Hi everyone! I'm building Somnia, a cozy adventure game inspired by Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing, but with a twist: instead of collecting wood and stone, you craft with emotions.
🎭 The Core Idea
Six emotions — Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, Wonder, and Love — are your primary resources. You combine them to grow crops, forge tools, and reshape the dream world. Even "negative" emotions are useful: Anger makes powerful weapons, Sadness creates healing rain, Fear unlocks hidden areas.
The question I keep wrestling with: "Is this intuitive enough, or does it feel like a gimmick?"
✨ What's Playable Right Now
You can play it in your browser — no download needed:
🎮 Play Somnia
Current features:
- Farm & craft using emotion combinations
- Explore the dream village (NPCs with daily schedules, shops)
- Day/night cycle with dynamic weather & seasons
- Combat with dream creatures — you can tame enemies and add them to your party
- Fishing minigame with zone/season/time-based catches
- Bed-to-sleep cycle, interaction prompts ("[E] Talk"), camera bounds
- Minimap with entity tracking, toast notifications, animation state machine
- Visual hotbar (1-5 keys), dialog boxes, game over/respawn flow
- Inventory, save/load, settings with key rebinding
- 1,300 automated tests across 175 commits — 54 systems built with TDD across 7 phases
It's still in early development — art is placeholder (Kenney tiles), no sound yet. But every system is functional and rigorously tested.
🤔 Specific Questions
I'd genuinely love feedback on:
- First impression: When you load the game, does the emotion crafting concept come through, or does it just feel like another farm game?
- Onboarding: Is it clear what to do in the first 2 minutes? I worry the tutorial is too sparse.
- Emotion system: Does combining emotions to craft feel interesting or confusing? What's your gut reaction to "craft a healing potion by combining Sadness + Love"?
- What would make you come back? I'm trying to build the "one more day" loop. Right now it's farming → exploring → crafting → sleeping. What's missing?
📋 Dev Context
Built solo with Godot 4 using strict TDD (test-driven development) — all 54 systems across 7 development phases are complete and passing. If you're curious about the technical side, I write detailed devlogs:
- Why I Test-Drive a Video Game — the testing philosophy
- Befriend Your Enemies — monster taming design
- Building a Living World — calendar, weather, NPC schedules
Thanks for taking the time. Every piece of feedback directly shapes where this goes next. 🌙