Today is very much a "real work" day for me, because we have a client call scheduled for later today and I spent my morning doing "followup emails" and "circling back on previous discussions" and just generally acting like a jobsona.
Mostly, I don't have to do that. Mostly I get to make toys.
But this is still a business, and that means sometimes I have to jobsona.
(yesterday was a day like that too, although less stressful than today, because I didn't have to talk to anyone outloud.
I'm usually good on a mic, but I don't do it much anymore.)
Anyway, it's my lunch break and by virtue of today being a real work day, that means today's lunch is a real work lunch.
Which means I get a few minutes to screw around on the internet while I eat.
This has afforded me some time to think about the things I want to do in the future but that I don't have anywhere in our current development schedule.
One of the wacky toy projects I want to tackle next year is a virtual pet.
But not just any virtual pet, I specifically want to do something like POX or SCANNERZ, which is to say a virtual pet with some kind of real world mechanic.
I'm struggling with this one a bit, conceptually.
I am not struggling with it mechanically.
I'll start with the mechanics and then talk about why I'm struggling conceptually.
Mechanically, the idea is:
- Little oled (or, if I'm feeling fancy, eink) screen
- Big battery
- ESP32
- Some buttons
- LoRaWan radio
- Some custom firmware to turn your local meshtastic network into events for your little vpet.
- a web app or mobile app or whatever that lets you interface with the thing over BT to change settings.
When I was a kid, a virtual pet with that feature set would have been absolutely my jam.
But there's a problem, and that problem is that all 90s and 00s virtual pets were predicated on the idea of BATTLE.
I have really been working to remove BATTLE from my play mechanics and my idea space.
There is no reason for every group of pre-teens to be forcing their robots in to high stakes combat a la medabots, or forcing their pets to fight a la pokemon, or being transferred in to a digital nightmare and being forced to survive neverending torment at the hands of computers that want to kill them (like Digimon or Monster Ranchers.)
But all the Virtual Pet toys of my childhood, if they had any kind of "connectivity" at all, were entirely based on the idea of interpersonal combat.
This is not to say that I think there is no room for conflict or combat in play. Very much the opposite, in fact. But I'm trying to encourage the kind of behaviors I want to see in the world and that means that if I have a combat element, it needs to be Player(s) vs Environment or Player(s) vs Institution.
The players are cooperating for a common cause.
That common cause might be a violent one, but it might just be "building a community center".
This brings me to the crux of my conceptual conundrum.
Which of our in progress franchises do I tie a virtual pet to?
The obvious answer, to my wife, was K9 Riders (have I talked about that here? God we're working on so much.)
The basic premise of K9 riders is:
- Far future, humans extinct
- Aliens land on earth and make friends with Dogs who are now the dominant species
- Other aliens try to enslave Dogs
- Friendly aliens work to liberate dogs and build dog friendly society in the wreckage humans left behind.
I can see how to make a k9 riders vpet, how to explain it conceptually, and at least a few ways to theme it as a cooperative rather than combative experience.
But that's not the one I thought of first, and I'm not convinced it has the widest potential.
The obvious answer for me was Bottlecap Galaxy.
Have I talked about Bottle cap galaxy? God damn we're working on so much.
BCG is basically: CosmoGnomic Gnomads are scavenging the Garbage Belt where humanity has been dumping their trash. They have been recycling human trash into spaceships and garbage deflectors (in the form of bottle cap launchers).
My initial thought was that you'd have a virtual Cosmognome living in your little keychain who spends his day collecting "debris" as you wander around, and using that debris to build stuff.
If you encounter other folks with cosmognomes, you both get to jump ahead a slot on your research tree.
Then the idea was to render various garbage deposits around the city, and have the gnomes turn those garbage deposits into functional pieces of gnomic society by interacting with them (but then I'd need a mechanism for continued play! What do you do when all the garbage has been converted into gnomehomes?)
There are ways to work the virtual pet concept in to other franchises that we're working on.
I could make it work within the context of Wrestle Planet (I don't think I've talked about that one, and I'm not going to start now!) because, in spite of the fact that a wrestling match appears to be a conflict between two wrestlers, but is in fact a cooperative performance with the goal of entertaining an audience.
Or, for our cryptid work, your virtual pet could be a cryptid habitat. Maybe you're trying to hide bigfoot from @jack and maybe you're trying to start a cryptid preserve along the way.
Or, for our sky pirates, we could use basically all of the same conceits while abandoning the specific pet motif. It's not a digivice, it's a communications array. You're part of a network of spies coordinating information about [story beats from the skypirates novel and tv show] while also trying to establish a more hospitable environment for your community.
