2019 – My Virtual Guinea Pig

My Virtual Guinea Pig (V-Pig) was a mobile virtual pet game. I spend a nice chunk of time doing market research, creating mobile builds, and working on 2D art assets. I was actually contracted to create a demo. I hired a contractor to work on the programming while I handled the art and design. I created some mock-ups in Figma, Photoshop, and Affinity Design. Sadly my client was unable to finish funding development but I learned a lot along the way.

I had just learned about style tiles and started to use them in my work.
I went with a vector art style for everything as you can tell here

It was a cool project with a lot of potential and I had it running on iPhone and Android devices, perhaps one day with more funding we can continue. I was eventually going to change out the guinea pig as it served as a placeholder while I worked on creating a more unique style. Due to lack of funding though I would not finish this project.

It was on this project I would also start to work with Github Desktop to find better ways to manage this project as Unity collab was frustrating to deal with. I would also begin working with Figma as a design tool, it was still pretty early back then and it was missing a lot of useful features.

Demo of Guinea pig game

Here is a demo of a build that eventually shows I had a basic store setup to work with Google Firebase. It was really limited but a quick proof of concept. You can buy new guinea pigs or sell them. The buttons needed to be resized.

Ashley Hooper