This project is a cursed reinterpretation of a Tamagotchi, but instead of caring for a cute little creature, you're managing the brutally cynical arc of human life going through all the levels of the Maslow's pyramid. Think of it as a social commentary wrapped in a pixelated fever dream: you’re born, you pick an education, you get in debt, you work yourself to exhaustion, you try not to starve, and, if you're lucky, you might ascend. More often, you just die in increasingly absurd and tragicomic ways.
The idea came from wanting to build a high-effort parody of life simulator games, combining game design, electronics, pixel art, and humor. It’s meant to be both funny and uncomfortable. One moment you’re playing a rhythm-based hobby minigame, the next you’re asked if you want to “try crack?” through a random event system.
How it works:
- It runs on a Raspberry Pi connected to a physical RGB LED matrix.
- Logic is exclusively code based.
- Controls are real buttons wired via GPIO.
- Graphics are rendered in real time with pixel-perfect sprite animations, stat decay, and timed life progression.
- There’s a series of unlockable minigames and screens: education, job, housing, socializing, hobby, rest, food.
- Audio cues and microtonal buzzer melodies add a creepy lo-fi soundtrack to match the visuals.
- Stats like hunger, rest, esteem, and safety are constantly decaying and influence which choices you can make.
- Your choices lead to death animations depending on what stat hits zero (e.g., get shot if safety drops too low), or a final win state if you somehow reach self-actualization.
The game originally ran on pygame so I could develop it within a simulation on my computer before porting it to rpi-rgb-led-matrix. On the GitHub you can fin all the code of both versions. The code is relatively heavy since the entire game relies on stats management. The stats need to be known throughout the entire game architecture meaning a large amount of state management.
A couple hurdles that I encountered:
- The pins were all used by the RGB LED Matrix hat. Thus, the buttons kept frying over and over again. After adding physical debounce on the buttons and a lot of trial and error, i found the pins that worked properly!
- The battery only had a singular output but the LED matrix hat needed external powering. I had to hijack 2 pins on the battery board to power the hat through usb-c
This was by far the most nerve-wrecking project I've ver worked on. It’s both a game and a satire, and it’s been designed to physically exist and be played like a twisted arcade cabinet from another timeline.
The YouTube video for it is available here, it would help a lot if you gave it a watch:
YouTube Video
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