How I Do Ovipets Projects

I just finished my first MarineAngemon project! It took me approximately 9 months, due to how I do my projects, which is honestly quite haphazard.

I figured I'd take this opportunity to explain my project process. This probably not going to make a whole lot of sense to anyone who doesn't play OviPets, but... oh well.

I want to start out by saying that I work full time and have very little mental space for a lot of craziness in games. Remembering combos is not in my wheelhouse. This is why I've settled on pretty much exclusively playing Pokemon and OviPets. Both allow me to drop and pick them up at any point with minimal memorization and allow me to play more-or-less in a vacuum. Keeping my sanity via their repetitive natures is fantastic. I love the low-maintenance nature of OviPets, so I developed a low-maintenance breeding style that will eventually get me the pets I want, even if it means my thousands of ideas sit on the back-burner and I don't make lots of credits selling them.

Visualizer

I first start with using the Visualizer in the Lab section to visualize my project. I have a ridiculously long project idea list that I've both written and spreadsheet-ed, so I use this to also tweak my original design. I either add mutations or tweak colors based on what I'm going for.

Starting work on Tyrannomon

Generation

I take my newly visualized design and plug the colors into the Generator. At this point, I'll usually generate at least 8 pets or each gender for a total of 16 pets. Usually 2 of each color lock. This may vary depending on the colors I'm trying to get. I find mixing the color locks gets me a better mix of colors to, well, mix and end up with what I want. 

I then name my pets and plop them into their tab. Unlike a lot of project breeders, I don't have a naming convention or anything. I usually just go through baby name lists I find online and name my pets that way. I don't think I'd ever remember the naming convention stuff anyway, so I just stick with what I've ended up putting in my tags.

Color Correction

I start of breeding my pets four in the morning and four in the evening, just for my own sanity. I usually don't have a lot of rhyme or reason to the way I end up doing it, just trying to get the colors of the offspring as close to what I originally wanted as possible. This process usually takes about a month, breeding twice a day, every day. Again, I try to get as close as possible to the colors I originally wanted, but I'm not SUPER picky about this because the colors tend to even themselves out over the course of the entire project. I'm not trying to make pures here, anyway. I managed to to that only once and I have, like, three pets total from that accidental pure line...

You can see the color variation I've got to work with here.

Traiting

After about a month of color correcting, I go on to trait my pets. I do 8 pets per trait and I don't worry about the genders. If, for some reason, I'm still working on a particular project in a year, I'll re-trait. But otherwise, I spend the credits to trait one set and then pretty much hoard credits between projects.

Breeding

So, this is where things really start to get haphazard. I breed almost completely at random. Say I have a project with 4 traits (Body, Ears, Head, Tail). I'll breed my four pets in the morning with a compatible pet from each trait section. So one will get a Body, one Ears, one Head, one Tail. At night, I go backward: start with Tail, then Head, then Ears, then Body. I do tend to skip a particular section if the pet I'm breeding already has the desired trait (showing or otherwise). The goal is to eventually have pets that at least carry every trait I want so their offspring have a greater chance of showing that trait in the future.

I also usually breed the first 4 pets that come up hungry at time of breeding. Since I'm feeding them, I might as well breed them. If there are no pets that come up hungry, I count down a certain number or rows depending on what day it is and feed/breed those 4 pets. This end up mixing colors and traits in a satisfactory manner, even if it does end up taking a really long time.

How the offspring comes out will be at the mercy of the algorithm. The rest of my breeding is pretty much at the mercy of the algorithm. If I get a traited pet, great. If I don't, also great. What I end up with is usually a pretty diverse breeding pool.

Organization

I mentioned in the Breeding section that I'll breed each pet with one from a trait section. That's how I order the pets in their tab. I use tags to tell me whether a pet is the color I want and then after that, how many traits a pet has. I will then organize my pets via their tags and later, when they're given or are born with traits, by their traits.

I use tags to keep track of which pet has which traits

 Whenever I feel like I have either too many pets or a good amount of pets of a certain tag-type, I will cull my tabs. First the not-correct-colors, followed by the non-traited pets, followed by the green tagged-non-trait pets, and so on and so forth until I eventually end up with the pets that have the most traits I want at the end to breed into the finished products. In addition to the tab culling, I do cull as I hatch the pets. So if I'm at the point where I only want pets with three traits and up visible, any pets who come out un-traited or with only one or two traits gets put up for adoption rather than sent to the tab for breeding. This is how I keep my pets at a good number for me to keep up with.

Finished Projects

So, now that I've finished my projects, what do I do with them? I send them to the tab that represents their project, of course. Digimon to the Digimon tab, Randos to the Misc Project tab, etc. I only keep 5 males and 5 females of each finished project. Again, I want to keep my pet numbers down.

My current tab configuration

I keep the finished projects separate from their breeding tabs so I will remember not to breed them and hopefully end up with actual breeding pairs I can use. This doesn't always happen, but 9 times out of ten, I end up with at least 2 breeding pairs... which I'm also not really picky about. So long as I have my pretty pets to look at, I'm happy.

Ending Comments

So yeah, that's it. That's how I do my OviPets projects.

I think I started doing it this way as a sort of compromise between what tutorials out there have you doing and what my brain could actually handle. Lord knows I would forget what my naming conventions were supposed to be... I can barely remember what was on a particular tag I just looked at.

Not to mention, this way is a lot cheaper than the way a lot of project breeders do it. There's less traiting, for one. That alone would cost hundreds, if not thousands of credits... I imagine, anyway. My way, I spend a set amount on generation and traiting and hoard the rest for later. I also have drastically fewer tabs to keep track of.