We’re coming down to the final hours here. Let’s wrap up.

When we began this project, the only idea we had in mind was that the Looking Glass looked awfully like an aquarium. Thus began our harrowing journey to bring the Peppo to life. It went through several iterations — from a beat-em-up pet simulator à la Pocket God, to “basically Webkinz” — before we settled on having a knit toy pet in a world based in your junk drawer. Since then, we’ve just been making new minigames and adding new features, trying to make the world of Peppo. Here’s what we’ve done:

Peppo: A Summary

You begin with your Peppo in your beautiful home, in a beautiful (if slightly weird neighborhood) that includes all the possible minigames you can play. The Peppo begins fairly basically — it’s pink, it has all the average stats that you can expect a Tamagotchi to have like hunger, cleanliness, and exhaustion — but you can level up both your pet and your home by making money and purchasing new items (specifically, hats and furniture).

The most straightforward way to make money is by farming Cheerios, which you can farm (hah, get it) endlessly for quick and easy cash. You can also have fun by performing at the concert hall or gambling at the casino, and there’s a number of more basic minigames that let you interact with your pet (i.e. you can go to the park to play with the Peppo, or catch bubbles to clean it). With your newfound money, you can buy new furniture to build and new hats to give your Peppo, of which there are increasingly expensive tiers.

We imagine Peppo as a cozy game; there’s no monsters or competition, no levelling up in the traditional sense. Your motivation for the game is simply collecting all the hats, gussying up your house, and having fun with your pet. If we had more time, we’d love to have even more customization possibilities and to have polished the metagame world a little more to get our narrative across more strongly.

But in the end, we love our Peppo. We hope you do too. :0

Cheers!

Since the last checkpoint, we’ve been putting a lot of work into polishing the UI, gameplay, and getting all the final assets ready for the main game. For example, we finally have a hat shop up and running, which wasn’t necessarily an “essential” mechanic but nonetheless one that kind of makes the game what it is. We also have now put all the games together into the metagame, and updated the UI to match so that it’s a full and playable game. New sprites and models for all the various functions we have are steadily coming in.

We’ve also begun actual playtesting, which has brought us valuable feedback on the playability and feel of the game. As such we’ve been hard at work bug fixing and tweaking the last (many) features of the game. We’ve been going over all the money-making games to make sure that the amount of money makes sense for the reward you get, etc.

For the last couple of days, we are looking to fix any persistent bugs and provide all the tutorials and UI necessary to play all the minigames. We’re also updating the look of everything so they are no longer placeholders, and just trying to make the game as polished as possible.

Let’s hope it builds this time!

This week, we mainly focused on implementing transitions and other integrational points between all the minigames and the metagame. For example, now there’s a flow from buying furniture at the store to building it in your home, and as a whole we’re really working more on fleshing out the world as a fully-realized pet game.

To that end, we’re starting to establish asset pipelines to replace all of our placeholders with actual animations and stuff. The Peppo (name still in flux) is steadily getting animations built for it — figuring out how to get the model to deform in the way we want, with all the cartoonish sprites, is still in progress — , as well as models for the world itself. Obviously, there’s some refactoring to be done in the game as we make the code more accessible to modularity.

Now we’ve also begun playing around with sound for the game, researching potential Peppo noises and background music for the world.

We’re at the point where all the building blocks for the concrete actions you want to do are in place; as such, we now need to focus on implementing the personality stats and Peppo customizability in full polish. We already have the framework built but we need the user to be able to see the rewards of keeping your Peppo happy, being able to buy it nice things, etc. So a lot of work now will be done on building UI and polish: for the economic system, for the character customization, for the stores and shops and minigames.

Also, we have a new logo for our team! Check it out:

For the past couple of weeks, we have been spending most of our time working on shoring up the “main” minigames that form the mechanics for taking care of your pet and the integration thereof. While you have fun with your pet in its Looking Glass home, we wanted to have a larger world on a second monitor where you could upgrade your house, sell stuff, and interact with other people’s pets since ultimately we want everyone to be able to have fun seeing what the other Peppos have grown to be.

To this end, we’ve made a functional outside world (what we call the metagame) that acts as the meeting point between your home, other players, and the shops where you can buy new items. Currently, we’ve created a login and save system for each player so that their Peppo is assigned to themselves, and built a world for them to interact in.

We’ve also been developing the various minigames that go along with the pet. Currently implemented (with bugs):

• Cooking food for your pet
• Bathing pet
• Playing (piano) with your pet
• Slot machine (for those lootboxes — hire us, EA)

In terms of models, we’ve developed a Peppo rig and have been working on getting a furry version that’s simple enough to get on the Looking Glass with a reasonable framerate.

To-do:

Our next biggest priority, besides shoring up the technical aspects of each minigame, is to integrate all of these into a more reasonable and cohesive prototype. Right now they’re separate scenes, and we haven’t done a lot of work on transitioning between them. We also plan at this point to start replacing the placeholder models with our actual art, and developing the UI.