Design1online

November 20, 2017

OpenSSL is free :-)

November 17, 2017

You pay them well!!!! Hands down the best way to keep talented people working for you.

November 17, 2017

Really? I thought it was older than that but the domain was registered in 1999. Geesh, my game has been open since 2001. I feel so old

November 17, 2017

I typically would build out all the details of a project before I would even estimate the cost of doing the project. This is the example breakdown for programming work that I would send people before they even got a full estimate to give them an idea of the level of detail I needed before I could begin working on it. Anyone is free to use this breakdown style or example:

Join, login, logout, lost password - $50
Message boards - $150
- Add categories and subcategories
- Sort order
- Pin posts
- List of active posts
- List of recently replied to posts
- Upgrade only option
Layouts - up to 3 designs for $100
Horses
- Bought from the store
- Live from 0 to 25 years old
- Die or retire?
- Breed from 3 to 20 years old
- Age 1 year every x days
- Mate
  - horses can only breed to their mate
  - players must request/accept mates
  - Baby inherits genetics
Game Stores & Items - $300
- Add/edit/create stores
- Add/edit/create items
- Custom store pages
- Upgrade only stores
User Stores - $200
- Buy/sell items
- Customizable store page
- User store item search
Items - see stores
- Equippable
- Consumable - increases health/energy/stats
- Upgrade only
- 4 special items (ie age change, color change, gender change, etc)
Moderators and Staff - $100
- Action logs
- Notes section on each member
- Ban members
- Kick members
- Manage message boards
- Pin message board posts to the top of the board
- Whatever other add/edit/delete admin features you want them to have access to
Polls (ajax) - $100
Player Notes - $100
- player can add/edit/delete notes only visible to player
Members Online - $25
Bank - $50
- savings account
- send money to other players
- interest - extra $5
- log of money transactions - extra $25
Chat Room (ajax) - $100
Newspaper - $75
- add/edit/delete articles
- comment on articles
Message System - $50
Mass Message System users - $25
Mass Email Users - $75
Google Ads - $10
Art Depot - $125
- add/update/delete layouts
- sell layouts
- upgraded only
- apply layouts to the whole site
Special Value - $45
- adding a value amount to genetics - $25
- adding up the amounts on the genetics the horse has - $10
- adding up the amounts on the skills the horse has - $10
Battles
- Computer opponents - $100
  - Admin panel to add/edit/delete characters they can fight against
  - Display a list of all available foes
  - Stats you can edit for each character opponent to make it a stronger or weaker foe
- Computer deathmatch - $75
  - characters will always attack back, no waiting period
  - the one to run out of health first looses.
  - player takes prize if they win
- Computer Sparring - $25
  - adds a forfeit button to the fight
  - player takes prize if they win
- PvP Death match - $100
  - turn based, the one who runs out of health first loses with the win forfeit to the player waiting for the other to attack after a 48 hour period if the battle is still in progress
  - Winner takes prize
- PvP Sparring match - $25
  - add a button which allows either player to forfeit the match before their character runs out of health
  - Winner takes prize
- 4 Additional Battle Challenge Rules - $100
Dynamic Images with Genetics - $500
Map Exploration - $50
- So your map system is different from the one I originally quoted you for:
- Page of territories
- Page of herds in each territory
- Admin panel to add/edit/delete herds and their leaders
Herds
- claiming a herd - $25
- deciding a herd mate - $10
- increased points/stats of herd owners - $10
- Forum - owner can add/edit/delete categories and posts
- Forum - owner can they make sticky posts
Enemies - $10
- if you lose a PvP battle to a character it becomes your current enemy
Hall of Fame - $25
- Non-deceased horses top points list
- Deceased horses top points list

Total Project Cost - $2,775

November 4, 2017

I program 40 hours a week for my full time job and about 10 to 20 hours a week on my.own projects. Your brain is just like any other muscle, it can get exhausted after hard thinking. However, the more you do it and use it the stronger it gets and the more stamina you'll build up. Keep at it!

October 30, 2017

The pet and player template system for pet game framework is almost done! It will let you design the look and feel of the pet and player pages using keywords and then populate it with the game contents. Pretty neat to see it in preview mode and then in the rendered mode.

Preview Mode

Rendered Mode

October 30, 2017

17 hours ago, Digital said:

@Design1online, I believe what was kinda asked wasn't so much testing or code coverage, but features or benefits to PGF over say another framework. Can you elaborate on that?

It's designed specifically for pet games and generic frameworks are not. The list of features is below:

Easy Installer
- Upload the files and you’ll be walked through the installation process
- Includes 5 pets, 9 items and default game configuration data to get you started
Documentation
- Fully documented code base
- PDF help file
- Section for owners
- Section for developers
Protocol Support
- Http or Https
Optimization
- Follows PSR standards
- Stash filesystem caching to reduce database load
- PHPDocumentor code comments
- PHPUnit tests
- Full code coverage
Mod-rewrites for easy to remember URLs
Dynamically loaded javascript files
Dynamically loaded css stylesheets
Layouts
- HTML5
- Bootstrap 3.5
- Fully responsive for websites, tablets and phones
- Customizable style sheets
- Customizable meta data
- Customizable player and pet pages
- Customizable icons
- customizable icon animations
- 3 page arrangements
- TinyMCE WYSIWYG editors
- Font Awesome icons
- 50 color themes
Multi-Language Support
- Languages files included
- English
- Spanish
- Italian
- German
- French
- Danish
- Swedish
- Russian
- Romanian
- Norwegian
- Polish
- Portuguese
- Set a default game language
- Allow players to switch the game language if multiple are enabled
- 71 languages officially supported
PayPal Payments Integration
- Manual payments
- IPN Automated payments
- Payment reports and transaction log
Permissions System
- Administrators – full game customization and moderation functionality
- Staff – limited game customization and moderation functionality
- Moderators – only moderation functionality
- Players – a user with no additional permissions
- Customizable to add additional permission groups
Extensive Admin Panel
- Manage the game, pets and players without any programming knowledge
- Custom Emails
- Join/lost password email
- Mass emails players
General Gameplay
- Generate alpha accounts
- Open/close joining the game
- Open/close the entire game
- Daily/hourly cron jobs
Toggle entire game functionality
- Genetics
- Dynamic Images (only if GD support enabled)
- Clubs
- Player Shows
Players
- Toggle multiple accounts
- Username
- Player name
- Avatar
- Referral system
- Encrypted passwords
- Player editable page
Upgrades
Inventory
Shops
Pets
- Custom breeds
- Custom colors
- Custom traits
  - strength, speed, etc
- Custom attributes
  - health, energy, etc
- Custom genetics
- Dynamic images (only if GD support enabled)
Items
- Equippable
- Consumable
Breeding
- Customizable % of traits passed down to offspring
- Single offspring or litters
- Offspring List
- Pedigree
Competitions
Training
Sales/Auction
Shelter
- Rescue
- Abandon
Upgrades
- Enter special competitions
- Access to upgraded forums
- Custom avatar image
- Access to player journal
- Higher allowance
- Higher bank interest
- Monthly special item
Licenses
- Limit the number of pets a player can own
Search
- Pets
- Players
- Items
- Competitions
Mail
- In game messages
Friends List
- Quick access to the player’s friends
Blocked List
- Allows player to block other users from messaging them or responding to their posts
Bank
- Allowance
- Interest
- Savings
- Transaction log
Clubs
- Elections for president and vice president
- Customizable page
- Can create shows
- Pets/players can join
Hall of Fame
- Players
- Pets
Message boards
- Categories
- Topics
- Sticky posts
- Bump posts
- Recent posts
- Active topics
Newspaper
- Comments
- Up vote/down vote
Polls
PHP Chat Room
Mini Games
- Hangman
- Tic-Tac-Toe
- Guess the Number
- Pong
- Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock

October 29, 2017

This is from about a month ago.

October 29, 2017

It is still in development, however there are multiple pre-orders that already have access to the code. @Vix is currently using it on her game Celestial Equine, that's the only one I know of that is open so far. It won't be out of development until all the pages are converted to use bootstrap and it has 100% unit test coverage. We're at about 30% test coverage right now but there are over 10,000 lines of code.

October 26, 2017

Lots of unit tests and pet/player templates for my Pet Game Framework.

Yeah so code is boring, here's what PGF looks like, heh.

October 26, 2017

I'm not sure how many people know about this but I saw some posts recently that were talking about making iframes responsive so I figured this would be a site to share. Gaahhh!! If you're still using iframes you're doing it wrong, please message me so I can help you stop your descent down the path of darkness, lmao.

CanIUse.com lets you enter in any html tags (see section and article) and css (see grid and flex) as well as javascript functionality (see es6 and async) to see how well browsers are currently supporting or compatible with that functionality as well as when it will be completely deprecated (say bye bye to marquee).

October 26, 2017

There are a lot of benefits to a framework. You get lots of low level functionality you don't have to write yourself, someone else keeping the framework up to date with current standards, and usually a lot of convenience functionality like safe request variables, different built in extensions for caching mechanisms, a whole group of people bug fixing and troubleshooting issues with it, as well as familiarity of other developers with it if it's a large framework. The idea is to reduce your amount of development time for what is typically mindless setup of a good, secure website.

Writing your own is fine too, it just takes many, many years to get to something that is really solid and bug free and well secured and optimized. However if you write your own framework people will have to learn it before they can start developing on it so having a lot of comments and good documentation is key.

October 26, 2017

I pick a bunch of names and then check if the domain is available. If it's not I go back to square one. Sometimes I also browse the expired domain list and snatch up ones that have recently expired. For things in the game, I name them realistically so people can figure out what they are without needing an explanation.

October 23, 2017

30 minutes ago, Dinocanid said:

About the multiple accounts (by the same user) thing, there will be people who manage to make multiple accounts, but another way to discourage it is to make it hard for users to do it efficiently and still be successful at the game. Let's say someone makes 1 wolf for each rank and makes their own pack. It would be easier to spot and shut down since your IP is recorded each time you sign up, and 5+ wolves in the same pack with the same IP is a red flag.

That's assuming that users won't share accounts or give out their login info. If you ban by IP address that way you could have the same problem where someone is logging into their friend's accounts to take care of their wolves if they're on vacation or if they want to play while the friend is away. It happens a lot on my games where multiple accounts will have the same IP address because they form partnerships or have different packs they want to play, etc. Also, siblings on 2 different computers in the same house will not have different IP addresses if they're going through the same router. Just things to keep in mind as you progress in your development.

October 23, 2017

11 hours ago, Digital said:

Assuming there is an economy, a single user cannot amass nearly enough resources efficiently to be able to provide any wide advantage. A group can gather more then a single person. It's one reason why we are communal creatures by nature.

There is this, which I can totally agree on players doing it themselves if the game's community/activity is too little to provide enough players. The nice thing about the idea behind this game is that some packs (especially the ones you join at the start) have some NPC based wolves to help.

Sure, that's true. However that's not what I have experienced in sim games. They are too turn and click based to really get to that level of teamwork. On the other hand, an MMO where they are all online and visible at the same time seems to work better at developing that kind of community and team based gameplay.

October 23, 2017

Nice to see some charts @volka!

October 23, 2017

I'm 31
I'm a woman
I live near Washington, DC
I'm a senior front end developer for a networking monitoring software company, an indie game developer and a horseback riding instructor on the weekends.
I have 3 horses, 2 dogs and a cat on my farm.

October 23, 2017

3 minutes ago, Digital said:

I guess the argument (and this is strictly game d sign and theory) is whether or not those people are able to do better playing all sides versus a group of people working together.

It isn’t so much trying to stop people from that play style but offering advantages to group cooperation.

They said they were limiting accounts though. That means they want to discourage the multiple accounts. Also, I'm not sure what competitive advantage you'd have from different people playing as each wolf versus having all the accounts you run yourself. One of the reasons people make all the accounts themselves on my game is because they can't get people online and coordinating things as quickly since people sign off or go awol for days at a time. Then it becomes easier for them to do it themselves.

October 22, 2017

Heh, good luck with that. Banning by IP address will not stop people from creating multiple accounts but you'll learn that the hard way ;-)

October 22, 2017

So I will tell you from my experience that getting members to work as a team is really difficult. I have a similar feature in my horse game and what happens is everyone creates multiple accounts and plays all the different povs. So you will end up with people creating their own packs. Just an FYI.

October 22, 2017

I guess what I don't understand is you are playing as one wolf or multiple wolves? If you're upgrading yourself but then you die does that mean all your work is lost or do things carry over when you create a new wolf? Also, what if you die and have no SP? How do you make a new wolf then and what earns you SP?

October 22, 2017

When you load your case file just add a query string with a version number on the end. When you update the CSS file you change the version number. You don't have to do anything special with the CSS or the contents of the CSS file, it's just the url to the file that changes.

?v=2 then ?v=3

October 22, 2017

4 hours ago, Dinocanid said:

One of my fears is never getting to the final stage, but another one would be css themes. I like to try them out, but at the same time, converting them is an absolute nightmare. The newest css theme on Foodbabs I don't even touch anymore because, whatever the reason may be, that theme in particular can take up to 30 mins to show a change, even if I hard refresh. I could accidentally break something and not know it until waaay later, then fixing it takes just as long.

@Dinocanid do you not know how to disable caching with css files? All you do is add a version number to the file query string. Then as soon as you change the CSS file you update the version number and it will invalidate the browsers cache so it pulls in the new css changes. For instance http://yourdomain.com/css/theme.css?v=1

October 19, 2017

They're pretty comparable. Switching from one to the other isn't really hard either. Personally, I don't have a preference and I'm just as comfortable using regular CSS.