-
-
Our splash screen!
-
Building the homescreen!
-
Building the shop!
-
Pond chat!
Inspiration
I am in love with Tamagotchi!
When looking at pre-existing virtual pet simulators on Reddit, I didn't find anything that quite scratched that retro style itch.
We wanted to make it super cute, but also have it incorporate social features to give it that Reddit feel.
I felt like a digital pet would be the perfect contender for a daily game, as users would have to keep coming back to maintain their frog.
What it does
The game starts by spawning your frog. Once you have your frog, you need to take care of it by feeding it, playing with it and giving it medicine. You can forage to earn money - which allows you to buy hats from the shop which the frog can wear.
With regards to social features, you can talk to other users in the pond chat - with input mainly restricted to "ribbit". You can also add friends, so that you can go visit their pond and help keep their frog stats up for them.
If you fail to maintain your frogs needs, your frog will "die", but you will just be resent to the spawn screen. The user gets to keep all their money and items - only the frog will be new.
How I built it
The game is built with React. I implemented Reddit API's and Redis to store user data and update the frogs health in realtime.
All pixel art was drawn by my partner. All the rest of the styling and animations was done with styled-components and css.
Challenges we ran into
I am a solo developer, and started the project halfway through the Hackathon. This limited time period and lack of a dev team meant it was difficult to implement every feature that I had imagined.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Personally, I am really proud of the Pond Chat. I think it's a super simple but also a cute idea to get the community interacting with each other in a silly way.
My parnter is really proud of the splash screen.
What we learned
We definitely learned how to scale things back. This is my first Hackathon, and also my first actual solo project that's made it to completion. There were so many more things that I wanted to do - but making a priority list and sticking to it really helped ensure that we could get it finished.
What's next for Frog Spawned
A leaderboard that tracks who has kept their frog alive the longest and who has the best pond!
Weekly frog themed events.
More items and upgrades, for your frog and pond.
More refined stats management. I really wanted to have custom frog moods and behaviours based on the stat levels but there just wasn't enough time.
More animations!
Better layout design for full screen. It looks way better on mobile and medium size screens.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.