Long, Super Auto Pets used a strange and clever (and cheap!) source of artwork for his attack animals: emojis enlarged much larger than they appear in your mom’s WhatsApp messages. The supercar eventually began creating its own artwork for its later expansions, but much of the ferocious fauna was still emoji. This has now changed with today’s patch, going back to replacing all the old emojis with new animal images. Goodbye, old friends.
When Super Auto Pets first started, the Wood Games team relied heavily on emoji for the game’s art, using creatures from the public emoji libraries of Google, Twitter, and FireFox. It wasn’t the most consistent look, but it was cute enough and it worked. I really respected the decision to use existing artwork to get a great game up and running faster. The Wood team really started making their own animal art from the second expansion, but the animals in the base set and the first expansion were emoji until today.
New art for old pets often has similar poses or colors to the originals, though of course they’re funnier and sillier. Animals from the new expansion also look a bit different, with different colors and expressions.
“Why did we create a new work of art?” developers ask themselves correction notes. “To make Super Auto Pets more unique, consistent and like what we at Team Wood Games have created, rather than a mish-mash of different emoji sets.”
I like quite a few of the new old pets, but some I really miss. Fortunately, you can turn them back. Go to Customize/Pets and you can switch any individual pet between classic and standard appearance, and switch all of them at the same time. I also miss some of the new sounds.
Today’s patch also added hard mode for serious animal fighters. After each store level up, you must choose a new negative bonus (a toy, to use the game’s term) that will hinder your run. Maybe you choose to give your opponent extra stats, or paint your own pets, or damage your pets when their friends pass out, or lose money when you buy from the shop, or… some of these can help build a little, but mostly they will screw with you.
I’m happy about that my favorite auto butler apparently things are going well enough for developers to pay for new art. This is a cool game (our favorite games of 2021 too) and extremely generous, with a huge amount available for free.
You can play Super Auto Pets for free from Steam or in your browser on Itch.io, as well as on iOS and Android. The base set of pets is free, as is the best mode (a weekly rotating set of random pets and items), while expansions and some cosmetics cost cash. This is extremely generous.