PXLME: a life-sim game

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Hey everyone,

I wanted to share some exciting news with you all. I’m currently working on a game called “PXLME” which is a 2D top-down life-simulation game developed in Unity. I’ve always been passionate about creating a life-sim game, and lately, I’ve been particularly drawn to the charm of 2D games.

In PXLME, players will have the opportunity to choose from a variety of characters at the beginning of the game. While I initially considered including a character customization feature, I’ve decided to focus my efforts on implementing a unique weight gain mechanic instead. Managing the weight of your character will be a central aspect of gameplay.

Alongside weight management, players will also need to fulfill other needs such as happiness, energy, fitness, hunger, and more. The choices you make in taking care of these needs will have an impact on gameplay. For instance, eating enough food will boost your character’s happiness, while a lack of physical activity will lead to decreased fitness. It’s up to you to decide how you want to play the game and manage these needs.

As development progresses, I plan to introduce additional features such as job opportunities, non-player characters with rich personalities, home customization, and much more. These additions will further enrich the gameplay experience, allowing players to immerse themselves.

I’m particularly interested in hearing your thoughts and gathering feedback on my progress. If you’d like to share your ideas, suggestions, or simply join in on the discussion, feel free to join our Discord server at the following link: Discord.

I will post early builds on my discord

Here is an example screenshot:

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Thank you all for your support, and I’m looking forward to making the game with all of you :slight_smile:

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I’m super hyped about this. There desperately needs to be more sandbox/sim style WG games. As far as the “unique weight gain mechanic” What did you have in mind? I imagine it wouldn’t be too hard to pick a body type (Apple, Pear, etc.) and be able to customize your character, but I’m not a game dev so I could be talking out of my ass here.

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Oh this looks like it could be very fun. Quite excited for future development

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My goal is to make the game as realistic as possible, but also playable. This means in terms of the weight mechanic that you have following features:

  • BMR: You constantly burn calories (since your body is always active)
  • Stomach: You have a stomach, wich you can fill up with food. Everytime you achieve to stuff yourself completely full, your stomach expands a little bit, making room for more food.
  • Activity: You loose weight quicker when you walk and you loose the fastest when you run. Since most people here like to put on the pounds, I suggest to not be active after stuffing yourself, since running will pick the calories straight out of your stomach.
  • Visual Changes: As your character gains weight, he/her will change in appearance. I’ve already added 6 unique sprites for each weight stage. This is the hardest part, cause of having to redo all the animation sprites for each directional walk and activity for each of these stages.
  • Addiction: Food can be an addiction in real life, so Im making it one in my game :sunglasses: There will be a feature in the future in wich certain activities like eating can be done too many times in a certain amount of time, resulting in an addiction for your player. This can result in your player becoming unhappy when not having anything to eat for a short amount of time. Im not shure yet what I will add as requirement to loose the addiction, but all this will soon come.
  • Rude/Nice Pedestrians: This will probably be one of the hardest things to add in the future, I want to have unique NPC Characters wich can react on changes in your weight. Meaning that some may comment in a bad way or make a fat joke about you, while other might say something positive, supporting or neutral.

I hope you like my idea of the game. I’d also like to add that you can influence how fast time goes by to play the game at your pace. If you have any cool ideas for future features, then lmk :smiley:

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So is this a sandbox kind of game or does it have an overall storyline?

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I like the idea of having a story or some kind of scenario going on while playing. Something more in a way of a story based on own decisions or something like that. I would probably work on something like this, if the base game is finished.

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I like the sound of everything a lot! I think the sprite work is great too. Sprites are underappreciated imo, it allows for your imagination to run wild and fill in the gaps while giving you a visual base for your character. It would be nice to scale how fast or slow your body burns calories, it would make for a nice “difficulty” system. Since this is going to be a sim game, I think have a “silent protagonist” or having our character talk minimally would be a nice touch. Like I said, I’m not a game dev, and my head could be in the clouds, but these were just some of my thoughts and suggestions. Good luck!

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Definitely sounds interesting, color me interested!

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Always love a nice sandbox, even more if it’s open-world like this one(or at least it looks pretty open-world to me)

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i hoping you going back that cool and great idea of character customization do not forget that ok.

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If I manage to get more skilled pixel-artists :smiley: I just started doing it and I know its fun and easy, but to add a character customization to a game where each sprite then has to have 6 different variants, is very hard. But the feature itself is definetly on my Todo-List. I will add this the time im confident enough to design all the sprites :slight_smile:

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Is there stuffing mechanics, or just WG? Also, what’s the game engine?

Also, can the downloads be posted here? I don’t like joining a bunch of rando Discord servers.

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Don’t let feature creep beat you in the long run!

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