It’s been a few months since September big update, I figured it was about time we revisited those big changes.
We launched MatchyGotchy back in January, and ever since we’ve worked on different updates. We have shared seasonal updates like Halloween, and Valentine’s Day, but these changes are often up for two weeks or so and then they’re gone until next year. However, back in September we did a set of big changes which were fully permanent to the game.
From the ‘Big MatchyGotchy Update’ we revisited a lot of user feedback and decided to tweak things around. Some were technical, and most were entirely aesthetic changes. Let’s talk about the most important revisions first.
We included notifications.
These pop up bubbles show up to help you understand your Star better. At first it’s supposed to guide you through as a tutorial, actions light up yellow to make it easy to follow. Eventually the popups will appear less frequently only to guide you in the right direction if needed.
Party at Xanadu.
Some people thought the congratulation screen wasn’t enough of a reward at the end of the game, so we decided to include a whole pool party. You can now get a proper score of how well your Stars worked, and also give them a bit of time to relax and have fun after all that hard work. Visiting Xanadu will change the laboratory too, after your visit.
Stars leveling pace changed.
We tweaked how Stars level. Baby phase only takes three ships and tenage phase takes another six ships – this has to do with the whole notification phase. Also, each pet is capable of different productivity skills, meaning some can produce multiple ships at once. As adults the Stars even produce ships of different colors. And last but not least, leveling includes a more visually noticeable animation to let you know your Star is on its way to become a rocket surgeon.
Sleep is a bit easier.
We heard that this one achievement might have felta bit grindy, so we decided to make it less of a chore to get. Sometimes idle pets will fall asleep when you aren’t using them for up to 5 sleeps. This makes the sleep achievement a bit easier.
These are both visually and technically important, however, there were other changes that were just aesthetic – yet, they add more to the game now.
Hands animation.
The main game from the free build now has hands instead of buttons. You get to choose which hand the heart is hidden, making the game interaction somewhat more enjoyable. Also the first choice you make is a freebie, guaranteed to get you a heart.
More roaches.
Cleaning just got more colorful, and messier! There are different roaches now. Including a swatter to get them.
Stars have different sizes while growing up.
It was a minor aesthetic change, but it sure makes baby photos look extra cute now.
In other updates, mostly technical, cloud save is now available. Soft and hard reset exist. Soft reset clears stars but not your score, whereas hard reset clears all your stars and your score. A lot of new things became part of the game, and also were intended to improve the game experience.
Have you played MatchyGotchy yet? You should! It’s fun, it’s cute and it’s also entirely free. If you enjoyed the game, you can support us by leaving a positive review :)
Designing a set of Stars for the Matchyverse required so many iterations I’ve lost track. We needed memorable shapes that stood out and were distinct and they eventually took on personas and characteristics of their own. Here is some more info on how we did it:
We really started from nothing and got a whole universe. At first we were calling these seven just “gems” or “shapes.” It would take months before we realized they were Stars and the Matchyverse was born. Getting the final shapes for the Matchy Star “Stars” took a lot of design work. The first Star, Matchy was pretty straightforward to put together but we needed a set of 7 which meant color and shape differentiation to make it very easy for players to tell which shape was which. For the colors we started with the color palate from Don’t Shoot Yourself which was designed to be bright and vibrant but not to have the colors clash or compete with one another.
The first step was figuring out a set of spacy out of this world shapes that would both fit the theme and also stand out from one another. After Matchy Star, a crescent Moon was a pretty easy choice and I guess the phrase Blue Moon had entered my unconsciousness so I decided to make this Star blue.
The basic moon shape took 2 iterations. The first one was a bit too thin and my mom pointed out that it should be a bit beefier to be a cuter shape so I tweaked it and got the final version.
The next idea I had was for a space satellite which was originally orange. It required a lot of simplifications before it became a red sputnik. I had a sputnik character in Speedway Heroes which was part of why the iconic lil’ spud was in my brain and I knew it was a great iconic space related shape so it made it into the game.
Once it was clear the Sputnik would be red, I made a ringed planet that was Orange. By Rotating it 45 degrees it seemed much bigger despite not taking up more texture space:
The next Star wasn’t so clearly defined so it needed a bunch of iterations. It was supposed to be a galaxy expanding into space. I figured the spokes and points would make it stand out from the rest of the shapes. Getting the number of spokes and their curves took a lot of fidgeting. Some iterations looked like saw blades, others looked like gears.
I knew I had to have a robot and I guess because of the Android logo I assumed it would be green. We had to compact it a little bit to avoid being too similar to the Android android and changed it to being a “Lander” instead.
The last Star was the most complicated. It was meant to be a space ship before I had the concept of using a set of ships to collect matches:
Similarly there was going to be a UFO to sow chaos and cause all kinds of trouble but the Ship and the UFO would switch places with the UFO becoming a gem and the Ship traveling above the grid. Its possible to tell what direction the Ship is moving in by looking at it and players needed that to help predict which direction the characters would be moving in.
Thus we got the final Star, a UFO:
Even after getting the shapes right, we still had more iterations on the combined colors of everything to make sure different Stars stood out, we would even make the images black and white to see what the different intensities of the colors were to make everything stand out as distinct as possible:
Finally Jimp stylized all the Stars and added faces, giving the complete look and completing this epic design task:
Eventually we punched up each Star to have a set of clothing and a profession based on their outfit and even designed personalities for each one that affect how they work in the various Matchy Verse games. It was a long, complex, and difficult process, but the Matchyverse finally has its Stars!
Creating an original character felt like I had to create an entire universe, but really it was just one star.
The literal first thing I did on this project was come up with the name Matchy Star. I knew I wanted to do something Sci-Fi, and I knew I wanted a main character that would stand out and really be able to get people behind him. So, the first character I designed was a star shape based on a number of sources.
The process for how I did it was complicated:
The initial star shape for Matchy was a little off set for its perspective and based on the classic Nintendo star icon shape. I wanted an exuberant face and I always had the old meme emoji “Exuberant Bliss” stuck in my head, so I sort of fused the two together. The Nintendo star is a bit less expressive because its not supposed to outshine Mario, but for the Matchyverse, Matchy needed to really be an expressive exuberant character that would communicate with players the feelings that the series is supposed to evoke. Next, I added a black outline that was again not perfectly aligned to add some character. This style of cartoony outline was inspired by the sort of offset lines in Angry Birds.
For the next iteration I added some hair and a bit of a sense of vanity and ego that comes with having great hair. This could only mean one source of inspiration, Johnny Bravo:
Of course, as the creative director, I had intended Matchy to have shades. Later iterations would change them to goggles and remove the hair which was sort of a compromise with the people on the team – and Jimp, the artist who did the final designs of Matchy. I don’t like being too firm in imposing my creative direction on the team because it sort of becomes more of a creative dictatorship, and I understand that the team has a say in these things too but here is the SHADE version of Matchy:
I did a lot of iterations that involved small tweaks to shapes and shading, but idk where the files went even though I intended to save them. Some of the details were so small even we have a hard time noticing them, sometimes the changes were big and obvious. Designing takes a lot of small tweaks and iterations and sadly a lot of those details will be forever lost. To some extent each change almost felt like aliens were contacting me to help me design the character. Sometimes I’d make a change and have an itch or hear a noise and it would make me think about modifying that change even more. It was sort of surreal to put together the character and I went through 12 iterations that all had differences.
And I suppose no one can escape Simpsons Mania, so I decided to add a nice set of blue pants to complete the look:
Of course it would take even more work to get the final versions of everything, but this is how the whole thing started. We eventually hired Jimp from Massive Monster, and he added his own lick of paint. We defined the style of eyes and lines based on some feedback from our mailing list from a bunch of options Jimp presented. We also discussed the idea of making Matchy a wizard or redefining the character, but I added some more references to the list to cement the direction including Sponge Bob, Andy the Mechanic from Advance wars, and other spacey characters to define the final direction as an enthusiastic derpy goofball scientist and as a result we got even more iterations:
It really took a phenomenal amount of work to design this character even though it might seem sort of obvious now that Matchy already exists. I know that Matchy seems like a very clear cohesive simple character, but it was not at all obvious or clear on how to land at this end result, it took a lot of work!
Creating an original character felt like I had to create an entire universe, but really it was just one star.
The literal first thing I did on this project was come up with the name Matchy Star. I knew I wanted to do something Sci-Fi, and I knew I wanted a main character that would stand out and really be able to get people behind him. So, the first character I designed was a star shape based on a number of sources.
The process for how I did it was complicated:
The initial star shape for Matchy was a little off set for its perspective and based on the classic Nintendo star icon shape. I wanted an exuberant face and I always had the old meme emoji “Exuberant Bliss” stuck in my head, so I sort of fused the two together. The Nintendo star is a bit less expressive because its not supposed to outshine Mario, but for the Matchyverse, Matchy needed to really be an expressive exuberant character that would communicate with players the feelings that the series is supposed to evoke. Next, I added a black outline that was again not perfectly aligned to add some character. This style of cartoony outline was inspired by the sort of offset lines in Angry Birds.
For the next iteration I added some hair and a bit of a sense of vanity and ego that comes with having great hair. This could only mean one source of inspiration, Johnny Bravo:
Of course, as the creative director, I had intended Matchy to have shades. Later iterations would change them to goggles and remove the hair which was sort of a compromise with the people on the team – and Jimp, the artist who did the final designs of Matchy. I don’t like being too firm in imposing my creative direction on the team because it sort of becomes more of a creative dictatorship, and I understand that the team has a say in these things too but here is the SHADE version of Matchy:
I did a lot of iterations that involved small tweaks to shapes and shading, but idk where the files went even though I intended to save them. Some of the details were so small even we have a hard time noticing them, sometimes the changes were big and obvious. Designing takes a lot of small tweaks and iterations and sadly a lot of those details will be forever lost. To some extent each change almost felt like aliens were contacting me to help me design the character. Sometimes I’d make a change and have an itch or hear a noise and it would make me think about modifying that change even more. It was sort of surreal to put together the character and I went through 12 iterations that all had differences.
And I suppose no one can escape Simpsons Mania, so I decided to add a nice set of blue pants to complete the look:
Of course it would take even more work to get the final versions of everything, but this is how the whole thing started. We eventually hired Jimp from Massive Monster, and he added his own lick of paint. We defined the style of eyes and lines based on some feedback from our mailing list from a bunch of options Jimp presented. We also discussed the idea of making Matchy a wizard or redefining the character, but I added some more references to the list to cement the direction including Sponge Bob, Andy the Mechanic from Advance wars, and other spacey characters to define the final direction as an enthusiastic derpy goofball scientist and as a result we got even more iterations:
It really took a phenomenal amount of work to design this character even though it might seem sort of obvious now that Matchy already exists. I know that Matchy seems like a very clear cohesive simple character, but it was not at all obvious or clear on how to land at this end result, it took a lot of work!
Back in January of this year we released MatchyGotchy, originally intended as a cute short project to open up the Matchyverse. A casual tamagochi-like experience presented as a free game for everyone to rekindle that sense of childlike joy, and for those who never had a virtual pet, to join in the fun exploring a game experience like this.
MatchyGotchy got a positive response all the way from beta testing phase, consistently having players ask for more and more content – this is what sparked the idea of creating a DLC with extra content for the MatchyGotchy. We initially started the idea with mostly cosmetic items: like new outfits, and new food skins; all of this with the purpose of including Steam Cards like everyone wanted. Eventually we learned that Steam Cards via DLC required a steep financial curve for players we were not comfortable with, so we are still working towards MatchyGotchy Steam Cards but in a different way. This is where the idea of MatchyGotchy Z comes in, a new whole game instead.
We introduce Zoot into the Matchyverse with MatchyGotchy Z, that’s where the name comes from. Presenting money as part of the game allows us to expand more on the places to interact with – like MatchyMart. A monster store that will be the place for you to unlock activities to do with your Stars and items to customize everything from the toys you use to play with, to your entire pet’s wardrobe. Now food will have a direct impact on your pet’s productivity along with their stats, and ultimately defining how it grows. This will be part of our intent to diversify how you want to explore your gaming experience with the Stars, now there will be different elements that will change your Star’s mood, including their chances to become a Rocket Surgeon.
Another addition MatchyGotchy Z is Zootlandia, this is known as Star Base trade house. It is where you go trade your ships for Zoot, and unlike your regular game store, there is an economic trend which will either favor you or not when selling your ships. This means the market can be doing great and you get get a fantastic deal when you sell, or simply luck out and get a below standard deal at the moment of the trade. This will provide for a bit of timing and thinking whether you want to save up to buy things, or risk opportunity to get a better deal for your money.
MatchyGotchy Z has already over 30 different types of food / snacks coded in, we also have a fully functioning currency system in place already. We have already included new ways to interact with your star with games, cleaning and even to look after their health – there is even a mini game to give vitamins to your stars. And of course, last but not least, a new activity to do selfies with your cute stars that can include your favorite NPC’s too.
Right now we are preparing to wrap up the first beta revision up on Steam, so if you would be interested in joining us beta testing MatchyGotchy Z, please don’t hesitate to reach out so I can include you as part of the beta group for MGZ. You can find me on Twitter, or you could join the Matchyverse community on Discord :)
