Second D-Pet Beta to Begin This Week

January 14th, 2016. Over the 8th, developer Jorge "JoMdz" Mendez made an announcement that the successor to Digimon Ver. PC, D-Pet, will begin its second beta in the coming week. JoMdz had previously stated that the second beta would be available through the dedicated D-Pet Facebook page. At this time, the second beta has still not been launched.

Although the D-Pet name was coined to reflect that it will be available across platforms other than just Windows computers, JoMdz has stated that the Android and iOS versions are not being tested as of yet. Currently it's known that the second beta will implement variable window sizes in its settings.

The first beta for the game went out late last December, during which time several bugs were uncovered in early testing. Most prominent was the "sleep glitch," which caused a Baby II stage Digimon's training count to drop to 0 while it was asleep, making evolution to Child and above impossible.

Digimon Ver. PC was originally developed by Malaysian programmer Hong Ming (alias "nrg890110" or "hosc") during Digimon's dark age in mid 2009. In part due to Digimon's long official hiatus--Savers had ended two years prior and Xros Wars did not air until a year after DMPC came out--the game experienced a brief surge in popularity when it first launched. After hosc disappeared in 2010, DMPC was revised by JoMdz into 2.0, working with a small team of designers and individuals that acted as public relations contacts, managing its various communities. DMPC 2.0 introduced color graphics, additional evolutionary levels, and new Digimon. The game had been especially notable throughout 2009 and 2010 for having online battles through Hamachi.

Right to left: Tyrannomon in Digimon Ver. PC, and in D-Pet.

Eventually, the difficulty of managing community fanpages for the game, design conflicts over the direction of Ver. PC, and a lack of enthusiasm on the part of fans lead to a slowdown in development and its user base shrinking considerably. In 2013, JoMdz resumed work on Ver. PC, and began developing D-Pet in 2014 as a continuation of the program. The rechristening to D-Pet was chosen in order to reflect the fact that the new program will be playable not just on PCs, but also on Apple computers, iOS, and Android devices. D-Pet is planned to eventually have Facebook connectivity in order to make finding a battle easier once the online functions are completed, and will use redrawn sprites rather than basing its graphics on the original Digimon virtual pets.