This guppy is more than an AR Tamagotchi — it eats your feelings, too
TendAR. The augmented reality mobile game is the latest from indie studio Tender Claws, and it stars an adorable guppy that eats your feelings and craves information from the real world. But it’s much more than just a new take on a Tamagotchi. TendAR will be available in July for Android devices.
TendAR actually starts out as an “emotion fortune-telling app” that you can take to parties and play with other people. You hold your phone up and scan a friend’s face, and the app will detect the emotions in their expression. You then capture these feelings — which appear as colorful blobs — and get a comedic little readout for your trouble.
“As the narrative of the game evolves, you learn that it’s the character, the guppy, that’s an AI algorithm that’s deciphering these emotions behind the scenes,” said Tender Claws cofounder Samantha Gorman in an interview with GamesBeat. “He wants to start coming into your world. He starts to subtly appear in different parts of the game, and then becomes more and more present as the game goes on.”
I got a taste of what it’s like to interact with an AR creature when I tried the demo at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week.
The entire experience wasn’t just me making faces, though. Eventually, the guppy asked me to find interesting objects in the environment to show it. And it was social, as well — I played with another person, and the guppy asked us to sync up our facial expressions as best as we could. It was a very charming demo, especially since it felt like its mechanics were cleverly AR-native rather than just plopping a virtual game world in a real-world space.
Gorman says that TendAR can be an “AR Tamagotchi indefinitely,” but the guppy does have his own narrative arc that evolves over several sessions. At first, he’s not a sentient being, then as you interact more with him, he becomes increasingly curious about the world.
Gorman is the game’s interactive narrative designer, and she works with a writer’s room of six to eight writers including a playwright.
See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/2018/03/31/this-guppy-is-more-than-an-ar-tamagotchi-it-eats-your-feelings-too/