In Week 12 of AN, I wanted to work on making a concept for a virtual pet, based on the concept of owning virtual pets for stress relief and to feel loved. The theme of loneliness is one that’s prevalent across many forms of media and explored in various ways.
By producing an interactive concept where the pet chick is mass-produced by clicks, I tried to show the multiplying functionality of a ‘shimeji’. Shimejis are desktop mascot characters that move across the screen and do animations and multiply. The user controls their behaviour by clicking them into existence (as I showed in my interactive concept) dragging them around and dropping them wherever.
While I was brainstorming, my group suggested that my idea was similar to ‘Tamagotchi’, a handheld digital pet that the user has to feed and play with or they die. I was thus inspired to include the feed and play functionalities in my concept for this relaxing interactive pet experience.
Tamagotchis were actually quite a phenomenal obsession amongst an entire generation as the first electronic connection that kids had when they had no one else to connect with. This is why I believe easy, surface-level connections is better than deep meaningful connections.
Moreover, was focusing on the technical feature (multiplication) of the shimeji itself. My reasoning for why such a feature exists was that people are lonely and the more little creatures they have floating around their screen the more they'll be able to be distracted. So multiplication will be acting as a defence against loneliness
Another game I reference is Run Once; a shimeji game with similar themes but instead of multiplying, it dies after the program is closed and the player is only left with memories saved as pictures.
From watching the watching list, The Wonders of the Molecular World Animated was the most engrossing in terms of how molecules move and I got the sense of small things working together to form a bigger picture.
game here>> pwd:magi
https://hiyokaygames.itch.io/chickcreate
#kaykay #kkanfolio2
