail. Holding the right mouse button and rotating the mouse summons a tornado that sweeps up nearby objects. A cave and its illustrated tablet connect the input to an absurd story about an ancestral kung-fu dog. The ability serves exploration and environmental interaction as well as destruction.
Level design & environmental guidance
Revising light guidance after the first playtest
Initially, we wanted a game with light guidance, where players could explore for themselves rather than rely mainly on voice or text instructions. The first playtest showed that our guidance was even weaker than we had expected: players did not know where to go or what their objective was.
My teammate and I then continued iterating on how players could understand the abilities through experimentation. We added signposts and built more explicit guidance into situations. For example, a giant piece of jerky in the distance draws the player closer, but a trap lies beneath it. With no conventional exit, the trap was intended to give players a reason to try their existing abilities and discover a chain reaction between a skill and a prop, rather than simply read an instruction.
In this example, players learn how to use a power they already have. We wanted to preserve that sense of discovery while giving them a clear enough problem to start experimenting.
Signposts, gaps in trees, paths with less grass, watchtowers, and selective lighting give the island a readable structure without prescribing a single route. Bright props distinguish important interactions from the surroundings; signs in dim areas are emphasized so that visual guidance remains legible. UI hints support this environmental language rather than carrying all of the navigation.
A piece of jerky near the starting point introduces food collection before the player encounters the larger reward and trap.
Teaching as a reward for curiosity
The bright tablet gives the cave a focal point. Its drawings tell a miniature story while showing modern mouse controls in an apparently ancient setting. The mismatch is intentional: a practical tutorial becomes another expression of the game’s surreal humor.
Small, isolated encounter spaces reduce the number of simultaneous interactions a newcomer must interpret. Once a player understands an action in that focused context, the larger island gives it other uses. This retains exploratory discovery while providing the instruction the early prototype lacked.
Sketches & level iterations
An early rhythm-game direction
During our initial brainstorming, we also considered a rhythm-game direction. I took on a music-making experiment to explore whether that concept could work. It was my first time learning FL Studio, and I produced two short pieces that I was pleased with.
This happened before we settled on Dog Of War and belongs to the project's early concept exploration.
01 / Reducing scale and widening the kinds of play
The initial concept placed military camps along the coast and a large food warehouse at the center of the island. Raising a Chaos Meter through destruction would briefly teleport players to the warehouse to eat jerky before returning them to their previous location.
That map was too large for a dog-sized character: travel felt slow, the production scope was excessive, and players who avoided destruction had too little to do. We reduced the scale and divided the island into a military camp for destructible interactions and a rainforest for exploration, platforming, and food collection. The change addressed both pacing and the need for meaningful non-destructive play.
02 / Giving the two zones a clearer identity
After the first reduction, the military camp and rainforest still looked too similar, and empty areas offered little variety. Barbed-wire boundaries gave the camp a stronger identity and separated it visually from the forest.
Platforming sections and environmental obstacles added actions between destinations. The purpose was to make traversal itself part of the experience, rather than simply shorten the distance across an empty map.
03 / A focused experience designed for about five minutes
The revised island still exceeded the intended playtime. We reduced and restructured it again, with a design target of making the main content accessible within about five minutes. Under the development deadline, the central warehouse was removed, while the military camp remained the primary destruction and exploration area.
We also had to make room for players to understand the abilities they already possessed. We worked signposts, rewards, visual paths, the cave and the trap into the smaller layout, giving discovery and practice a place within our five-minute design target.
Illustration & interface design
Start screen / turning a mechanic into a visual identity
Pilot goggles connect Beagle’s appearance to the impossible flight of Tailpedo. Separate dog-missile elements were prepared so they could float independently in the engine. Brown and white lettering echoes the character’s coloring, while rays and halftone marks carry the comic-book energy across the composition.
When drawing the start screen, I wanted the Game Start button to feel more forceful and theatrical. On hover, the explosion frame and other elements would pop out at slightly different moments rather than appear all at once. I wanted to control not only how the screen looked, but also when each element entered it.
I had not made this kind of animation before. My first attempt used multiple hand-drawn frames, but the result did not work as I had hoped. After several attempts, I began learning After Effects and used simple pop-out animations to move closer to the effect I had in mind.
I drew the source artwork in Photoshop.
Loading screen / PAWS
The loading screen reworks the composition of the Jaws poster: Beagle replaces the shark, while an island carrying jerky sits above the open mouth. The visual joke is directly tied to the food-collection objective, so a transition screen continues the game’s central motivation.
Four illustrated variations of the water surface were prepared for frame-by-frame animation. The small island carrying the treat functions as a movable progress indicator. I also explored a worn-poster version placed on a rock, extending the same image into an environmental prop.
Ending illustrations / between honor and appetite
The normal ending unfolds as a gradually revealed four-panel comic. Compared with the start screen, a quieter, less saturated palette establishes a relaxed scene many years later, when Beagle recalls the past with her children. Beneath the human title of “hero dog,” the memory remains one of finding delicious jerky.
We initially considered using this comic for the secret ending, then placed it in the normal ending because it more directly expresses the project’s central irony: people assign heroic meaning to another creature’s behavior, while that creature pursues a much simpler desire.
The secret-ending illustration references the composition of The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! Beagle rides a giant missile with a human-awarded medal and a straw pistol. Red-and-green, laser-like colors heighten the deliberately bizarre tone. Several background studies led to grayscale photographs with halftone dots: a cartoon dog intrudes into imagery that recalls the violence of the wartime setting.
Murals / an intentionally anachronistic tutorial
The tablet depicts a kung-fu dog ancestor reading a manual and learning to summon a tornado by chasing its own tail. Modern input diagrams embedded in this apparent ancient relic make the tutorial both useful and absurd.
I explored several mural versions in Substance 3D Painter to improve the legibility of the controls. The graphic had to communicate an action at gameplay distance while remaining recognizable as part of the game world. A separate charging mural develops the same approach for Tailpedo.
Character & prop production
Beagle / texture and character identity
I carried the brown, white and dark markings from my illustrations into the playable Beagle’s texture. The texture-painting process and finished model show how I kept that character identity across the interface art and the 3D dog.
Jerky / a reward designed to be noticed
I gave the jerky a clear silhouette and a graphic red-and-white texture. It needed to work as a collectible reward, a navigation cue and a recurring visual joke, while remaining recognisable among the island’s props.
Signage / graphic language inside the level
Road signs translate the objective into an in-world visual cue. Their material, silhouette, and jerky symbol connect a navigational function to the project’s art direction. Warning signs extend the same visual vocabulary.
Prototype & team implementation
From graybox to an explorable island
We began with simple geometry for testing the dog’s movement and interactions, then built out the camp, forest, rewards and separate learning spaces. MuTian Chen (Mu) handled programming; the team’s animation, environment and effects work connected the playable island with the visual direction I developed.
Terrain and ProBuilder / working within the schedule
We used Unity Terrain to paint the beach and distribute trees, keeping terrain iteration inside the engine during the short development period. Simple grass cards and the Set Height, Raise Terrain and Smooth Height tools helped us shape the forest, cliffs and mountains without rebuilding the whole landscape in external modelling software.
We also tried ProBuilder for broken geometry so that small changes could be made directly in Unity. Within the development schedule, we kept this as a separate geometry study; integrating it into the environment is a direction for a further optimisation pass.
Animation layering / a more flexible Tailpedo charge
The original approach rotated the tail through a script independently of the dog’s other animation, producing a rigid result. The team moved the tail-spin clip into a separate Animator layer named “Propelling.” Its weight changes gradually with player input.
With Additive blending and the clip restricted to the tail-root bone, the rotation could play over the base animation. We could vary its layer weight with the player’s input while the rest of the dog continued its existing movement.
NPC behavior / reactions to the player’s power
NPCs support patrol and flee states. Patrol alternates between a randomly selected destination and a random idle duration. When Dognado is used nearby, NPCs flee in the opposite direction. Unity NavMesh handles navigation and steering. The behavior makes the dog’s power affect the surrounding characters, connecting an entertaining action to visible consequences.
Effects / supporting the same comic vocabulary
The team prototyped cutscene transitions in Unity, using a Shader Graph overlay for the iris-out effect. A directional light and gradient-textured skybox provided the basic lighting setup.
At the ending, particle-system god rays exaggerate the importance of the jerky. Dog toys and balls were explored as particles in the Dognado effect. These details tie technical effects to the same appetite, play, and absurdity expressed by the illustrations.
Playtest findings & implemented changes
Playtest session photos
I documented the playtests and kept the recordings alongside player feedback. These photos show the prototype being played on laptops.
01 / Interactable objects were hard to distinguish
Finding: players could not reliably tell which scene objects were interactive or breakable. The environment lacked a consistent visual cue.
Implemented change: taking the visual readability of breakable objects in Resident Evil as a reference, the team changed breakable boxes and dynamite to unlit materials while keeping the surroundings lit. The brighter treatment separates actionable objects from ordinary scenery, including in darker areas.
02 / Too many unfamiliar interactions at once
Finding: players did not understand how the dog’s abilities interacted with dynamite. The variety of player–object and object–object interactions at the start was overwhelming.
Implemented change: the team introduced isolated teaching scenarios. The cave focuses on Dognado; the trap requires a dash-and-explosive interaction to escape. Each situation makes one relationship practical before the player combines it with other interactions in the island.
03 / Exploration needed goals beyond collecting food
Finding: players were drawn to jerky collection, but other intended points of interest did not communicate a clear invitation. They often missed the encounters and routes the team wanted them to explore.
Implemented change: terrain was reshaped into readable paths, and signs, props, rewards, and local lighting directed attention toward encounters. This response strengthens the value of exploration while retaining route choice.
We also told players during the introduction that the game contained hidden Easter eggs, hoping to give them a reason to explore again after a first playthrough.
Design takeaways
A visual system that carries more than decoration
I used the art to carry information as well as establish the style. Jerky became a reward and a wayfinding symbol; the murals combined illustration with teaching; the ending images placed the dog’s simple appetite against the heroic meaning people gave its actions. These connections were central to my work on the visuals and interface.
We kept revising how much structure exploration needed: reducing the map, separating the regions and using encounters to introduce abilities. We removed the central warehouse to focus the production scope, while retaining the ProBuilder study as a direction for later environment work. These choices helped us concentrate on the experience we could deliver within the schedule.
Finding my place in a team
This project helped me find my place within a team and made me think seriously about how a team communicates and works. How do we keep collaborating when opinions differ, or when emotions affect communication? When progress is disrupted, what should we prioritise to achieve the best result we can complete? These questions became as much a part of the experience as making the game itself.
I also experienced how much inspiration a good brainstorming session can generate. Deeper discussions kept changing our understanding of the project; its direction needed repeated adjustment, and its details needed further work. That experience has left me looking forward to another thoughtful, collaborative project.