It's a pretty well-designed and unique game. And tackling heat in cities and it's educational through dog walking it's really incredible concept.
The treats being automatic is a bit unintuitive. I would say adding to give the treat in the following levels can be a good idea instead of automatically giving treats. Complexity is good when implemented correctly in a game.
Play game
Pawsitively Hot's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Gameplay & Mechanics | #2 | 4.304 | 4.304 |
| Use of Themes | #3 | 4.217 | 4.217 |
| Polish & Release | #3 | 4.130 | 4.130 |
| Overall | #4 | 4.052 | 4.052 |
| Aesthetics | #7 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Writing | #8 | 3.609 | 3.609 |
Ranked from 23 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Artistic Statement / Use of Theme
Pawsitively Hot takes on extreme heat, a naturally occurring and unnaturally exacerbated disaster, by demonstrating how it can affect someone’s day-to-day life. As a dogwalker, the player experiences how fluctuating urban heat can harm people and animals while we’re trying to live our normal lives. I wanted to showcase both individual and collective solutions – or rather, adaptations, needed to live with the reality of urban heat.
From the beginning, I wanted to make a small game that didn’t require a lot of strategy, but still lightly educated players about heat even if you only played a few minutes. I was inspired by top-down minimalist pixel art games such as Pokemon Red and gameplay such as the Papyrus tile puzzle from Undertale.
Development Summary
I played some Climate Jam 2024 games and wanted to try submitting my own game this year. I knew my time available for the jam would be erratic, so I decided to solo develop (I’d love to try with a team next time). Because of the great free pixel assets available by generous creators online, I did not make original art and instead focused on the design, music and coding. I was pleasantly surprised to receive specific feedback from jam participants and mentors over the course of the sprints, as I had never done a jam before. I had hoped to include multiple maps where you could walk dogs, but had to cut that to just one to ensure I could include other mechanics such as the community meetings to emphasize the jam themes.
Release Plan
I plan on continuing working on Pawsitively Hot to flesh it out a bit more with multiple maps, implement better accessibility features, and add final polish such as more animation transitions. As a potential expansion, I want to explore creating maps based on very simplified versions of actual cities in California, such as incorporating their proportion of tree cover. This would provide a way to educate about real-life variety and variables.
I plan on keeping any version as a free browser game on Itch.
Topic Tags
Extreme Heat
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.