12in12 January edition: A virtual puppy made in Unity with Clayxels. Play with it on itch.io Keep scrolling for the dev diary.
For January I decided to take a little tamagotchi game I had made with Twine in 2020 and port it to Unity. This way I didn’t have to worry about design or assets, and could focus on learning the basics of Unity.First thing I did was take the images and hook them up to the animator. Then I made a bunch of buttons to trigger the animations. Couple of glitches, but a good start.I made some progress bars and a basic state machine that counts stats like hunger and happiness up or down, depending on what the puppy is up to.Next Good Boi learned how to talk! These little affirmations make him feel more real and help me communicate feedback to the player.But also realism. Puppies poop A LOT, and so I got to figure out how to instantiate poop prefabs during runtime.Half-way through the month I realized I had already implemented the core of the game, so I could move on to my stretch goal: making a new character model with ClayxelsWhen it comes to animations I don’t really know what I’m doing, so I introduced a bunch of bugs and Good Boi went a little psychotic for a while…I linked a button to another scene with the original graphics. This way people with less powerful machines could still play with the puppy. The UI got an overhaul as well.One of the weirdest and proudest game dev moments: Animating Good Boi smelling its own poop.
