Legally Distinct Emergency Dog

This is game was built for a four-year-old, which is why:

• The game is two-player co-op — a four-year-old is not quite skilled enough to play most games alone.
• The game is hard to lose — there are a couple of places you can soft-lock it, but generally it's easy enough. If you do soft-lock it, the pause menu can restart the level. The dog has infinite lives and the fire engine cannot be damaged.
• The game is about a fire-fighting dog and its vehicle. (In the kid's games, a character's vehicle is often an almost wholly independent entity, sort of like the daemons in His Dark Materials.) But it's not about any particular fire-fighting dogs from any particular children's copaganda show. Let me be very clear on that point. The aim is to get to the end of the level and put out all the fires.

The mechanics aren't great for a longer game, because they don't interact well enough to give rise to interesting, non-linear problems. But there's enough variety for 16 screens of Pico-8. It's also quite playable alone with keyboard (check the pause menu for controls — and opening the pause menu is ENTER).

Also for some reason I added a speedrun mode (available from the pause menu) which:

• adds a timer
• adds a death count
• prints the total number of coins so you know if you've 100%'d it
• shows what controls you're pressing at any given time.

There are a few glitches in the movement system, but I left them in because the movement code is hacky so I'd have to totally replace it, also the glitches aren't game-breaking and might be fun for speedrunning.

Lastly, there's an option in the pause menu to replace button-hold controls with toggles, because accessibility is important.