Yesterday I penned my ideas for how I would build a handheld virtual pet, assuming I had all the abilities to code it and all the materials I could want.
It filled a couple of pages in my notebook, but I'm going to see if I can pitch this in less words here.
So the crux of my idea is that this is a virtual pet that takes care of you as much as you do it. So it would have all the basic virtual pet needs like you need to feed it, play with it, clean it or it's enclosure. I could add other things like giving it medicine when it gets sick but I never thought that was a very engaging mechanic. I could do things to change that potentially, like not have it so your pet gets better right away. And that relates to another philosophy that is related to the first: That the care you provide for your pet should mirror fulfilling your own base needs. Getting something to eat, cleaning yourself up and taking time to recover when you need to.
That is also why I would want to put a pedometer function into the hardware as well so that when your pet gets exercise and play, you ALSO get exercise and play. Traditionally, you would achieve this through minigames, which I might also include, but I wanted that aspect to again be mutually beneficial for your wellbeing as well as the pet's. It is also worth noting that this does not work for everyone. I was made aware from a retrospective I watched about various pokemon pedometers that this should be an optional feature that can be bypassed for the sake of people with disabilities who would not be able to trigger the function of a pedometer or use it much at all. Anything that the pedometer activity would reward you with would be accessible in other ways in the game. I would give some thought to and recieve some peer review on some good alternatives that would add to the gameplay.
On the topic of minigames too, I don't want to put in anything too complex. Just a fun, short idle game option cause those are fun to have. It might also be nice if you were able to swap games out, because playing the same ones over and over again can become very dull. I find most handheld pets can only hold about 3 unique rounds of a single game, so once you memorize a brain teaser or an order of things appearing on screen, you just play it by memory. There are some games that work better for this than others too and we all have our own preferences.
That musing aside though, something else I wanted to include were little interactive screens you can't really lose at to be used as visual stims or screens that would allow you to just stim with the buttons on the handheld device without opening other screens. I find myself sometimes wanting to idly stim with my virtual pets, but it's not very satifsying and you can't just open a game and look away from it while you stim otherwise you lose and the screen closes. In fact, I thought about putting stims into the virtual pet before I thought about putting in any actual games, but I thought it would be nice to have some levels you could choose from based on how much stimulation you need. I often find myself doing nonogram puzzles or sudoku to help soothe myself and those require more concentration.
The next function that I wanted to add was affirmations and reminders. I want these to be fully customizable but they would just be little things tailored to you if you want them to combat any cycles of thinking you find yourself in or remind you of important things you don't want to forget on the day to day. I have found in other self care apps that affirmations are very general and they aren't always what you need, so having the ability to write them out and have your pet parrot them to you scrolling across the screen on occasion throughout the day when idle would be a good solution. Also if you think it would be funny to make your pet say the fuck word, I won't stop you even if I could!
Lastly, pause functions. I want this to be a very forgiving virtual pet. We can't always be twiddling around with handheld devices and we shouldn't have to be either. So you will be able to pause or turn off the hand held device whenever you want. But I also thought about implementing another function that would eliminate the pet's depreciation of hunger and other stats for as long as you need to, still allowing you to access all the functions that would be beneficial to you like the stims, games and affirmations. Because ultimately having a virtual pet is a low stakes thing. If you have to focus just on yourself for a while and not anything else, that should be okay. I think it's important to be able to tailor this to your needs.
I had some ideas for extra stuff too like being able to find more virtual pets as you play but I'd only consider those for very late versions. This is even assuming that this is ever something that I could give to other people. Like yeah, I can make this for me but it's also so cool that I'd just want to share it.
I have been watching a lot of videos of people making handheld devices, cyberdecks, and virtual pets, but whenever people make virtual pets, impressive as they are to me because WOAH you made that!! They are usually just tamagotchi clones. I haven't really seen anybody out there branching out and trying anything too different and that just makes me feel an even greater sense of longing.
Maybe it's just cause im an adult and I have less free time and support than I did when I was a kid, but I feel like everytime I start to take care of a virtual pet these days I inevitably lose track of it for one reason or another. I can't take care of it for very long because I'm too busy taking care of myself by focusing on myself to get through a rough patch, I have a bunch of responsibilities to fulfill or I'm getting out into the world with other people and wanting to engage only with that for a while, get away from screens and devices, you know? So this right here is what an ideal virtual pet would look like to me, and maybe wanting for something enough will drive me to creating it someday. I know it takes more than that, but I think it's important to entertain these ideas too.
As it stands, I have begun to learn Javascript to complete my web dev trifecta of HTML and CSS. And as I learned more about what javascript is capable of, it dawned on me that I already have the tools to build a virtual pet. I even managed to build a hunger status that depreciates in real time and can be filled back up with the click of a button. That's one of the most basic functions a virtual pet can have.
Even if I can't make it portable right away, I think figuring out the logic of it all on desktop would be a big step forward. I really didn't think this is what I would be up to at this point in time, but it's a very exciting prospect and so different from what I usually do.
