Dinocanid

I've found that most pet/sim sites have 3 styles: toony neopets style, semi-realistic (think lioden), and realistic. Virtual pets tend to almost always use neopets style art and look similar to one another, so that's in the highest demand, while sims tend to use more realistic styles. I agree with @st4nn1s that cell-shaded toony art is the easiest to replicate, since the anatomy and shading are simple. When you get into the more realistic and complicated anatomy + shading, things get harder to replicate and the ability to do it well across multiple artists (and have it look seamless) gets harder and harder.

Thanks!

Added more examples, and I now have examples for items!

It's time for a new update, and I have quite a few things to show off today! -Site Theme- I designed a brand new theme for the site! The background tiles like it does because of my browser's screenshot extension. It's a single image on the actual site. I'm still in the process of drawing more art to add to the index page, and it still needs some fixing to scale properly on all screens, but other than that the final design is pretty much complete. Further in the future I plan to add a "light mode" for users that don't like darker interfaces. -Stockpile- I finally got around to adding the stockpile. Right now it just shows the rib item as a placeholder image, but in the future it may change depending on the amount currently stored. (So an empty stockpile would show a few scraps, a large stockpile will show a hoard of food) Rather than whole items, the food is stored as "points". A wolf's hunger goes from 0-100, so if your fullness is 80% then 20pts will be taken from the pile. I find this way much simpler and less wasteful than users consuming whole items and not needing the leftover points. (Then I would need to make scraps and all that stuff...I would rather not) When it comes to your personal stash however, you do consume entire food items. Well...almost. If you eat an item from your stash then you will waste any extra points a food item might have had. For example, if you're at 80% and eat an item with a 50pt food value, then 30pts will go to waste. It's much more beneficial to add your food to the pile, but some people will always decide to be greedy. -Pup 2.0- I decided that I wanted to remake the pup art since the old one didn't really capture the feel of a pup. This one is much more cheerful, while the old one looked like a deer in the headlights. While working on this lifestage, I decided to include some limitations. Pups will always have blue eyes and pink noses/paws until they reach 6 months. Once they reach 6 months, they'll show the colors they actually inherited. (for reference, they become adolescents at 1 year) The adolescent will be getting an update as well, but that will be in a later news post. -Content Warnings- I've finalized the content warnings for the site (as it stands). It's similar to Lioden, just without the suggestive/sexual references. The label itself is subject to change due to legal issues it could bring though. It'll most likely change in design before the site opens.

Slowly moving forward, but I finally added in the bank feature and made some final changes to the night sky theme (I need to work in a pretty environment lol). All the built in themes will also only use Bootstrap 4 now. Next things I'll start on soon are condensing the myadopts page (lots of unnecessary pages and redirects) and adding the auction and raffle features.

Alright, I've taken a long break but I plan on working on this some more this weekend! One new thing I've decided over the break was to drop composer support (+ plans to merge it into the main branch) and just leave it up to the individuals that want it to install it. That doesn't mean the composer branch is going anywhere though! The code is still open source, so anyone that wants to maintain it is welcome to. (It just means I won't be maintaining it myself)

I'm not at my computer to elaborate, but there's a step-by-step guide on the official krita documentation on how to animate with it: https://docs.krita.org/en/user_manual/animation.html Once I get to my computer later I can edit a more "straight to the point" guide into this post.

Just an update that I'm still looking for a layout design! I can also be contacted through Discord (Dinocanid#6171).

That's fine! I'm just really thankful for the help ;-;

Yeah, I'm mainly looking at more of the layout. For the colors I wanted to keep the dark look, but I'm open to suggestions for that too. Thanks for offering to help btw!

I've been having trouble designing a nice looking layout for Wild Souls. The current one is okay, but not at all on-par with most similar sites: I can handle the actual CSS part myself, it's just the overall design I'm having trouble with. It's not eye-catching enough and pretty bland. Would anyone be willing to help by providing sketches of possible layouts? If needed I could pay for some sketches, but my budget is pretty low ($20 max)

It's called Wild Souls, and thanks everyone for the nice replies!

Thanks! I had help making the system, since I'm not skilled in javascript/ajax and couldn't do it myself. Don't give up though! I've only been at this for about 3 or so years, so there's still a bunch of stuff I need to improve.

(300 HP for the hare is temporary. It's normally 30 and dies in 1 hit...if you can catch it!) The base hunting system is now complete! While exploring it is possible to find prey. After clicking "chase" it shows the hunting screen. In this screen you have the 4 different moves (with room for more in the future). Depending on your stats and hunting skill each has a chance of success or failure depending on what you use them on. Higher stats affect the success and strength of your attacks, while a higher hunting skill only affects success. So you could have very low attack and not do much damage, but rarely miss if your skill is high enough. The blue bar is your energy, and the prey gets away if you run out. Most prey will also constantly try to escape, so try to bring them down in the quickest way possible! While I haven't added aggressive (and potentially lethal) prey yet, it is possible to lose health, get injured, or die while hunting if the prey retaliates. If things are looking grim, save yourself and give up! While not completely polished (only hare is available, wolf sprite doesn't match character, background is a placeholder), the system itself is complete. Later down the line I'll work on pack hunts, which involves the alpha picking a large target and all those with the hunter rank help bring it down. I'm going to take a break with hunting though, and focus on other features for a while. That's all for this update, and I hope it gets you all excited!

What I did was learn programming alongside worldbuilding and concept ideas for the site. The reason being that a lot of things can sound good on paper, but the challenge comes in at "how can I properly convey this lore on the site in a functional way?" For Wild Souls, I did minimal worldbuilding before I went all out into making the site (so just the setting and a tiny bit of lore). Afterwards I did more brainstorming and coded different features to see what sticks and what doesn't. I don't believe you need to have absolutely everything planned out lore-wise before coding the site. Even AAA games have scrapped features. My current obstacle is figuring out how to make an idea work in a way that is interactive. In Wild Souls for example, there's a hunting mechanic (which is done by yourself) and a pack hunting mechanic (which is done with others non-frequently). The thing is, I've yet to figure out how to implement this without it being a simple dice roll from a button. Other than that issue, I would say development for it is going really well. I've had to put Foodbabs on hiatus because I wanted to redesign pretty much everything with it lol. I'm in the process of working on a murder mystery visual novel, which would be my first ever commercial game. Hopefully it sells well, but I plan to use the money to better improve my sites, like premium servers, domain names, and staff. I plan to make a topic about it actually once it's a little more done (I've been keeping it hush-hush until I have a playable demo, but in some places I post about it to build hype)

- I usually test features privately before having them live on the site, usually through local testing like XAMPP, although it can't be helped that bugs arise when making a feature public. I've never had to do it, but I'd only shut down a feature if it's causing a lot of users grief and/or it's ruining other aspects of the site. During the downtime I would take user input into account and re-release the feature when it is better. - Pretty much what matthew said. If I can reproduce the bug then I'll reimburse any affected users ASAP. If the bug can't be proven or reproduced by anyone though, then they don't. (People can and will lie about a valuable pet or item disappearing in order to obtain it for free) - I've never done this. I would only do this if a user was able to obtain things through illicit means (like scams, hacking, or exploiting of bugs) - I prioritize them from game-breaking to minor inconvenience. If a bug causes major problems I would prioritize that over, say, a bug that makes pets appear upside-down. That being said, if a bug is extremely minor and easy to fix, I'll actually prioritize that over a larger bug since I can fix it in about 10mins and go about fixing the other ones afterwards. - My method goes like this: Respond to let them know I've acknowledged the bug exists (and possibly the approximate cause if I know it) Give regular updates as I'm in the process of fixing a bug (like if it's going well, if I'm still figuring out the source, etc.) Mark the topic or help ticket with a "resolves" tag once the bug has been fixed. - It depends honestly. Development is pretty slow for me, so I usually jump on bugs as soon as someone reports it and it's done within a day or so. I would the wait time should be relevant to how complex the bug is. If it's just a spelling error or something, it shouldn't take a month to fix. - I would prioritize a bug like this pretty high and look into it as soon as I'm able. If it's confirmed to be a real bug, I'll add the money back to their account and inform them to avoid the bug until a fix can be made. - I plan on having built-in help ticket systems on my site so I can easily track and label bugs (preferably a setup similar to github's bug section), but that's it. I would say test features extensively before adding them to the site as well (preferably with a team dedicated to testing new features, since they're more likely to spot bugs than one person alone), but of course it can be hard to predict what one out of thousands of people will do so some bugs are only spotted after release. Having an easy to navigate and use place for bug reporting will help keep things organized and under control.

Custom versions of the script is allowed, but I got his permission before making it since it would be located on a different site (github), this is what he sent me: So I'm good to go ^^ I hope to get back to working on it soon. Earning money is my highest priority at the moment though, lol. I'll be leaving a bunch of comments in the code, since my biggest problem starting out was that there were all these functions and whatnot and nothing to say what it means. Not to mention so many things are split across multiple files (which I plan to condense), so it was hard just tracking down where things were.

While not there yet, I plan to allow account deletion on my sites. Basically it would delete only that user, and whatever pets they own would be sen to the pound. Private messages wouldn't be affected, since if a receiving user (or the sender) no longer exists then it would say "From: [deleted user]" or something along those lines. Any forum posts and other data would stay as well. Cancel any "in-progress" actions they have, like trades/trade offers, bids, contest entries, etc. I feel like users should be able to delete their account, since it's their choice. People just might not want to play anymore, and don't always return to an abandoned account. (I don't play neopets anymore, but I'm sure my 10 year old account is still there) Just make sure it's not easy to do it accidentally, since that can be a major problem. Allowing users to delete accounts also help keep your player count accurate. You can say you have 1000 users, but what if 500 of them hadn't logged in for years? Those accounts could be abandoned, and they weren't given a choice delete them. It keeps the database clean too, and I'm a stickler for that lol. Troll accounts are a concern (so people don't just make accounts for spam and delete them afterwards), so there would be layers to the process. IE: confirmation email and the request is reviewed by staff. Maybe include a "why" field they can fill in, in case you ever wanted feedback on what's causing so many people to leave.

It does, thank you!

Oof, sorry. $survival is a random number between 1 and 100: $survival = mt_rand(1,100); However, health is it's own variable. I probably should've included it before, but this would be the whole thing: //survival rate $survival = mt_rand(1,100); $highhp = mt_rand(80,100); $medhp = mt_rand(50,70); $lowhp = mt_rand(20,50); $vlowhp = mt_rand(0,20); if($survival <= 100 && $survival > 60){$health = $highhp; $illness = "none";} elseif($survival <= 60 && $survival > 20){$health = $medhp; $illness = "none";} elseif($survival <= 20 && $survival > 10){$health = $lowhp; $illness = "none";} elseif($survival <= 10 && $survival >= 1){$health = $vlowhp; $illness = "runt";} //survival rate end!

My brains not working as well as it should be at the moment, and I can't figure out the percentages these equal to: if($survival <= 100 && $survival >= 60){$code;} //high HP elseif($survival < 60 && $survival >= 20){$code;} //medium HP elseif($survival < 20 && $survival >= 10){$even_more_code;} //low HP elseif($survival < 10 && $survival >= 1){$hey_look_some_code;} // very low HP This is what I got: High HP (80-100) - 50% Med HP (50-70) - 30% Low HP (20-50) - 10% Very Low HP (0-20) - 10% But I'm pretty sure that's not as accurate as it could be.

I think this would be the closest together I've had news posts for a while -- for the same site at least. The breeding system is now complete for player-to-npc. Player-to-player and npc-to-npc still needs to be worked on, but about 70% of the code would be the same so it's not that much more to do. After you become mates a breed button appears, and you can get anywhere from 1-5 pups (3-4 being the most common amount). Gestation lasts for 4 IRL days before pups are born, and breeding cooldown lasts 12 IRL days (1 in-game year). (I have 8 since I forgot to clear the table whoops--) When pups are born their amount of health will differ between each other. The scale for that is the following: High HP (80-100) - 50% Med HP (50-70) - 30% Low HP (20-50) - 10% Very Low HP (0-20) - 10% (Not be 100% accurate, I'll make a post asking for help about that in a moment lol) Through testing, this is what I got: 2 runts (1 with 1% HP) 4 low HP 12 medium HP 13 high HP Medium HP pups are still considered somewhat healthy, so that's 25 healthy and 6 unhealthy. The 1% pup is likely to die but it could live with some serious luck. Pups born with very low HP are automatically runts (at the moment, but may keep it that way). The status of a newborn pup (pups under 3 months) update every 6 hours, meaning their health can either rise or drop based on different conditions. At the moment it's only based on health, so pups with high HP have low chances of getting worse, and pups with very low HP have low chances of getting better. When weather/seasons are added, that will also be a factor in a pup's survival (IE: a pup's health is more likely to drop in the winter, regardless of HP). To help with survival rates, there will be an item called "Spirit's Blessing" that can be obtained at The Gorge for a sizable amount of SP (probably 200 or so) which raises one pup's health to 100%. Lastly, we now have a blog on Tumblr! Feel free to follow, and maybe reblog to help spread the word? That's all the news I have for today! The next news post I hope to make is of the re-styled battle system, hope you guys are excited for it!

I haven't really made any changes this week since I'm working on my site, but next week I should be able to spend some time on it.

I currently use Discord to keep people updated on Wild Souls as I work on it. I find it great for talking to the community, and they definitely appreciate the transparency. Every time I work on the site I post constant updates in a dev blog channel so they can see how the game is progressing. Not even large things, it can be small like "I'm working on the breeding system today! Here's the babies I got from the random generator". Discord is also widely accessible, rather than an on-site chat box. Discord can easily be embedded on your site with something like Titan (I did that for Foodbabs before it went on hiatus), and it allows users to communicate with players wherever they are, be it through the site, phone app, or desktop app. Depending on how many people are going to be in this discord server, it's up to you to appoint mods to handle things while you're away. My discord server is currently small (21 people, only 5 or so active), so I can maintain order myself. If you have a large server of about 100+ people though, all active, then it's best to have moderators.

Thank you ^-^ Yeah now I'm using a custom solution over twine. (since I always wanted a lioden-esque explore system for the site) I'll probably use Twine for something else though. I got it working on the site, but I decided it wasn't really what I wanted.