First, the timelapse

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43zut5CUOzQ

Turns out I had juuust under 14.5 hours of footage, which is pretty impressive considering that I had to work all weekend.

This was one of those weird ideas that hits you in the shower. Virtual Pets are one of the game archetypes that easily spring to my mind, and it had been on the list of potential options since the theme voting. The thing that pushed it over the had was the mental image of combining dna and getting weird mutant creatures out of it.

Things I wish I could have done better
I know "art" isn't the point here, but I've seen some really nice stuff done very quickly and I really don't like most of my art. Guess just mark it as something to practice in the meantime. On the other hand, definitely will want to focus harder on getting the actual game working before stressing too much about art. One of the downsides of my concept is that things have to be kinda recognizable. All things in balance. Also I had several issues with Defold suddenly insisting there was a problem with my images that's only fixed by restarting the editor, which a google search indicates they're aware of anyway.

Things that went well
Well... I finished it, for one. Or maybe "finished", in quotes, because there's still a few things I would have liked to add but didn't have time, and there's a lot of balancing that could happen. But still! It's done, and all the important bits work. I learned a lot about Defold's GUI system. I have other personal projects that I really wish I'd have known some of the things I know now. And I managed to keep screen changing really simple by keeping each screen as basically its own object, or collection in one case. Not that this is useful for most games - it doesn't store information between screen changes easily - but here it works near perfectly.

What didn't make the cut
The biggest thing that didn't make it was that I originally planned to have the simulation have a finite ending. As you cared (or ignored) your creature, it's "alignment" would change. And then after a set period of time, you would release the creature into the wild and see the results of what you'd unleashed upon the world. One of the "body parts" that beginning DNA can be set to is "the mind", which would affect how easily your creature was affected by your actions, and in some cases also affected the starting alignment. I never got the system implemented beyond starting values, but it'd have been cool.

The other thing that didn't make the cut was, you know, actual animations. But I guess that's not important in the long run. The wheel "spins", and I used a code based hack to make the head occasionally look the other direction to prevent it being TOO static, so it works.

Game link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/dnapet