next »

[Tokyoma]

So I'm starting work on an indie tamagotchi-esque game. It will not have a window, the pet will wander around the screen and the player will be able to interact with it from there. It will also have a system tray icon for ease of access and so you can let your pet remain active or asleep, and not necessarily be on the screen.

There will be several types of "eggs" that the player can choose from initially, that can grow and maybe even have several different evolutions per egg, but maybe only on per egg, just depends on the amount of sprites I can get for this. [Anyone who would like to donate a sprite or set of sprites, check the list of sprite requirements.] The player will care for the egg until it hatches and then begin work taking care of and developing his pet.

Below are several branches of information for various possible game design candidates:

[Sprite Work]

[Max Sprite Sizes]
1) Eggs-16x16
2) Step One Evolution-24x24
3) Step Two Evolution-32x32
4) Step Three and Onward-64x64

[Sprite States]
1) Eggs
  a) Idle State
  b) Shaking State (Probably 2 to 3 frames.)
  c) Hatching State (Probably 3 to 6 frames.)
2) Evolutions
  a) Idle State (Most likely a two frame breathing animation.)
  b) A Normal Left Walking State (The right will just be mirrored in game. Likely to be 3 frames.)
  c) An Eating State (Likely 2 to 3 frames.)
  d) A Celebration State (Generally a dance, or happy bounce. Anywhere from 2 to 6 frames.)
  e) A Sad/Sick Left Walking state (Likely 3 frames.)
  f) A Disgruntled State (Likely 2-3 frames.)
  g) Other States including game/playing states, mating states and any other states I will add to the list further in development.


[Game Points]

[GUI]
1) The pet will be displayed directly over everything on the screen.
2) A small window for selecting Games, Feeding, and things of that nature will be available to open from the System Tray Icon.
3) The pet will be easily toggled to be displayed or not displayed.
4) **Multiple pets at once is planned but may not be implemented.**
5) The System Tray will have a menu for "Show Game Menu Window", "Show Pet(s)", "Toggle Sound", "Exit", (Any other ideas are welcome.)
6) The in-game menu will have choices for "Play with pet", "Hospital", "Pet Toys", "Pet store", "Pet competition", "Connect to Arena" (For eventual online battling), "Make pet sleep", "Punish pet", "Punishing tools", "Praise Pet", "Give Gift", "Feed pet", "Close game window" (Any other ideas, please let me know.)
7) **The ability to feed a pet files from your computer will also definitely be integrated. **


[Pet Stats]
1) Name; The name you give the pet.
2) Age; The age of your pet in game-years.
3) Breed; The specific species of pet you have, Breed name can be chosen by sprite creator.
4) Sex; Whether the pet is male or female. (Maybe have two different sprite color choices.)
5) Hunger; How hungry your pet is, affects Health, Energy and Mood.
6) Health; How healthy your pet is, this affects how likely it is to get an illness.
7) Mood; How happy your pet is, this affects your pets over all health, and fertility.
8) Energy; Affects whether your pet wants to play, sleep, and how well it does against an illness.
9) Fertility; Affects the success rate of mating. Based on Health, Mood, Age, Breed, and Energy.
10) I need more of these and ideas are acceptable except RPG elements, if I get enough positive response, I'll probably add a simplistic RPG system for battling pets anyway, I just want the basics for now.




Please Any other Ideas or anything really will help, I've got the basic ideas, I just would like some help fine tuning the features and such. Thanks for any input. :]
 

[raiten]

Nice idea. You should make it a virus though!

[pen]

Nice idea. You should make it a virus though!

You should make it so that you feed it files, not "ingame food items" - making the pet act as a recycling bin, for better or worse!

[michael]

Nice idea. You should make it a virus though!

You should make it so that you feed it files, not "ingame food items" - making the pet act as a recycling bin, for better or worse!

^

[Tokyoma]

Nice idea. You should make it a virus though!

You should make it so that you feed it files, not "ingame food items" - making the pet act as a recycling bin, for better or worse!

I actually thought about both of those ideas, that's why the terms "egg" and "pet" are used loosely. I would like to see a little on screen interaction, if nothing else, just sort of following your cursor from left to right at the bottom of your screen from time to time, or the ability to bite onto it and you gotta shake 'em off or something cute and similar. I like the idea of feeding it files, maybe not actually deleting them, but still being able to feed it to him would be nice, I actually think I'll add that. As for the virus idea, this could allow for procedural growth and people would only have to design several various virus parts that all could fit together.

[Edit: I've gotten the basic engine for display down, I've run into a small problem however, I'm using GM7 and the FunDraw library, to draw directly on the screen, this works well and incredibly fast, however, it really only displays bitmaps, and as such there's no transparency for them, therefor giant white box around the sprite. I'm searching around for another library to Draw on the screen and support an alpha channel of some sort, if anyone knows of anything let me know.]

[letsap]

Oh man, I loved Tamagotchi. Don't make it a virus, though.

I didn't know if you wanted color or black and white, and I assumed you wanted the Tamagotchi two frame thing going on, so here's this egg.

[null & void]

I don't think he meant a normal virus. I think it was meant in a sort of "directed evolution" way.

Which I'm all up for. Seriously.

[threesided]

I'd be interested in maybe throwing together a whole bunch of these little guys, but first I'd like to know that they're being put to good use.

How good of a coder are you, and have you actually started on anything for this? Or is this strictly an idea right now?

These'll be pretty easy to pump out a whole bunch, so the faster you get back to me, the faster i can tell you whether I'd be willing to help.

Edit: Whoops, just read your last post. I see you've gotten started on coding. I'd still like to hear where you'd like to go with this a bit more i think.

[Tokyoma]

I'd be interested in maybe throwing together a whole bunch of these little guys, but first I'd like to know that they're being put to good use.

How good of a coder are you, and have you actually started on anything for this? Or is this strictly an idea right now?

These'll be pretty easy to pump out a whole bunch, so the faster you get back to me, the faster i can tell you whether I'd be willing to help.

Edit: Whoops, just read your last post. I see you've gotten started on coding. I'd still like to hear where you'd like to go with this a bit more i think.

I'd place myself at an average coding level, I'm using GM7. I've been using GM for around 3-4 years now. I'm just now really getting the hang of making all of my code reusable. I am moderately serious about this project however, I don't want you to pump out a bunch of sprites for something that I'm not going to finish, because I have a habit of abandoning projects, but one of the main reasons is that I can't sprite anything for them and when I start using a bunch of temp art or spriting my own things I just get bored with how it all looks and I tend to trash it. I'd like to make this still, however I came to a small roadblock which is going to result in the game being windowed, it will still have a system tray icon however, and will be easily put away or brought to the front. The base engine I'm using, I'll be honest, I'm not sure how fast it is. I've always wanted to get the maximum speed out of GM so I decided to throw everything into a while loop, and then everything else is really just scripts I manually update the screen, and so far as I can tell on this laptop, there's no tearing issue that I usually encounter, it was nice to see that eliminated. But regardless of how optimized it is or isn't, it's more than fast enough to run a simple tamagotchi program. So I present you with what you've read, as input comes I'll try to add more things and get this thing really developed. What I suggest is just making like one complete set of sprites for one breed of creature, and I'll use that as a template for the game and after that you can just make anyone you want and I'll toss 'em in a selectable list of eggs. Even some secret ones that the player can only unlock by raising and breeding two other breeds.

And if anyone has any ideas about how to make this more fun than just a virtual pet, to really add some sustenance to the program, please speak up. I'd like to see this be fun, not just a tamagotchi close, I'd like to see some unique indie interpretation of a tamagotchi system.

[null & void]

As said before, make it eat your files and gain stuff from them. I mean literally eat. Want to delete something? In you go! Chomp chomp and your fuzzy friend is looking a little stranger.

A good example of what I'm talking about is in that game from the Procedural Generation thing, dropTD. It's a bit exploitable if you find a really good file (I found one which stacks well enough to cover the whole screen with well over a thousand copies of it in loosely structured levels).

But basically, it'll interpret the file you feed to it and maybe, say, give your pet a horn, or make your pet take longer before getting hungry, or something interesting in that vein. Just a suggestion, not sure if it's feasible.

[sergiocornaga]

I really love the idea of dragging all my precious files onto a tamagochi and watching them disappear.

It might be neat if a few hours later, they were excreted in the form of garbled files of significantly smaller sizes. Or... something along those lines.

[jwaap]

wow tokyoma :D this was ancient man GMG back in the time I was still Nobody right?

[threesided]

Alright, I'm going to do up some sprites for you to work with today. I'll try to make a complete set, or at least get you a couple babies and maybe one evolution chain. Then you can get back to me on what to add/redo/improve.

Oh yeah, and I'm going to do it in colour, hopefully that's what you were hoping for.

[threesided]

Here's something to start with, let me know what you think, if I should simplify or not.



I made some sprites for the next level, but haven't done any of the animation parts for them yet.

[Tokyoma]

Oh man, I loved Tamagotchi. Don't make it a virus, though.

I didn't know if you wanted color or black and white, and I assumed you wanted the Tamagotchi two frame thing going on, so here's this egg.

I like it and I like your style, I've seen your posts quite a few times before, but I'm not a big fan of outlines on sprites at all, but if you must, make it a very thin one, or not one at all, I've got an in game script to add an outline to anything I need, so if you want it I could add it that way.

Here's something to start with, let me know what you think, if I should simplify or not.



I made some sprites for the next level, but haven't done any of the animation parts for them yet.

I like these too, the thin outline is tolerable enough.
Progress with the engine is going well I just got the encryption of the "pet" file down with saves information for all of the pets based on which user you log in as. Today I gotta work on getting all of that information loaded up from the same file, and then I'll work on the first part of egg selection. :] More updates soon.