A great way to gamify work
Furnish your virtual cottage. Manage your tasks and track your focus time. You can do all that in Virtual Cottage 2. It’s like having a lofi stream as a video game. Unlock new furniture while working.
This is finally a really good implementation of “work gamification”. That means adding game “mechanics” to your workflow. Like unlocking new stuff or leveling. Most times it’s just a small idle game that is used. But with Virtual Cottage 2 you even have a small progress tracker, music player, white noise machine, todo list and coworking system. Yes, a coworking system. You can invite other people to work with you and study together in a shared cottage.
The way to unlock new furniture is also really well implemented. You only get progress for time worked in the focus mode. Obviously it only works well if you follow the “rules” and not abuse it.
The artstyle is really warm and relaxing. While it’s still a demo there are already so many models to place around your cottage. And it looks alive with a few small animations and scenery options. It’s enough movement to not look like an image. And little enough to not distract.
I’m actually using Virtual Cottage 2 right now while writing this post. And I’m gonna keep using it for all my work now. Not only helps it with removing unnecessary browsing or youtube scrolling it calms my mind and keeps me focused pretty well.
What I like the most about Virtual Cottage 2 though is the “Journal” to see my progress and the work I did in the past. Here is an image of my current virtual cottage:
Default in the game is a large list of lofi-like music to play in the background. And an option to upload your own music as well.
In the demo is only the location like from my cottage. But we can see on their steam page that they have many other locations already prepared for the full game.
Virtual Cottage 2 is developed by “DU&I” a game studio from Munich, Germany. From what I found out they are two developers / artists that mainly work with different clients to build corporate designs or learning games. And Virtual Cottage 2 as well as Virtual Cottage 1 were side projects to keep their work fun.
Sadly they are not active on social media so most of their small games went unnoticed.
It’s hard to say if and when we get an update to Virtual Cottage 2 or their other games.
