How We Accidentally Won The Best Technology Award
LevelUpKL 2025 just happened and somehow, Weyrdworks walked away with the Best Technology Award for Weyrdlets. That was unexpected for the team. Honestly, we didn’t even think we were in the running. Weyrdlets started as a weird little virtual desktop pet. Something we built because it made us smile. And yet, here we are.
Weyrdworks team receiving the Best Technology Award during the SEA Game Awards 2025.
We Won?
So yeah, we just won the Best Technology Award at LevelUpKL 2025. Didn’t see that one coming. Last year our small Malaysian game studio got Best Development Studio and figured, cool, that’s our lifetime achievement unlocked. Time to retire gracefully. Instead, we got called on stage again. Receiving the award prompted us to retrospectively dive into what we actually made. So here it is.
The Pet That Got Out of Hand
Weyrdlets began as a simple virtual pet that lived on your desktop. Cute, harmless, probably destined to be forgotten after a week. Then it… evolved. Now it’s a full-blown productivity buddy with a Pomodoro timer, mindfulness tracker, and to-do list, all wrapped inside a cozy little island. Basically, it’s your emotional support app pretending to be a game. Or the other way around. It’s really whatever you want it to be.
Weyrdlets’ new key art for their latest Fishing with Friends update!
Play, Chaos, and Petception
Somewhere between updates, we lost control (in a good way). Weyrdlets now has multiplayer fishing, water balloon fights, desktop micro-games, Twitch chat integration, and day-night cycles with dynamic lighting. And because we didn’t know when to stop, we added MiniPets. Yes! Your pet now has its own pet. Petception was inevitable.
Customize Everything
Then there’s the full-blown customization. You can recolor your pet, slap on stickers, and accessorize with hundreds of items. The same freedom extends to your island home, which players have turned into tiny works of art.
Our community’s pets, all dressed up and ready to party!
Under the Hood, We Got Nerdy
All that whimsy hides a surprising amount of tech. The desktop mode now includes smart optimization tricks such as dynamic frame-rate that drops to 1 FPS when unfocused on the desktop, and dynamic resolution scaling when frames start dipping. It keeps everything smooth and efficient!
We’ve also been building a pretty nifty tiny pet brain so you’ll soon be able to talk to your virtual pets offline without telling a big AI data centre about how you stole your cousin’s Tamagotchi when she wasn’t looking. After listing all that out… yeah, okay, maybe we did deserve that Best Technology Award after all. So keep them coming!
Huge thanks to everyone at LevelUpKL, to our wonderful community, and to the team who somehow turned this fever dream into a living, breathing world. Weyrdlets 2.0 (complete with farming, sports day, hamster ball racing and conversational pet brains!) is just around the corner and we can’t wait to show you what else our little pets have been up to.
