Một Ngày Làm Chó

Một Ngày Làm Chó ("A Day as a Dog") is a comedy browser game Golden Sea built around one joke: you do not get to choose your dog. A slot machine assigns a breed, then you live on an endless Vietnamese street of tube houses, lampposts and street carts, barking at locals, peeing on poles, stealing slippers and dodging the dog thieves' motorbike. It runs straight from a link on phones and computers, in portrait, with no install.

The street is shared. A small Node.js WebSocket relay, running in its own Docker container on a VPS, keeps every player's dog on the same road. The server owns the things players would argue about: health, bites, deaths and respawns, which lamppost belongs to whom, and the "Most Badly Behaved Dog" leaderboard. It also clamps movement to stop teleporting, rate-limits actions, gives each device a stable player number across reconnects, and filters chat for links, phone numbers and spam before broadcasting it.

The animals and people come from user-made and AI-generated models, rigged automatically in Blender. Dogs walk with a procedural four-legged gait and act through code-driven poses, while each model's facing, scale and materials are normalised at load time. 243 meme lines are voiced with ElevenLabs, and the game layers needs (food, water, bladder, health), daily jobs, wayfinding arrows to food and water, and a cinematic highlight camera that captures shareable moments.

Most of the engineering went into making it hold up on ordinary phones. Models were stripped to the textures they need and compressed with meshopt, taking the download from about 44 MB to 17 MB, and the title screen appears before the characters finish loading. Off-screen characters are culled, distant props are hidden, and an fps watchdog lowers resolution and draw distance on slow devices. Every release was reviewed in a loop between Claude and Codex and checked with automated soak tests that drive the game and bot players against the live server before deploying.