World's Tiniest Desktop Pets

by plusonerabbit

co-authored: @caeden117, @lulu-dev

Overall★★★★★★★★★★4.12

Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.85

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★4.52

Theme★★★★★★★★★★4.63

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★3.98

Audio★★★★★★★★★★3.58

Humor★★★★★★★★★★4.08

Mood★★★★★★★★★★4.06

A falling-sand-desktop-pet-idle-game-hybrid powered by compute shaders :)

Enjoy time on your Windows PC alongside HUNDREDS...no, THOUSANDS...no, MILLIONS of tiny friends!

Watch them dance along the bottom of your monitor!

Let them go for a ride on top of your windows!

Feed them an image file and watch the pixels get munched away!

Neglect them and get jumped at!

Tend to their mood and receive love and appreciation!

Everything is magical with the WORLD'S TINIEST DESKTOP PETS by your side!

In-game tutorial is included, but for reference:

- Mood increases near your cursor, while riding windows, and when eating food
- You can see an overview of happiness in the (i) info panel
- The happier your friends are, the more gold you get
- Buy more friends with gold using the + button
- Press the apple button to open the food folder
- Place actual image files (.PNG, .JPEG) of your choice in the food folder for your friends to eat
- (While the image files are deleted when eaten, a backup is present in the "eaten" folder next to the "food" folder)
- You can drag the UI using the ... bar at the top
- The settings menu contains a few bonus options

Ways to play:

Sadly, the Windows x64 executable is the only way to play this game, though source code is available if you'd like to view or compile for yourself.

Due to the nature of desktop pets, no web build is available. Cross-platform code was out of scope for a game jam. We really tried to make this work in Godot, which would have made Mac & Linux much more feasible, before giving up and switching to Unity :(

Tools used:

- Unity 6
- Paint.NET
- Photoshop
- Audacity

Credit:

Caeden117 - Programming, UI, Art

PlusOneRabbit - Programming, UI, Art

lulu.dev - Programming (saving partially-eaten images back to drive)

Thank you to our cat friends for lending their voices:

skalx - VA (Meower)

Nekomata Kohaku - VA (Meower)

laurn - VA (Meower)

Starlit Traveler - VA (Meower)

VioletStorm - VA (Meower)

JoyceIsDie - VA (Meower)

Anonymous - VA (Meower)

Rabbit's cat Claire - VA (Meower)

Tags: #desktop pet, #idle, #mouse only

Tools: Adobe Photoshop, Audacity, Godot, Paint.net, Unity

Comments24

LDJam user 3024107 Oct 2024, 16:33

Fantastic concept, loved it

qiqiqi7 Oct 2024, 16:38

hahaha you guys must be shader genius

Sheepolution7 Oct 2024, 17:47

Oh no!

I feel like my computer could explode at any moment, but besides the many creatures there was no lag at all. It was funny to see them eat the images, and how fast that went as I got more and more pets. A bit more interaction would've been nice, but for a jam game this is already really cool!

tuism7 Oct 2024, 19:01

Wow! This is..... So much *fun*! I certainly didn't even know that you could do this with Unity? What?? That is super cool! Not much in the way of a game, but certainly a great toy!

PlusOneRabbitauthor7 Oct 2024, 19:32

@tuism I think there are other ways of turning a window transparent which allow for alpha blending, but for the method we're using to wrangle Unity into supporting it, it's essentially acting like a chroma key effect - counting any pixel matching #FF00FF as purely transparent. So yeah, in this case the dither was our only option for blending with the desktop. As for on *everything*, like blending text over an opaque background panel, not necessary there, but changing the default shader was the easiest course of action, and it was just a gamejam concession. Looks kinda interesting in the end, can't tell if I love it or hate it.

PlusOneRabbitauthor7 Oct 2024, 20:35

Little update 1.1.0 while it's still before the deadline - merged a feature from a friend which saves partially-eaten food images back to the food folder. Their eating progress will now persist between game restarts, and you can also watch its thumbnail update in file explorer with the destruction. Thank you, @lulu-dev! Besides that, just a handful more faces and meows brought in to the project.

Stephen L. De Rudder8 Oct 2024, 04:06

Cool game/run while working distraction. 😉 I like the eating images concept. They seem to interfere with the taskbar by going behind it, so I had to autohide my taskbar.

Oxropy8 Oct 2024, 15:18

nice idea, I couldn't make my 10,000,000 little friends happy, that makes me sad :(

Halgendy8 Oct 2024, 21:37

I never would have thought I would say this about tiny little cubes, but WOOWW THEY ARE SO CUTE. Somehow they feel like they're alive and with emotions. Great job.

rsheepdv9 Oct 2024, 03:51

So cute!! I had issues with keeping the game on top though, was there a setting for that I missed? >.

Thomas Gelman9 Oct 2024, 03:58

This is a fun little idea! Sometimes I forget that desktop pets aren't all viruses! Also, I can't believe this is possible within Unity!!! Wish there was a little more to do with them, but watching them eat images is fun. Good work!

Ronn Fever9 Oct 2024, 04:00

What a fun 'little' idea! Loved to see them eat away at my image food. Great audio, great vibe. Hard to be much tinier!

IRoRoI9 Oct 2024, 08:31

haha, I never expected to see that at a jam! innovative :)

PlusOneRabbitauthor9 Oct 2024, 09:07

@rsheepdv It's supposed to just work, no setting, but it seems like there's some inconsistencies between systems :/ Guess that's what we get for trying to use the Windows API on the window created by Unity. Support seems all-around much spottier on Windows 11, if that's what you were using, but there's a few weird edge cases on 10 too.

XanderGoodwin9 Oct 2024, 13:05

Soooo adorable :))))

KoningMathijs9 Oct 2024, 19:19

This is awesome and a really fun take on the theme. Super impressive you've managed to pull this off. Congratz to you and the team! :)

Miles Michell10 Oct 2024, 02:01

Amazing concept and execution! I wish they move a bit more vertically than being "grounded to the bottom of the screen cause they're a little hard to see. still super cute and cool

Coderah10 Oct 2024, 05:01

Brilliant, and absurdly well executed. :clap: I lost my cursor.

Infernaton10 Oct 2024, 08:05

OK. I clearly didn't expect something like this in a JAM. It's fabulous ! Maybe you could add thing to buy with the coin, like a toy or a preset picture from the game itself.
Is there a maximum number of them you can have on the screen ?

PlusOneRabbitauthor10 Oct 2024, 08:26

@infernaton A shop would be a great feature for a post-jam version! Maybe a beach ball for them to bounce around your screen or something. The maximum in the jam version is 10 million, and they spawn in a special animation when you reach it. The technical limit with 1 compute buffer is around 59 million, but it was very laggy and required 2GB of VRAM up-front. Staggering updates is probably the first optimization I'd try if we were to increase the cap.