Baby Yoda Tamagotchi
I am not affiliated with either Lucasfilm or Disney
In the span of four days, I was lucky enough to be free from school work, right after getting called back by an innovative startup about joining them for an apprenticeship — what started out as a casual assignment from our Micro-Interaction teacher Rodolphe Brugnoli to assess our understanding of Protopie, turned into a bigger project than I intended for it to ever be.
Half of me feels silly for wanting to share this project so badly; I mean, I’ve been coding primitive tamagotchi since, what, high school, but I feel my enthusiasm is justified and I won’t be apologetic about it! I’m a student, and your studies are the perfect timeframe to make a fun project that might not change the fate of the world, but still manage to be a bit — pardon my English — awesome.
If you’re only here for the prototype, you can see it below or later down this article :
Baby Yoda my beloved & lockdown shenanigans
He is so cute, we need the sweetness in the current world. Like everybody, I have opinions on what cute easily marketable creatures I will tolerate from licences I love, but I like what is ultimately achieved with Baby Yoda. I also cannot deny that choosing an easily identifiable species that is emblematic of StarWars was genius.
First lockdown was a downer, but I was unbelievably into StarWars again at the time, and would have rough lightsaber fights with my kid stepbrother between unending hours of remote work. As you can imagine, news of the show hadn’t escaped me. It is rare for me to consider a tv show as a social bonding activity, but the Mandalorian succeeded in bringing the whole household together each Friday to follow the adventures of Space Dad and his green ward.
Ok back to the project
I managed to keep silent the first few days, not wanting to jinx it, since I am a model in ambitious projects. The problem with ideas is you can either have one good miraculous one that you can’t afford to fail making, or you can have many ideas, let yourself get bored of some or even fail, and just try and see what sticks for the right reasons!
Tragically, I don’t think any of the first scribbles I made survived the journey, but I was in such a rush that I even used Instagram Stories, of all things, to jot down graphic concepts on a black picture while I was trying to keep an eye on my lunch cooking.
I wanted it to be reminiscent of Bandai’s Tamagotchi that I grew up with, as instructed by the teacher’s original prompt. Truth be told, the study of inciting interaction and gratifying the user after each action they trigger could have come second to the idea of the game itself, were it not inherent to the initial idea of a tamagotchi and for the way Protopie itself initiates functions. Kudos on that, it might have helped me keep this relevant to the class it was for in the first place.
Made the graphics mostly on Adobe Illustrator, enjoying the clean look and the possibilities offered by vector work. I tried out different approaches, painting and scribbles on Procreate (my current main thing as far as illustration is concerned) but vector was going to be the most interesting option to work with when prototyping.
I tried a few different looks for the assets, the ship or the puppet, and got feedback from my sister (who was awake at ungodly hours realizing that “Hey, the Mandalorian is kind of a fun show!”). She still thinks the baby is too green on the prototype, but come on, she also wanted him to have white little Yoda hair.
The puppet
The puppet is made out of a cute round baby Yoda head with big emotive eyes, and cheeks just a tad pink. I wanted to put emphasis on the expressivity of the eyes: they sparkle a bit with interactions. The ears, always in motion! They’re as big as the rest of the head, poor sweetheart. Maybe he’ll grow into them. I almost went for the Yoda type three-clawed hands, but it’s a bit too aggressive for the Child. He sometimes raises his little palms softly to the sky when in Force trance. The body is just a classic fashionable jedi-style beige baby toga.
The videos
Aside from royalty free stars videos, I made the two holograms on After Effects, following a really nice YouTube tutorial, I wasn’t going for the same use case in the end, but it still came in very handy. I’m expecting to improve the look of my holograms next time, but it was a lifesaver.
Following a really short very efficient tutorial to learn making the legendary Star Wars opening crawl on After Effects made me feel very powerful (and, unrelatedly to the tutorial, crashed my laptop a few times). I learned macbooks moo-ing is an actual thing. Yes, really. I yelped embarrassingly when I first heard the ghost cow.
Prototyping
Coding always takes a lot of focus out of me; not having to dread this step, yet still getting to create an interactive product to share my vision, ended up freeing my creativity.
I have tried builders before like Twine, Ren’Py, even rpg makers and such, but with me all this ends up swept aside. Making a prototype is a different ordeal altogether, and while a pie is not an actual end product, the difference is that this is my actual job and let me focus on what I’m meant to do : design.
For the Baby Yoda tamagotchi, pies are a bit slow to load due to the videos, I assume.
Talking about videos, some of them seem not to auto play (thus not to play at all) on some browsers at times. I had a bit of a scare after the second update where videos wouldn’t play for me, and while I wasn’t going to give it all up just now, I almost expected the creative fever that’s been holding me in its clutches for almost a week now to die down.
I’m also worried about the compass trigger, I cannot figure out if something is wrong with any values I try, if my phone is dysfunctional or if it’s completely up to fate whether this time it will or won’t work.
Apparently there’s been updates prior to my interest in the software, enabling SVG imports, but all my copy pasting SVG turned into PNG. Mysterious.
I wish the main share-link updated to the latest version, and the newly outdated version could instead change address so the link you send viewers would remain relevant. I understand positions on this would vary a lot depending on your use of the pies.
Protopie prototypes are both much more interactive than a simple AE animation, and enable far more creative possibilities than the usual built-in prototyping tools in your softwares. Yet I am still undecided on whether I will be using Protopie in the context of web work.
My doubts don’t come from the learning curve, I feel Protopie was easy to work with from the very start and followed use codes familiar to the softwares I usually tend to use like Adobe Xd, Figma, or After Effects. Rather, I would say they simply come from habits, or not actually needing prototypes of that level of details and interactivity at this stage of my career. Still, Protopie remains a very interesting tool and I’m expecting to keep playing around with it until I can make these skills come in handy.
ADD test was a failure, but everything your older sibling does sucks at this age, doesn’t it. Let’s not even bring other’s reactions into the mix. This project sure doesn’t teach me how to be a welcoming host, but it’s humble work. Small price to pay for a Baby Yoda tamagotchi.
Here are some more positive reactions of the first version that really made my week :
THE GAME
Here’s the prototype, have fun and take care of the Child, he’s your problem now ! Welcome to parenthood, shoot a space worm !
If you enjoyed it and feel it brought you joy, then by all means I encourage you to share it with people you feel might also enjoy it, whether they’re Star Wars fans, folks who could use the entertainment, or your tech savvy granny!
In a perfect world, I wouldn’t finally understand how to make a Medium article just because I’ve been in a frenzy designing a Baby Yoda minigame that I won’t even get to code later on, but here we are!
Shout out to the Protopie team for such a cool tool, two youtubers Motion Master and Flat Pack FX for their inspiring tutorials, to my sister & to Mite and my friends who helped out with first user tests, to Can for helping with this article, to Rodolphe Brugnoli my Micro-Interaction teacher, and to Soufien Arbia who taught us illustrator and always rambled on about the importance of Medium articles despite not having any on this account.
May the Force be with you !
