Play it: https://good-dog.fly.dev
A game where you are the dog. The dog is real.
You spend three days in a shelter as a real dog, one of twelve taken from real shelter listings. You cannot speak, so you bark, whine, growl or stay quiet, and you watch it land wrong. At the end you learn the dog you were is real, and you get the link to their listing.
go run ./cmd/server
That serves the game and the API on http://localhost:8080 as a single binary with the frontend embedded. For frontend work, run the dev server alongside it:
cd web && npm install && npm run dev
Copy .env.example to .env and fill in the keys. Without them the game still runs: it falls back to the twelve fixture dogs and plays the night as text.
Three layers, one law.
Reality is the listing: real name, real photo, real shelter, real status. This layer never invents anything. Interpretation is the personality, the sensory language and the radio, all built by a model that is only ever allowed to work from facts the first layer verified. Game is what you do: scent, bark, visitors, trust, night, the reveal.
The engine owns truth and the model owns wording. A model never decides what happens next. Real listing text goes through an extraction step that keeps only verified fields, then a generation step builds the dog from those fields alone. A grounding eval suite in cmd/evals checks generated text against the listing it came from, and it is run by hand before any prompt change ships.
Everything spoken is recorded ahead of time into a disk cache and shipped in the image. Nothing is generated while somebody is playing.
More in docs/game-design.md and docs/tech-stack.md.
Twelve real dogs, each taken from a real shelter listing and checked by hand, carried in the repo as fixtures/dogs.json with the listing url and the description text quoted verbatim. Every photo, name, breed, age and shelter shown in the game comes from that listing rather than from a model.
They are read through an AnimalProvider interface so a live adoption feed can replace the fixture set. That live provider is not built. The dogs are real, the listings are real, and the game reads them from a file rather than from an API, so a dog adopted since the file was made will still appear. This is why the reveal only ever says what the listing says. A dog who is listed is waiting, or still listed if the game just gave her a home. A dog whose page went quiet is no longer listed, and the game does not guess why. And a dog whose page says she was adopted was adopted, with the date the page gives. One of the twelve, Bella, went home on August 15 while this was being built, and the game says so.
Backend, Go 1.25, standard library for everything except:
- modernc.org/sqlite v1.56.0, the database. Pure Go, so the binary builds with CGO off
Frontend:
- React 18, for the UI chrome only. The game loop is plain TypeScript on a canvas
- Vite 6, build and dev server
- Vitest 3, tests
- TypeScript 5.8
Services:
- Google Gemini, structured output for the dog sheets and the radio
- ElevenLabs, library voices for the radio and the sound effects API for the dog's own voice
- Fly.io, one machine and one volume
Listings from Animal Humane Society and Ruff Start Rescue, in Minnesota. The words in the About panel are theirs, quoted rather than rewritten.
The tag v0.1.0-challenge marks the state of the repo at the challenge deadline. Anything committed after it is listed here, so judges can tell the submission from what came later.
Nothing yet.
git config core.hooksPath .githooks
