Guide 6 — Cozy Critters

Rhys Watson

What you're building

A pet sim in the Tamagotchi tradition, minus the anxiety. Your pitch is explicit: "the fear of the pet dying after 2 seconds of not paying attention does not exist." The pet idles and walks around one area, you have options to care for it, and caring for it raises happiness and shapes what kind of creature it becomes.

Nothing in this build can kill the pet. That's enforced in the scripts, not just in the design — need decay is measured per minute, and low needs make the pet slower and sadder, never dead.

Yours is the third movement rig and the only game with no player character at all. Light on scripts, heavy on UI.

Time: about two and a half hours, most of it UI.

1. Before you start

• Finish Guide 0.
• You need Guide B §B2 (managers) only. No player prefab, no camera rig.
• No extra packages, no new input actions — your game is played with mouse clicks.

2. Scripts you'll use

The pet (Tier 7)
NeedStat · PetBrain · CareAction · PersonalityTracker

Movement (Tier 5)
TopDownMover — in AI mode, driven by PetBrain rather than the player

Saving (Tier 7)
SaveData · SaveSystem

Core
GameManager · SceneLoader · AudioManager · HUDController · ChoiceFlagManager · (optionally ItemType, Collectible, CollectionTracker if food is limited)

You will not need: PlayerController2D, Health, Checkpoint, RespawnManager, or any combat. There is no player character and nothing takes damage.

3. Build the pet

1. GameObject → Create Empty, name it Pet.
2. Sprite Renderer with your critter sprite. (Species undecided is fine — a placeholder blob works, and you can swap the sprite any time.)
3. Add:

AI Controlled ✓ is the key setting. It tells TopDownMover to ignore player input and wait for PetBrain to feed it directions. Without it your pet would respond to WASD, which is not the game.

Move Speed 2 is slow on purpose. A pet that darts around doesn't read as cozy.

4. Add the needs

You'll add three NeedStat components to the same Pet object. Three components of the same type on one object is unusual but correct here — each one is a different need.

Add them in this order, because the third one gets referenced by the first two.

4c first: Happiness

4a: Hunger

4b: Energy

Why the numbers are so low

At 3 per minute, a full hunger bar takes 33 minutes to empty. That's the whole point of your pitch. Compare: a classic Tamagotchi drains in a few minutes and punishes you for looking away.

If it feels too slow while you're testing, don't raise the decay — instead add a debug button that drains a stat instantly so you can test the low states without waiting half an hour.

Assigning the Happiness Stat field: drag the Pet GameObject into the slot. Unity will ask which NeedStat you mean — pick the one showing Happiness. If it grabs the wrong one, click the small circle in the field and choose from the list.

5. Add the brain

On Pet, add PetBrain:

The wander area

Your pitch says "there will only be one area." Two ways to define it:

• Simple: leave Wander Area empty and set Wander Radius to 3. The pet stays within 3 units of where it started.
• Precise: make an empty GameObject PenArea with a Box Collider 2D (Is Trigger ✓) covering the pen, and drag it into Wander Area. The pet wanders anywhere inside that box.

Use the box if your pen isn't circular. The gizmo shows you the area when the pet is selected.

What the brain does

Four states: Idle (stands, waits 2–5s), Wander (walks to a random nearby point), Sleep (when energy drops below 20%, refilling as it sleeps), and React (a brief perk-up when you care for it).

The ranges are ranges rather than fixed numbers so the pet doesn't feel mechanical. Don't set them both to the same value.

6. Build the care actions

One CareAction component per button. Put them on separate empty GameObjects so they're easy to find.

Feed

1. GameObject → Create Empty, name it FeedAction.
2. Add CareAction:

Play

Same, on a PlayAction object:

Play costs energy. That's the one bit of tension in a cozy game: playing makes the pet happy and tired, so you can't just spam it. Small, but it makes the loop a loop.

Pet (stroke)

Clean, Sleep, or others

Add as many as you like. Each one needs a different Personality Trait string, because those traits are what PersonalityTracker counts.

7. Add personalities

On Pet, add PersonalityTracker:

Fill in the Personalities list

One personality must have an empty Trait — that's the fallback used before the pet has enough history.

How it decides

Every 15 seconds it compares the counters. It only settles on a personality once there have been 10 care actions total and one trait holds 40% or more of them. That prevents the pet flipping identity every few minutes.

If you have Animator Controllers per personality, drag them into each entry and the pet's whole animation set changes when its nature does — a lot of visible variety from a little art. The Tint field is the cheap version of the same idea.

8. The UI

This is the bulk of your work. Take it in two passes: buttons first, then bars.

Buttons

1. GameObject → UI → Canvas.
2. Right-click Canvas → UI → Button - TextMeshPro. Name it FeedButton. Put it along the bottom.
3. Change its text to Feed.
4. In the button's On Click (): click +, drag FeedAction in, choose CareAction.Perform.
5. Duplicate for PlayButton and PetButton, pointing at their own actions.

Stat bars

For each need:

1. Right-click Canvas → UI → Slider, name it HungerBar.
2. Delete the Handle Slide Area child, set Interactable ✗, Min 0 / Max 1.
3. Colour the Fill — orange for hunger, blue for energy, pink for happiness.
4. Add a TMP label next to it.

Repeat for EnergyBar and HappinessBar.

Optional but nice

• A TMP text showing the current personality name
• A "Welcome back — you were away 12 minutes" message on load
• Greying out a button while it's on cooldown (wire OnCooldownChanged to a Slider or the button's Image fill)

9. Saving

1. Empty GameObject SaveSystem + the SaveSystem component:

2. You also need a ChoiceFlagManager in the scene — PersonalityTracker stores its trait counters there.

Offline decay — the Tamagotchi part, done kindly

When you reopen the game, SaveSystem tells each NeedStat how many real minutes you were away and decays accordingly. Max Offline Minutes 480 caps it at eight hours, so going away for a week doesn't return you to an empty pet. That cap is what makes this the cozy version.

Look at your own save file

With Log Save Path ticked, the Console prints where the file lives. Open it in Notepad — it's readable JSON with your pet's stats in it. Genuinely worth doing once; seeing your save as plain text explains more about how games store data than any explanation.

10. Camera and managers

Camera

Static. Select Main Camera, set Projection → Orthographic, and set Size so the pen fills the screen nicely (try 4). Position (0, 0, −10). No Cinemachine, no follow — a camera chasing a wandering pet would be unpleasant.

Managers

GameManager, AudioManager, SceneLoader, ChoiceFlagManager, SaveSystem.

11. Wire it up

All three bar wirings must use Dynamic float — OnValueChanged sends a 0–1 number and the static version would pin the bar.

Picking the right NeedStat: when you drag Pet into an event slot and open the function dropdown, you'll see NeedStat listed three times. They're in the order you added the components. Click each one and check the Inspector to be sure — or temporarily rename them by reordering, since the Stat Name field doesn't show in the dropdown.

12. First playtest

1. The pet idles, then wanders, then idles again. If it doesn't move, is AI Controlled ticked on TopDownMover? Is PetBrain there?
2. It stays inside the pen — check Wander Area or Wander Radius.
3. All three bars slowly fall. Very slowly. Watch for thirty seconds.
4. Feed raises the hunger bar and the pet perks up (React state).
5. The button won't work again for 5 seconds (cooldown).
6. Play raises happiness and lowers energy.
7. Set Energy's Value to 15 in the Inspector while playing — the pet should lie down and sleep, then wake as energy refills.
8. Quit and reopen. Stats should be roughly where you left them, minus a little decay.

Step 7 is the fastest way to test sleep without waiting. Editing a value in the Inspector during Play mode is a normal debugging technique — the change reverts when you stop.

13. Then add

1. A species. Your pitch says undecided — the whole build works with any sprite, so try three and see which reads best. A creature with a clear idle pose and a clear happy pose is worth more than a detailed one.
2. Animation. Idle, Walk, Sleep is enough. Guide B §B6 — you need Speed, IsSleeping, and optionally IsHappy.
3. More care actions — bathe, brush, give a toy. Each one needs its own trait.
4. Personality animator controllers so a playful pet moves differently from a sleepy one.
5. Decoration for the pen — a bed, a bowl, a window. Static sprites, no scripts.
6. A day/night tint on the background.
7. Limited food, if you want the sim to have an economy: make an ItemType called Food, add a CollectionTracker, and set Requires Item on the Feed action.

14. Design notes for your game specifically

You removed the punishment, so you need a different reason to come back. Tamagotchi used guilt. Yours can't. What you have instead is change over time — the personality system means the pet becomes something specific because of how you treated it, and that's a much kinder hook. Make the personality visible: a name on screen, a different idle pose, a colour shift. If the player can't see it, it isn't doing its job.

Cooldowns are your pacing. With no death and no timer, the only thing stopping a player from maxing every bar in ten seconds is the cooldown. They're not an annoyance — they're what makes caring for the pet an ongoing relationship rather than a single button press.

There is no wrong personality. PersonalityTracker is descriptive, not a score. Resist the urge to make one outcome "best" — the moment there's an optimal way to raise the pet, it stops being cozy and starts being a puzzle.

The withdrawn personality is the closest thing to a fail state, and it's reversible. It only appears after five minutes of sustained low happiness, and it goes away when you look after the pet again. That's the right amount of consequence for your game: noticeable, gentle, fixable.

Offline decay is a design lever, not just a feature. Eight hours capped means a player who comes back after a day finds a pet that's a bit hungry, not a disaster. If you want returning to feel more urgent, lower the cap. I'd leave it.

15. Common problems

16. Checklist

• Pet with TopDownMover (AI Controlled ✓) and PetBrain
• Three NeedStat components with different Stat Names
• Hunger and Energy both point at the Happiness stat
• Wander area or radius set, pet stays inside
• Three CareAction objects, each with a different Personality Trait
• PersonalityTracker with one empty-trait fallback personality
• ChoiceFlagManager in the scene
• Three buttons wired to Perform
• Three bars wired to Dynamic float
• SaveSystem with Save Pet Stats ✓ and Load On Start ✓
• Static orthographic camera framing the pen
• Quit and reopen — the pet remembers