WombaTomo
Tamagotchi-inspired Wombat Game
WombaTomo is a simulation game that invites players to care for an adorable wombat by feeding it crops grown in their backyard garden and interesting dishes made from their kitchen.
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Game Design
Everything started with my passion for…wombats…and a simple prototype on making unexpected combinations.
Branching off of my prototype, I designed a cooking system by combining two ingredients, and with different reaction the wombat would have after eating each combined dish.
We really want to recreate the Tamagotchi mechanics, so I created another food collection system, involving 6 different crops in the background, that the player can pick up for the food combination and feeding.
I researched and dove deep into what wombats eat both in captivity and in the wild. I also looked into what crops could grow in a backyard garden in Australia. With this knowledge we created a believable feeding system that the wombat would enjoy.
Aside from all the food-related stuff, I also design more interactions with the wombat, such as petting, to provide more engagement with the wombat. It is a mechanic for the player to have a deeper connection with the wombat as well.
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Art Direction
So wombats… I did a lot of wombat sketches before the settle on the final wombat. It is a hard animal to be represent by simple art, but I narrowed it down to 3 important features: rounded body, big nose, and square-ish face…?
Here we have some early stage environmental design for the game. Again, we want to keep the authenticity of the Australian backyard look, I planned the background on top of a photograph of an Australian backyard. I also took the Japanese clip art website, Irasutoya, as one of my main art references for our game to give it a cute, funny, and iconic look.
To give more juice to the game, I really want to focus on creating unexpected and interesting food combinations. After watching the anime Delicious in Dungeon, it inspired me a lot that even familiar ingredients can be made into extraordinary dishes. So I took this idea into the creation of our dishes. Not only we have classic Caprese Salad (but vegan), but we also included dishes like chips and soggy apple…
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Programming
This was a big learning experience for me, I became the lead programmer of the project and took charge of coding the food combination system, the wombat feeding system, the wombat reaction system and the kitchen UI. It was an intense learning and debugging process, but this project made me understand coding patterns, structures and project architecture. There is a lot of things now I know I could have developed in a better way but my next projects will probably benefit a lot from this.
Production
So this project itself is the final product of our Game Production class taught by Professor Richard Lemarchand here in USC Games. The objective of this project and the class is to learn the ins and outs of the video game production process. Going from ideation to postproduction, we produced important documents such as the project statement, the macro, and the burndown chart; we also went through critical milestones like vertical slice, alpha, beta, etc. Overall, I gained solid knowledge and hands on experience with game production process.
