My first Ludum Dare game, and I wasn't even planning to participate - but something about the theme "Unstable" hit my brain just right, and the game concept jumped into my head pretty much fully-formed. It's also my first time ever using GameMaker Studio -- many thanks to all the Youtube tutorials and the supremely helpful GameMaker discord for helping me through some fiddly problems.

Things I'm proud of: - The dogs and targets are all generated at runtime rather than pre-placed. The abstraction of coding objects while thinking about instances was a new and satisfying challenge. - I wasn't really planning on making an AI tree, but I made an AI tree for the dog behavior. It was overwhelming until I pulled out Notepad++ and pseudocoded it, and then it came together pretty quickly.

So grab your camera - the one with the BIG lens - and take some cute photos! The puppies will be completely uncooperative, but can be bribed.

The game works with a couple minor (mostly cosmetic) bugs. I've got two goals for polish: 1) Scoring works, but I'm not confident of the math behind it. I need to do some debugging and make sure it's tracking correctly. 2) The game is set up for sequential levels (e.g. puppy spawns are dynamic based on level), but I didn't have time to implement level transitions so "player level" is just a static variable right now. 3) (stretch) Sounds!