I think the main part of a tamagotchi is to maintain different values like hungry, tired, bored, happy, sad, age and to make them depending on different actions/inputs from the user. In a timer loop you can check what changed by input or by elapsed time. All this should be a inner "model" of the tiny beast.

I would create first this model and maybe test it with a very simple interface. And later I would decide how I can show the values and how do I get the inputs. This interface can vary from simple to something great - depends on your abilities not so much on the SDK.

Something special is the suspend/resume of an app. In this time the app isn't running, but the little beast should life again. After resume (or restart) you have to look how much time is gone and what should happen in between.

That's it :)

I think 10 weeks is a lot of time for it - depends what else you need time for in this 10 weeks.

I wrote the same time finefin did. So mostly I wrote the same things with other words ;)

Great advice there from the other posters.

To give further direction in getting started you're going to need the following:

1. Buttons to interact with the creature, (food, water, petting, buying additional scenery items to effect it's mood/life, etc).

Start by creating some rectangles and positioning them where you like on the screen, research button states and types, (touch,tap etc) and try to get the buttons to change colour and print something to the terminal, (the words "food", "water", etc dependant on which button is pressed).

2. You need a creature. I would start with a simple rectangle/square and set it to white, ( rgb: 255,255,255) then wire up each button to change it's colour to give some feedback. Too much water and it turns blue, to much food yellow. Hit it too many times and it goes red etc.

3. An environment. Draw a rough picture of it's house/cage or whatever and arrange all the items displayed on different layers, (called groups in corona) so they display correctly on top of one another.

4. Finally, you're going to need health bars and other visual/data feedback so the player knows what they are doing right and wrong. Save this for when you've got the other bits and pieces working.

If you get stuck, try and reason out why, then search the forums and if you're really stuck, post here and we'll try and help.

Good luck.

Thanks a lot for all the responses,

Lots of great information. I have 10 weeks for "proof of concept"
so it doesn't have to be too polished.

My original idea was to have a little monster virtual pet that need to be looked after. After being content(well fed, exercised,played with ect) they would slowly lvl up and transform and grow.

As these monsters grow then I wanted them to be able to battle other random monsters and friends monsters. This would eventually unlock special abilities to make them more powerful.

Due to skill and time Im going to focus on the tamagotchi part of the concept first.

Im going to break down to simplest parts like suggested and go from there.

Again thankyou very much for the feed back, its much appreciated.

Someone is already working on this type of app on #corona can't remember their name but you'll probably find them on there for some advice..

@anthony, if your lecturer finds the code similar to the ones posted on this site, would you not lose marks for plagiarism?

However you can get ideas that you can work on.

So Does UniCanberra teach CoronaSDK or are *you* using it for your project?

cheers,

?:)

Hi Jayantv,

As long as I attribute all sources and don't straight copy and paste entire pages of code its fine.

As far as I know the uni doesn't teach or make use of corona, I've been following this site for a while and it was a personal choice.

Its just as easy to pinch code from sources all over the net as it is here, so the same rules for plagiarism apply.

Im starting from basics.. following the tutorials and making a balloon bounce and rise via tapping... haha

Welcome Anthony! :)

Sounds like a fun idea, I've often wanted to look into making one myself, being a fan of Tamagotchis. (Even as an adult I still enjoy them.)

Peach :)