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.
