Umbrapets dev blog

Making a virtual pet site with 3D pets! www.umbra.pet

[umbrapets]

Is there any way for us to help support you and the development of the game? I hate to see the aspiring devs be put down due to costs.

First of all I really appreciate your question! I have a day job as a technical artist, so I will keep doing that until I can develop enough of Umbra to feel comfortable asking for support. I was hoping to make progress on this in 2026 but as it stands now with my health doing what it does I think 2027 is more likely. I will be able to feed myself until then though! ❤️ Thank you for the kind thoughts!

[umbrapets]

What an absolute fart of a 2026 I'm having!!

So continuing on from my cocktail of viruses in January it of course meant no income, so I worked as hard as I could in February and March to make up for it. This meant no Umbra, as my income on this is 0 so unfortunately until I make the product good enough to ask money for Umbra will have to wait in favor of food! Haha! Or, sad haha. And then I had a failed root canal that now needs surgery, which I have to wait for while eating painkillers all day. Sooo that's why I've been quiet.

Anyway, I am trying to make the production of Umbra as open source and free of Big Company(TM) as possible. Previously I used Substance Painter to paint textures that can be tinted in any color, but today I sat down and figured out how to use Blender to achieve the same thing using a bit of shader wrangling and the free plugin ucupaint. Very pleased with this! Adobe is a horrible company so I'd rather not use their apps. I did say the next post would be a crafting system update; unfortunately not. The root canal thing came out of left field and I'm not a good coder while on painkillers all day.

Hope you're all having a better 2026 health year than me!

[umbrapets]

Very briefly, what happened was: I got sick back to back for all of January (the holiday flu, or covid, or just..a glorious cocktail of shit viruses), and had to scramble to recover and find work in February and March to make up for it. And then I worked...so many hours. No time for Umbra! But now I'm trying to be back.

Anyway, here's a prototype of a minipet. You didn't think I would make a virtual pet game without pets for the pets?! Inconceivable! This is not the final implementation of them by any stretch but at least it's something new while I continue working on the crafting system. Hope showing that off will be the next post!

Much love!

[umbrapets]

I love the cute little idle animations for the pet, that's such a cute idea that I don't often see on pet sites.

Thank you! They are actually full 3D models (made to look somewhat 2D), and I think that's the main reason why we don't see this a lot. It's way easier to make something like this now than it would have been some years back!

[umbrapets]

this looks amazing, can’t wait to play!!!! :DD its so cool that you’re maming your own virtual pet site, best of luck with it!

Thank you so much for the support! I'll work hard to finish it!

[umbrapets]

*kicks down door* Hi!!

That was a longer winter break than I had planned! I fell sick over the holidays while visiting my home country and then I just kept. Being. Sick. I'm finally better now, and back on business!

Originally dyes were supposed to be part of the crafting system which is why you're seeing it now. Still working on crafting! However I decided it would be overall friendlier to just work dyes into the wardrobe system. You will still have to work a bit to unlock the colors though!

So without further ado...dye system preview! The UI will probably change quite a bit and definitely expect the clothing thumbnails to change. Hope you've all had a better winter than me!!

[umbrapets]

Hi. So uh. WOW

Hahaha! This made my day. Much love 💖

[umbrapets]

Happy holidays!

I’m taking some time off until the new year to spend time with friends and family. Thank you all so much for following along this first year of umbra development! I’m looking forward to sharing further progress with you in 2026!

[umbrapets]

Here's some footage showing what the site looks like currently, with some of the new features. Still plenty of things to do! Adding a confirmation screen to the shop is one of the priorities!

One important thing to note is that the current shop is there for testing purposes and the final game will have a broader array of shops as well as other ways to get the equippables you want. The interface of several functions like pet creation will also be improved over time!

[umbrapets]

Hi new followers! I'm very glad to have you on board! I've started working on milestone 2 and the crafting system.

You will be able to change the color of clothing items as you craft them! However, it might take some work to get the dyes you want!

[umbrapets]

Folks! The first milestone is complete!!!

I will post a bit more about the features I haven't detailed in here yet, but I'm so excited to start on milestone 2! It's in the screenshot as well, but some items I'm looking forward to is:

🌱Crafting 🌱Shops 🌱Second pet 🌱Biome system

A big thanks to all of you readers for following along so far! 🌱 Your encouragement fuels me! Also a gargantuan thanks to the project's programmer who is an amazing friend of mine!

[umbrapets]

I'm currently in the middle of crafting a much needed (but very light) story system for Umbra and with that comes the need for a tool to easily edit stories/tutorials with branching options and turn it into garble the system can read. I'm pretty happy with whipping this up on a sunday evening with only one tiny bite of chocolate to fuel me!

[umbrapets]

Having a silly little fruit day today! A lot of the remaining work on the current umbra milestone is just fixing problems so that's why I'm not posting a lot of visual progress. But did this today as a silly little treat :)

[umbrapets]

The amount of growth and effort you've been putting into your work as just a single person team makes me so happy. Each time you post gives me hope to see this game come out in the future! It's a fantastic concept and I adore the art style! Keep going ❤️!! I'd love to support if you ever make a patreon or anything!!

Ah, thank you so much!! This kind of encouraging message fuels me for months, I want you to know that! :D

It's true that I do a lot of work on my own but I have to give a shout to my friend that helps me on this project! He's a total powerhouse and does several key things like backend and API, helps me with crucial web architecture decisions and reviews (and improves) my code. It's thanks to him that I can keep the project at the level of ambition it's currently at, and I think that's super exciting! :D

I also appreciate your wish to support the development and I might set something up when the next milestone is done. This should be somewhere in 2026!

I hope you have an amazing day!

[umbrapets]

I'm playing around with some design changes...a shade of white is a lot more neutral than the purple but I'm not sure if I'm sold yet. Anyone have opinions?

I'm also working on the dialog system. It probably won't be a huge part of the site but it will be used for stuff like new player experience and the site story.

[umbrapets]

Hi folks!

Exploration minigame update: Loot table for exploration is in, and it does end up in your inventory, which you currently have no way of viewing, but I assure you it's there I have eyes on the database ;) This means that the first minigame prototype is almost done! It also means items are real and you can't cheat your way into getting them. This means that the first prototype milestone is almost done!

Proof of Loot! :D

I also made a new npc, a basic shopkeeper. There will need to be way to trade in your items for stuff ASAP, of course! Shops is also a part of the next milestone, which I will probably start on within maybeee..the next couple of weeks? I need to do some code cleaning and housekeeping.

Thanks for sticking with me, whoever is reading!

[umbrapets]

hey! Is there an official umbrapets discord? i'm so excited for this game~ >w<

Hey, so glad to hear you are excited for the project! It does not have a discord currently as I want to focus all of the development efforts on prototyping for now, but I will announce on all channels if I open up a discord or something like it! One of the reasons why I've cooled a bit on the idea of a discord is that I want to keep umbra as free of generative AI as I possibly can, and discord does have generative AI features (I am very annoyed by this). There are also alternative options to a discord but they have to be manageable and cheap to run and easy for users to use. I will be sure to keep you all in the loop on any developments!