Raise your own personal hive of mutating dogs.
A fairly normal dog simulation.
— Steam early access trailer
Wobbledogs is a pet simulating sandbox video game developed by Animal Uprising and published by Secret Mode. In this game, you raise and breed "dogs" that mutate and lay eggs. Their appearances are determined by the food that they eat and a complex genetics system.
The game officially left Early Access and entered full release in March 2022. For more information, you can visit the official website
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Wobbledogs provides examples of the following tropes:
- Achievement System: Completing "Goals" unlocks various things or items, like new dog pens, new food dispensers, or just some toilet papers...
- Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: Most dogs have bright body colors like blue or orange. Even the default dog is pink with bright blue highlights.
- And Your Reward Is Interior Decorating: Dogs sometimes leave a "dog capsule", and opening it usually gives you some furniture or decorative item.
- Anti-Frustration Features: With the automation options, you can enable useful features like the collection of various items, disable some features like death from starvation, or change notifications to simpler, non-interrupting ones.
- Artistic License – Biology: Cooked foods like burritos and French fries should not have bacteria in them as the entire point of cooking food is to kill bacteria.
- As the game notes itself in a disclaimer, it is generally not recommended to feed real-life dogs the things you feed the dogs in this game.
- Bigger on the Inside: Dogs can build "dog dens" on their pens with gathered dirt clumps. The interior of those dirt homes are much larger than the exterior suggests, and it can be expanded even more with additional dirt.
- Bizarre Alien Biology: Dogs in this game are nothing like the actual dogs in real life. They grow up via pupation, lay eggs, and change their appearance wildly based on their gut flora.
- Body Horror: You can end up with dogs so mutated they barely resemble the starting dog. It's possible to breed or mutate dogs with heads larger than their body, uneven numbers of legs, bodies so short they distort into a wedge, dogs with multiple pairs of wings and even dogs without legs.
- Breeding Sim: One of the main gameplay loops in the game is, of course, breeding and mutating dogs.
- Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": There is a plush doll that resembles an actual dog in real life rather than "dogs" in the game, but the game says it's modeled on an "unknown creature".
- Creature-Breeding Mechanic: Wobbledogs will occasionally lay unfertilised eggs. The player can either hatch them right away, which results in a dog with the default appearance, or they can choose two dogs to fertilise it. The latter will open up a simulation which generates a litter with mix-and-matched features from the parents. The player can choose one, or continue breeding them for several simulated generations in order to get dogs with more mutations.
- Deader than Dead: While a dead dog can still appear as a ghost, cracking open their dog core will erase their existence for real.
- A Dog Named "Dog": One of the default names for dogs is, well, Dog.
- Ectoplasm: Ghosts that consume food will produce ectoplasm that your Wobbledogs can eat, taking the appearance of a slimy green blob. Wobbledogs that consume ectoplasm develop black bodies and white legs, alongside occasional random mutations.
- Emo Teen: If you complete the "Negative Reinforcement" achievement, you receive the dog Mud—a confrontational yet solitary dog with Dreary Half-Lidded Eyes and a full black and grey color scheme.
- Extreme Omnivore: Dogs eat any "edible" things, like fruits, fast food, cocoons from mutations, feces, baby teeth, or even deceased dogs.
- Flight: Some dogs have a pair of wings on the top of their body, and you can command them to fly.
- Gravity Screw: The Gravity Machine can change the gravity of the den it's placed on.
- "Harmful to Pets" Reminder: Before the title screen, there's a message saying that the wobbledogs can eat things that are dangerous to real dogs.
- Hates Being Touched: The unpettable trait makes it so that dogs will get angry if you pet them.
- Howl of Sorrow: When one of your dogs is about to die, it lets out a mournful howl, and all nearby dogs will respond in kind.
- I'm a Humanitarian: Dogs in the game can eat dead dogs. After a dog dies, other dogs will start eating various parts of the dead dog. This transfers the dead dog's mutations to the dog eating its body.
- Immortality Inducer: Feeding cracked dog cores makes the dog live longer.
- An Interior Designer Is You: You can decorate your pens with various objects, carpets, or wallpapers.
- Joke Character: Some mutations, like having no legs or an extremely short body, essentially make your dogs immobile.
- Made of Iron: In short, the dogs won't die of anything aside old age and starvation. Even if you try to slam the dogs against floors or walls violently, they just get annoyed.
- Multiple Head Case: One of the rarer mutations allows dogs to have extra heads. So they can bark much more often.
- Multiple-Tailed Beast: Like legs or heads, dogs can have more than one tail.
- Mutagenic Food: The key feature of the game; the mutation of dogs is affected by the food they have eaten (for example, French fries make dogs long and skinny). You can unlock more types of food by completing various goals.
- No Biological Sex: The dogs apparently don't have genders. Every one of them can lay eggs, and any adult pair of them can produce a fertilized egg.
- Our Ghosts Are Different: Ghost dogs sometimes appear from their grave, and they can float and have the power to levitate nearby objects and dogs.
- Player Creation Sharing: You can export your dogs via dog codes, or import someone else's dogs, vice versa.
- Pun: How do Wobbledogs grow older? They pupate.
- Shout-Out:
- If you hatch a dog with only one wing, you get the "One Winged Angel" achievement.
- "Peeking Dogs Wallpaper" is clearly inspired from "Bliss" wallpaper from Windows XP. This wallpaper depicts a green hill, blue sky with white clouds, and... a gigantic dog behind the hill.
- The description for lasagna says, "Mondays, right? Haha." This is a reference to the title character of Garfield, who loves lasagna and hates Mondays.
- Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Icy Carpet makes your dog pens extremely slippery.
- Spring Jump: The Doggy Launcher is a placeable toy supported with a spring, and it launches dogs or things into the air.
- Tiny-Headed Behemoth: It's possible to create huge dogs with a pin-sized head. They still can eat or grab things with their tiny mouth.
- Vertebrate with Extra Limbs: Dogs can have more than four legs, and wings.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential:
- While you can't outright harm or injure them, you still can throw and knock dogs as much as you can.
- You can order the dogs to eat something unpleasant, like poop or dirt clods.
- The Wobblebopper will (as the name implies) hit your dogs.
- You can mutate dogs to the point where they can't even move anymore.
- Wingding Eyes: When the dogs die (or play dead), their eyes become X.
- Whale Egg: Wobbledogs hatch from eggs.
- Wizard Needs Food Badly: Dogs have to eat food to survive, and, given they can properly walk, will activate food machines if they are hungry.
