Virtual Pet: No escape from Life by MickM
Keep your virtual pet alive and happy... but it will need to work for it!
Congratulations on your new pet - A TimTam should be ready to hatch from your egg soon....
Your job is to love it and play with it. Also to feed it. Also nothing is free in this life. You will have to put your little baby pet to work so you can afford to give it all the love you really want to. Training it will help with working speed but working and training does take the shine off life a bit.
Pats are free though. Who doesnt love a good pat.
GAMEPLAY:
After you hatch your pet you will need to manage hunger and happiness - these are key to a long life! You can pat your pet - as a baby and when it is old it will appreciate this but in adulthood it will just make it grumpy! You send your pet to work to get credits to buy interaction points including food, play, (more!) work and training. Training will increase your pets work speed (hidden) however it really doesn't like training!
GOOD LUCK!
Dev summary
The good
The game is simple but I implemented it heavily event based. This means that the initial coding took a while but adding a lot of user feedback (SFX, graphics changes and even tutorial stuff) was trivial without making it spaghetti code-ish. Not perfect but pretty happy with how flexible it was.
I am very happy with the full user experience - tutorial, feedback through SFX, UI and art (graphics changes etc).
Sound effects came out ok I think for never having attempted it before!
The bad
UI scaling in Unity - all dev was done in 1920x1080 but had some challenges with scaling to smaller webplayer resolution. Ended up changing the look a bit to allow for better scaling at the end which resulted in a bit loss of the "good" feel to it.
The ugly
The art. First time I have tried to art and it kind of shows. Feels very flash game-y. I am actually happy with how the art turned out in general but the UI backing and character feel quite bad still.
I am still not sure on the game as far as fun goes. I quite enjoyed it but again.... feels too much like a 2000s era flash game for me to be really happy with it. This is offset by me being happy that it is a full 'game'.
Notes
This game was made for Ludum Dare 46 Compo, a 48 hour solo Game Jam.
The game was developed from scratch in an empty Unity project. An open licenced font was the only pre existing asset used.
Artwork created using Inkscape.
Music created using Rytmik Ultimate.
Sounds created using a webcam microphone and edited with Audacity.
Font: Mansalva Regular, developed by Mansalva Project (https://github.com/carolinashort/mansalva) and used under the Open Font Licence (SIL OPEN FONT LICENSE Version 1.1 - 26 February 2007), included in game download folder.
Ratings
| Overall | 774th | 3.145⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 748th | 3.016⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 900th | 2.79⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 183th | 4.032⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 982th | 2.5⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 542th | 3⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 205th | 3.466⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 717th | 2.968⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 21🗳️ | 32🗨️ |
@mincemeat Cheers - not my strong suite so tried to just keep simple notes on a loop!
@rakowu It is mentioned briefly in the start but the weights are for a hidden "work rate" stat - the more you train the faster you work (and eat/play) so you get resources faster but also get less of the hunger/happiness penalty relative to how much you earn (penalty is a constant rate whereas income is affected by work rate)
Glad you appreciated the sprite changes, tried to make as much information obvious to the player as possible (such as the starving belly and SFX, facial expressions, icons updating based on your resources etc).
Thanks all for checking it out and leaving feedback!
My TimTam died after 93 days. That's like 93 in human years.
Challenging but fun :)
Thanks for checking it out @erebus , glad you got some enjoyment from it.
Thanks @sageware , I was very iffy on the art so thanks for the kind words! If you like the Tamagotchi thing you should check out @kirbloid 's game too!!
@megamiley Ha that is life eh, glad you enjoyed it!
:purple_heart: :dart: :frog:
As for the graphics and music: I think the crunchy backgrounds in the UI were a bit over the top, I'd tone that down a bit. The music seemed to stay on a single chord forever, which I guess added to the feeling of stress somehow, but more movement there would be nice so it doesn't get too repetitive.
The graphics may not be the very best around, but they're consistent and I like them. The sound and music are pretty nice too. Well done all round!
Anyway sound department was pretty good. Music wasn't annoying at all and most of the sound effects were nice. The training sound effect hurt my ears a bit.
I don't really get the training mechanic without reading the explanation. Some indicators for that might be nice. Current day number might be nice to see as well, then you could really understand if you are doing better than the last run.
Nice job!