Advice on creating a simulation type game

I’m new to Unity, but I’ve been taking a look at the tutorials, and more or less get the hang of it

I want to create a tamagotchi like game, which is basically a simulation, represented on the screen by the “pet”, where you can see its state, and interact with it to affect the simulation.

This type of game relies more heavily on the simulation itself than the user interaction (user interaction is limited to feeding it, petting, etc.), so there’s gonna be a lot of code based logic behind

What are the recommendations on design, using unity, to start working on this? I’m a C# programmer, so the scripting language would be this one for me, but I’d like to have some starting point, some example or something to help me out before just starting to write code aimlessly

Thanks!

Your should search for online tutorials on how to create a GUI as this is going to be the most important element in this type of a game.

With that said, this is not the best area to be asking this. This type of question is better suited for the forums rather than Unity Answers.

I’d recommend doing some research first. If you have say a Tamagotchi game, write down every thing you see, that is the UI. Then, write down everything you can click, that is the player interaction. Write down the states of the pet, ie. happy, sad, playful. Essentially learn by ‘reverse engineering’ the game. From there you can learn a ton about why and how they made certain aspects of the game and you can then try to incorporate the elements you like into your own game and build upon or add new elements as well.

I would agree with the scripting in c#, that is a great place to be.

As far as where exactly to start, perhaps plan out based on your research but start small. Program a pet that has maybe two states, Hungry and Happy. Then with very little player interaction, say, Feed, causes the pet to be Happy, and after an amount of time has passed the pet then becomes Hungry again. From there you can add other states and different interactions. Perhaps then you could add a Bored state and the interaction, Play. After a time if the pet is Happy he becomes Bored. So the player must then interact with the Play button. Again, after the player Plays with the pet after an amount of times, the pet becomes Hungry. And thus the cycle continues.

Hope this helps.