Unique Pet Design?

Help and Feedback Game Design Support
1

I am making a Vampire RPG PVP game and I created Demons (aka Pets) that follow your character around and help their stats grow faster. Nothing unique about that except they are summoned from another dimension instead of hatched or whatever.

Once a Demon is equipped, they start periodically chatting with your character. Some are nice and some are mean, but all are helpful do different degrees.

Due to challenges in datastore pet saving, I have decided that when you leave the game, you may trade your pet to a fellow clan member, or else it goes back to the Demon Realm.

You start to learn from the Demons that being in this world makes them a slave to the vampire, pulls them away from their families, and it is very uncomfortable and sometimes even painful to stay here.

I got the idea from the Bartimaeus trilogy if it sounds familiar.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I can improve on this design or do you have any concerns that players may not like it?

Thanks.

edit: I had another idea where I could implement basic datastores to know how many times a pet has been summoned by the same player and the conversation can continue to build the lore, offer a tutorial on advanced techniques, and give the player something else to explore/collect similar to the memories in BOTW that add to the story/world building.

2

I don’t like the fact your pet(s) doesn’t save when leaving the game. Spending time on your pets sounds like a waste of time.

2 Likes
3

I understand and I would like to try to combat that through design.

Currently the first 6 pets can be acquired from game lobby randomly at 200 coins each which is gained very quickly.

The next 6 only cost 500 coins, so it is not super scaling and these demons are only slightly better than the previous.

I was hoping to switch up game play by switching pets each time you play and promoting trades for when you do get an epic or legendary pet. Thank you for your input. Any other ideas on how to make it less of a waste?

edit:
I feel like the current meta for pets is to grind until you get a special pet which makes every pet you gained prior to that useless as well as most pets you will acquire after that. This promotes insane power creep and wasted development when you have to keep coming out with stronger pets.

4

How about you just ditch the whole pet designs and come up with fresh ideas

1 Like
5

It is okay if you can’t think of an idea to help me, but how in the world is telling me to give up on my idea constructive or helpful in anyway?

To me, this is a fresh idea on a staple in video game development, especially considering the platform.