Betapet 🕶️ Space Devin

A Pet In Two Days

The day after my birthday, with BEAT.R just out, I opened Unity again and started making a virtual pet. Two days of C#, and then I stopped.

betapet later got two siblings, pettactoe and deformpet. One is a pet crossed with tic tac toe, the other is a pet you deform. I was trying the same idea three different silly ways to see if any of them had a game in it. Two days was enough to get something on screen and poke at it.

That fall was busy: BEAT.R on the fifth, betapet on the sixth, Woodpecker on npm in October, a wireless client app and server later that month, an Electron weather app in November and a diet tracker two weeks after that. All of it on the side of a full-time job running dev teams at the studio. Small prototypes were how I played, and once in a while one turned into something.

Thirteen Months In Unity

betapet was a Unity project in C#, started in March 2015 and worked on until April 2016. That's thirteen months, in the middle of Crunchbutton, which was already taking pretty much all my time.

It was part of a run of Unity projects. Cluckbutton got me back into a game engine for the first time since Zepa. Juryoku, the space shooter, came in 2014. Then betapet, and a turn based prototype later that year. Four game projects in eighteen months while my day job was food delivery.

I kept my hands in game engines, and that's part of why there's a Game Boy Advance engine ten years later.