Hatchlings

This was a quick 2 (or 3?) month diversion for our team to take a break from War of Nova to rattle off a tamagotchi game. Not gonna lie, this was a lot of fun to work on. We have a lot of talented 2D artists who breathed a lot of life into this with super cute animations

I did my best to match this with a fairly elaborate sound design that I more or less took the entire reigns for. I beefed up our in game audio system to support Ambient tracks, and picked & created ambient tracks for each of our 8(?) habitats. I also set up some really emotional sad piano music that would play when viewing the habitat of a dead dragon - really gut wrenching stuff. not to mention wiring up procedural snoring and procedural farting.

This project was built very quickly to meet a tight deadline, so the process was very engineer-driven. A lot of my initial decisions about the the UI still remain in the game. For this, i decided to push our tooltip system to the max, leaning very heavily on tooltips that would pop out of buttons in lieu of an endless wave of confirmation popups. I think this was the right call, it helps keep you immersed and grounded to the habitats.

Hatching Eggs. Unity timeline did the heavy lifting here

Decorating habitats. This is basically matching game - both Hatchlings and Decorations have traits you want to match up to achieve synergies. Each habitat also has a unique ambient track, background, and wind pattern. The wind pattern only affects the Pinwheel decoration - for example the tundra is much windier than the candy forest.

Just showing off some of these here Hatchlings!

As the hatchlings level up, they can evolve into young adulthood and finally to full grown adults. This animation was also sequenced with Unity timeline. This was a tough one to develop sounds for in a short period of time - I think I threw 3 different slide whistles in here :)

On the other end, failing to care for your Hatchlings will kill them. I picked a pretty sad piano track here and rigged up procedural farts when you'd click on the dead guys. The art team did such a good job on the death poses, it is pretty shocking the first time you experience this lol. Of course you could spend gold to revive your dragons :)

If a Hatchling reached max level, you could Ascend it, essentially locking in the points you've accrued for that Hatchling forever.

the tutorial

a small glimpse at the debug tool for hatchlings. you could set their needs to specific values, speed up time, and simulate hours passing.