While initially intended to be an American east coast inspired location, it eventually took on a simultaneous southern and western blend with the addition of palm trees and a skatepark somewhat inspired by the famous Venice beach. This was the first fully realized area for the game, and while it went through heavy iteration towards the beginning as we figured out the mechanics of the game, it generally maintained it's look and feel and eventually became a baseline for what other levels would need to live up to. 

At first we struggled to get players to use the vertical features of the map. I added navmesh links along the rooftops of buildings to allow dogs to jump up, and players began to follow the dogs and engage with more movement mechanics. This led to a greater variety of player photo angles and taught players early on to jump around more and explore levels more thoroughly! My personal favorite areas are under the boardwalk and down in the bowl with the skater dogs.

Mellowstone is my love letter to Blood Gulch from Halo: Combat Evolved. It holds natural mystery, yet it is also very recognizable with clear landmarks. It is also greatly inspired by Yosemite park which I visited when I was 13 and hated it. Now I've gotten my revenge, with great help from environment artists Alexis Faintreny and Campbell Fletcher. 

In an earlier iteration there were many confusing caves and underground fixtures, and players were getting disoriented very quickly. Many of those paths were converted to cliff faces with overhangs, further solidifying the openness of the space and making it easy to find a way out of the caves at any point. Each junction of the cave has at least one potential vertical path which I found made it feel more organic and allowed players to experiment more with framing. The rope bridge was a surprisingly late addition to the design, and was added after a discussion with the environment artist (thanks Alexis!). That completed a circuit path around the outdoors area, and greatly improved access for dogs and players to the area behind the waterfall. There are many secrets to be found here, some the player will come across naturally through the missions and others they will have to find on their own. Using scenery elements to create interesting gameplay was a primary goal for levels. This of course led to the realization that a geyser could double as a launch pad!

The city posed many interesting challenges for our team. It served as the marriage of two level concepts (a dog park and a city block) and wound up being a positively massive area. In an earlier iteration, we considered that the level could serve as a connecting world between other maps. A wide variety of photo vibes can be found in the city, some sunny and bustling and others haunting and unusual. The environment artist Alexis took inspiration from Parisian café blocks as well as Brooklyn while designing the modular buildings and this complimented the liveliness of the scene. Overall I find it's a pleasant place to be, and I'd love to live in a city with such dedication to walkways and parkour-able fire escapes. I put a lot of consideration into verticality here and it's very fun to just jump around! For a nice extra challenge, try getting all around the map without touching the ground.

Each area has special things that appear at different times of day, adding exploratory value and potential avenues for new missions. Most areas have four distinct versions including rainy morning, sunny day, sunset, and night time. We created a tool that set the scene to certain "times" to enable us to set up distinct events and objects for specific times of day so as not to create duplicate data in the project. Pupperazzi's install size via Steam remains below 500MB to this day (though this is largely due to the texturing method developed by our artists).

Testimonials...

"Getting to explore the vibrant and uniquely themed sandbox levels made up for the inconvenience. From {Buppy} Boardwalk, which boasts a skatepark and shuttered arcade, to the nature-filled paths of Mellowstone, each zone is a treat to explore. Different worlds have fresh objectives, hidden objects you can use to interact with your furry subjects, secret currency stashes, and vending machines to purchase equipment or items. I was also pleasantly surprised to discover a handful of optional platforming opportunities in various levels, like using awnings as trampolines to hop onto rooftops where more dogs were hanging out." - Jill Grodt for gameinformer.com

"...anywhere you point your camera (is) a joy to capture...It all contributes to a significant sense of freedom...If you don’t get too distracted by throwing sticks and photographing every tiny dog wearing glasses, you can hit credits in just a couple of hours. But there will still be plenty of objectives to go back to, various new times and weather conditions that transform old levels, and yet more miniature bespectacled puppies awaiting their moment in the spotlight. "  - Jay Castello for Fanbyte.com