It's not every day that playing a video game can make the real world better, but Little Rock Games is encouraging this through its upcoming indie simulator game To The Rescue!. The game has players become the head of a start-up dog shelter, and includes both joys and difficulties related to shelter and dog care such as funding, keeping the dogs happy, and finding them forever homes.
Little Rock Games decided just creating awareness through the game was not enough, and that it wanted to make a difference in real-world animal shelters. This led to the decision to give 20 percent of all profits to a real-world nonprofit, the Petfinder Foundation. Game Rant spoke with Little Rock Games co-founders Olivia Dunlap and Tanner Marshall about why they chose the Petfinder Foundation and how its mission aligns with their game.
What The Petfinder Foundation Will Do With To The Rescue! Funds
The mission of the Petfinder Foundation is to prevent adoptable pets from being euthanized. It helps shelters all across North America, with money going toward grant opportunities, helping animals with medical emergencies, helping adoption groups deal with disasters, building dog playgrounds, and reducing adoption fees for pets struggling to find a forever home. According to its website, it gave out 369 grants in 2019, which totaled over $400,000 going to various rescue groups and animal shelters.
According to Dunlap and Marshall, Little Rock Games prides itself on keeping its games ethical and impactful, and they did a lot of research into which nonprofit to partner with for To The Rescue!. "We wanted to find a charity partner who helps local shelters all over the country, all over the world if possible," Marshall said.
"We are happy that we found the Petfinder Foundation. We want people to feel when we say 20 percent of the profit is going to a charity that they are making an impact for them too, where they live."
Dunlap said the one to get the ball rolling for finding their charity partner was publisher Freedom Games. "They really understood what we were aiming for with our goals and they helped hook us up with Petfinder Foundation," Dunlap said. "I think Petfinder is perfect, the exact sort of thing we wanted to do. We didn’t want to find a partner that was a specific shelter, we wanted it to have as much reach as possible and to also align with what we wanted to show and represent in the game."
The Virtual Dogs of To The Rescue!
While To The Rescue! players give money to help real-life dogs, they also get to enjoy interacting with virtual dogs. They have 29 different variants and get randomly generated traits to provide their favorite food, personality, health quirks, names, and training values. These are not just for fun though, as adopters will be looking for specific traits in the dog they want to adopt.
Little Rock Games did a lot of research as to how real shelters work and integrated that knowledge into gameplay. This means cleaning, feeding, and dealing with health issues the dogs may have. There are also mini-games for interacting with the various dogs such as tug-of-war, fetch, bathtime, and itchy scritch. According to Marshall, one of his favorite aspects of the game is how players can get updates on dogs after they are adopted through an in-game social media feed.
Running a dog shelter is not always sunshine and rainbows. Little Rock Games made the choice at the beginning of development to have euthanasia as a feature. On the games' website, the developers explain they wanted to show the truth of shelters in that there are always more cats and dogs in need than there is space.To The Rescue!'s website says, "... Since we want to raise awareness, we don't want to pretend it's not potentially part of the job. It's not glorified or presented as an easy way out, but it's an important part of the experience." Marshall said implementing euthanasia was one of the hardest parts of making To The Rescue!.
"Of course implementing and designing the euthanasia aspect of the game was difficult, and involves some uncomfortable research to make sure we’re not depicting things inaccurately."
Since euthanasia is a difficult subject, Little Rock Games let players opt-out of the mechanic. Even so, it is this mechanic that shows the importance of its donations toward the Petfinder Foundation.
To The Rescue! is releasing on November 4 on Mac, PC, and Switch.