My first stab at having the dog poo was simply instantiating a poo asset at the "appropriate" location, and having gravity take care of the rest. It wasn't particularly fun or satisfying though, so I've had in my mind for some time that a particle effect could probably work, especially in a pixelated environment.

Having never used a particle effect before, I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to get to grips with.

The particle effects have native support with the scene editor, so you can change details in real time and see the effects. You can see an example of this in the video below, but here's a screenshot showing the scene editor and the million different ways you can edit your particles.

I've had an initial play with collision detection on tile maps (I created a fake floor tile for this) and also things like "bounce" and particle lifetime. I'll spend a fair bit of time fiddling with this over the next few weeks I suspect, but for now the results are pretty nice!

I've also massively improved my workflow by switching to Jetbrains Rider for scripting. Visual studio code is OK, but the code completion and general awareness that I'm using unity is so nice in Rider. It's also started yelling at the code I've already created, giving me various ways to improve it. I ❤️ Jetbrains.