Was the game fun to play?

Definitely. I liked this game way more than I expected to once I spent a minute to understand how it worked. Switching between the modes to keep the numbers down and seeing the robot evolve is great fun. The mini game where you have to predict the next bit isn’t the most exciting game on the planet but it’s not terrible by any means and I kept at it until I got a score of 5 out of 5. Maybe something cool could happen when you win like some text that scrolls with WINNER! I think something like a binary puzzle could be a more fun game to include while still keeping with the robotic nature of the game. 

Did the game include the core elements from the original?

Yes. I can definitely see the alert system from the original which is great. There’s also a robot that makes a good replacement for the creature from the original. The robot can also change forms and it animates nicely. There’s lots of stats to manage and for this game that takes the form of charging the battery, overclocking the cpu, cleaning the overstack and removing viruses. 

Was there a clear path of progression?

Yes. Progression is done through the runtime which affects evolution of the robot so it starts with a BitBot, then evolves into a ByteBot, then a KiloBot and MegaBot etc (I love how the naming convention ties into the size of numbers so it will be giga, then tera, then maybe all the way to zetta).

How good was the audio and sound FX?

The background music is really nice to listen to. The sound effects for the menu beeps were great. The warning noise is definitely what I’d expect for one, and while it isn’t so nice to listen to, it does the function well and makes you actually want to fix the problem quickly. 

How well implemented was the UI?

Exceptional. I feel like the game is centred around the UI and there’s both Human UI and Debug UI. The icons in the human UI have a nice clean minimalistic style that corresponds well with what they do. I like that the white changes to blue to stand out on the button you are on. The text rolls in really nicely on just the one icon that you are on to keep things looking good. The dot matrix style feels very fitting for the 1990’s time period. The clock takes centre stage due to its importance for the robot’s evolution. The clock has an interesting style to it and tells the correct time on the real time mode and it’s great that the simulation time can be increased by 2, 10 or 60 times faster. I think 60x is only useful if you are in sleep mode so you have got to be careful going that fast otherwise you risk system health. 10x seems fine in the debug mode and maybe 2x is doable in human mode but it depends on the pace you want to go at. The pause and complete failure is conveyed really well with the moving yellow lines over the icons and I like that you can easily restart the game again. The input buttons on the bottom makes sense with the return button taking you back to the top left corner quickly where you need to do most of the stuff like recharging the battery and removing the viruses. Going into sleep mode means no need to worry about issues and if you got it in real time mode you could also sleep without any beeps. I like that sleep mode is limited to just between the hours of 9pm and 9am each day for that purpose.

Nice Tamagotchi reboot!

The human UI going from keychain gadget to smartphone display was a nice touch, but it was pretty much unusable for me, so every time I tried it I ended up going back to debug to take care of the robot, even though I would have like to see what he looked like while I played.

Going to 60x speed took everything off the rails pretty quickly:

It wasn't super clear to me if there were multiple progression paths or how well I was doing, but I guess the original was trial-and-error as well.

Great work making this faithful to the original!

It feels like there are two games here, and both of them are pretty cool! The first one "debug mode" feels better to play since instead of cycling through the UI, you can just click the action you want. The debug mode actually informed me how the "human" mode was supposed to work. I do agree that maybe highlighting some key words on the debug mode would make things a bit more intuitive, but I didn't find the learning curve to be that difficult personally. 

I will say, the difficulty curve seems steep. I trust that you've been faithful to the original design, so maybe the original design is hard, but it became incredibly difficult to keep the full grown guy alive. Raising the small to medium guy wasn't too bad, but the full grown guy just likes to die I guess. That said, this is without a doubt the most faithful recreation I've seen, so an easy 5 stars on that judging criteria. 

I think the only thing I really would have liked to see changed was more minigames. After getting 5/5 on the password game, I felt like there wasn't much else to do. Could be fun to unlock different games to "play" with the bot. 

TLDR - Great job, I'm amazed at how well this is built.

I really like this game. I preferred the debug rather than the human UI, but I switched back and forth from time to time to see what the little guy looked like.  Got all the elements in and a great take on it!

There’s definitely a learning curve, but once everything clicked it started to get interesting. The aesthetics are great, and the audio was perfect. Watching your progress on Discord really got me thinking, I never considered building the entire backend first and layering the rest on top. I might have to try that approach myself if I tackle another numbers heavy game in the future. One of my favorites so far, I will have to come back to this to see what I have missed.  

Hey! This was a quite faithful recreation!! Good job!

I think if you had picked a minigame that was different from the generation 1 game it would have worked better… Currently there wasn’t really much to do. I guess the only thing i didn’t understand was what stability was meant to be? Rebooting did not do anything to it, it seemed, which would have been my guess for how to affect it.

Also the UI was a bit confusing as well as the control scheme (though i got a hang of both quite quickly, I don’t think it would have been as easy if I hadn’t just researched tamagotchis myself lol).

Btw, where is that music track from? I swear i have heard it before

Hey.
Played the game at 2x in the beginning then 60x none of the stats changed at all, had to restart the game before all the alarms when off, dunno - hope its only me it happens to :D 

Really struggled figuring out what does what and why i should be doing it, but the little robot evolutions are quite cute, and the music suit the theme overall. 

Would prob. have made a 1 time tutorial that explains what you should be doing when it feels something for the first time, but guessing this is the tamagotchi part where you just gotta figure things out.