Rufus the Dog WP Plugin

What Rufus Does

Rufus is a playful virtual pet companion for WordPress.

He has two personalities: an ambient companion
who appears unexpectedly while visitors browse the site,
and an interactive play companion visitors
can deliberately play with.

Ambient Rufus

Rufus can appear over normal website content without changing
the page layout. Site owners control the minimum and maximum
interval between appearances, and each appearance is randomly
scheduled within that range.

• Run across the screen chasing a squirrel.
• Spot a cat and suddenly abandon whatever he was doing.
• Take an urgent detour to pee.
• Appear at unpredictable intervals so he feels like a resident
  dog rather than a repeating animation.
• Stay out of the way of normal links, navigation and page interaction.

Play Ball With Rufus

Visitors can throw up to three balls at once. Rufus may catch
them beautifully, miss them completely, change his mind halfway
through, chase the wrong ball, notice a cat, or decide that a
nearby tree suddenly requires his attention.

The scoring system is deliberately backwards:
the score is based on drool.

• Maximum of three balls per throw.
• The better Rufus catches, the less drool you earn.
• Misses, confusion and distractions increase the drool score.
• Cat diversions can dramatically improve your score.
• Peeing diversions are not considered athletic excellence.
• Best drool score can be stored in the visitor’s browser.

Make It Your Dog

Rufus is being designed as a replaceable character system.
A dog-related website can replace Rufus with a customer’s own dog.

1. Upload a clear photograph of the dog to an AI image-generation tool.
2. Use the standardized Rufus character prompt supplied with the plugin.
3. Generate the required matching poses and animation frames.
4. Import those images into the plugin’s character slots.
5. Change the character name — Rufus becomes Susie, Buddy, Max,
   or any other dog.

The same animation and game engine can then operate using the
customer’s own virtual dog.

Current Version 1 Features

• Random ambient Rufus appearances.
• Administrator-controlled minimum and maximum appearance intervals.
• Squirrel chase.
• Cat chase/diversion.
• Pee diversion.
• Interactive ball game.
• One, two or three-ball throws.
• Drool-based scoring.
• Persistent local best score.
• Dedicated [rufus_playground] shortcode.
• Automatic “Play with Rufus” page on activation.
• Reduced-motion support.

Coming During Version 1 Development

• Full custom-pet pose uploader.
• Character name and personality settings.
• More Rufus behaviors and branching reactions.
• Improved ball movement and animation.
• Snuggle interactions.
• More drool. Obviously.
• Mobile tuning and additional accessibility controls.
• Preview/test controls in WordPress Admin.