Doodle Dogs wins Rep. Grace Napolitano’s 2023 Congressional App Challenge in California’s 31st District

When asked what inspired the creation of Doodle Dogs, the students said, “We took inspiration from other apps when designing Doodle Dogs. We used Kitty Letter’s sarcastic humor and simple doodles as a model for the structure of our cutscenes. The concept of the dog-sitting job was inspired by the Rover app, an app which is used to hire dog-walkers and dog-sitters. From these two apps, we found plenty of opportunities for a charming story and minigames.

When it came to character design, the dogs were largely inspired by our own pets. Our real life dogs are a chore to take care of, something which we wanted to translate into the game. Our Sherlock character represented the dogs that aren’t the brightest and just want to play. We wanted to use the short attention span of youthful dogs to set up the mini game challenge for Sherlock’s level. Francois, the pompous Parisian, was inspired by the concept that dogs look and act like their owners. Francois would be a spoiled, picky eater just like the player can guess his owner is like. The idea of a pretentious, pompous dog was also inspired by the attitude that we are given from all of our pets. Our third dog was inspired by one of our developer’s 90-pound dog. We designed the Rufus character based on his size and anger issues when awoken. We wanted to create a funny fear factor of being eaten by the big, angry dog.

The art style came about when we tried to draw certain dog breeds as simply as possible, while highlighting some of the traits of said dogs. Our doodley character art lived up to the name, Doodle Dogs. We wanted the art style to contribute to a simple, charming experience that would entertain users.

The chapter-based system was based on reading a picture book. We wanted the player to tap through the cutscenes like they were flipping through pages in a children’s book–nostalgia with a twist of sarcastic humor.”