Anoua

I enjoy Pokemon Go. Stopped playing for a while since I cancelled my data to save money and nothing ever really spawned at my house. But recently got a hotspot and went walking yesterday catching Pokemon along the way. It was pretty fun and I feel like a lot more appeared than used to which was nice, plus more variety with the Gen 2s added in. It's boring when there is nothing to catch. Also egg hatching is a good motivator for exercise. I wish it was more like the handheld games though. Would be great to catch battle and train the traditional way. I still play Pokemon sometimes, I don't have the last few gens with my latest handheld being a DS, but have played with some newer Pokemon on fan games like Pokemon Reborn which is really fun. Much more of an adult game and actually a challenge.

Awesome, glad to see this place growing, and excited to grow up a new adoptable as well.

Will you just collect the taxes as a way to get the money out of the system? Or are you going to do something with the collected money? I think taxes in a game can be a pain, but might work if you do something more than make those credits disappear but something for the community, or at least make it feel that way. Otherwise the points are just disappearing. Also 30%, especially for such a low amount of money feels explotive to me (I feel like this in real life too but), why are taxes higher on those with less? What are goals with a tax system? And when would a players money be taxed?

Hey welcome, glad to see you made your way over!

@SingSong That is pretty much how I feel as well. @Boltgreywing You can also have a search return all the Dragon pets, not just the first one. And with the list of returned names you can include their id and owners username. The owners name especially would clear things up as to who you are looking for. I can kind of understand, but honestly just don't feel the same. Even if I did feel special from it, it would be at the loss of others not having it, which for me I don't like. Though I think if pets had more personality people would be able to grow attached to their pets more in ways apart from the names being limited.

I hate forcing arbitrary unique names. If I want to name my pet Fluffy, I want them named Fluffy, they are unique to me regardless of whether someone else has some other pet named Fluffy. I also do not like the odd random number letter combos that often come out as a unique site ages and names get taken.

I made it through 5 levels and have 19 chips. Not sure of any other score indicators. Then quit frustrated and irritated because I made a mistake (pushed the wrong bolder into the water) that would then force me to do the entire level over. There were a couple of sceneros in earlier levels that ended the same way. Level 3 I had to restart a couple of times because of accidental mistakes which I overal find pretty irritating as I do not like to redo the same thing over and over again when there is nothing to be gained from it since the thing to figure out is just how to solve it and I already had solved it, just moved wrong. I am really tired right now, so that is probably a factor in my enjoyment of this one, but in general, this just isn't my type of game. I don't particular care for puzzles of this nature, even in games I do like such as pokemon, I usually find the gym puzzles not worth my time and would rather just get to the gym leader (and have them actually be a challenge) instead. I also couldn't really get into the game but was only playing because it was linked here. There is no story and it's not attractive. So for me there is just no draw. I really don't care about getting a through a puzzle the fastest, or trying for the highest level etc... As for what I do like, I suppose just solving things can be fun and I do like to figure things out in general. I also like that reseting doesn't seem to be too bad of an affect but you can just try again. Nice when a simple mistake makes you restart the entire level. I also like that the game saves your progress when you exit the browser. Nice since when I decided I was done after level 5 I closed the browser, then released I wanted to double check it was actually level 5. Things for improvement for a modern audience, I would say more draw for playing a level and doing it well. Things that could help would be some type of story or reason for winning these levels, where are you going and why? Gaining something by getting through x amount, and doing so at x speed if the goal is to get people to get through a lot and at high speeds. And what are chips for? What are those gate things I keep going through etc... Give people context. A nice soundtrack and sound effects could be an improvement as well. Find the current ones annoying, though I do like that there are sound effects for feedback.

Sounds like quite a few things are planned. Looking forward to having them added in.

Hey @Boltgreywingglad to see you made it over to The Gaming List. Glad you are making progress on your site as well. What did your registration do before? I thought the user creation progress was already happening?

I use Linode, which is pretty similar to Digital Ocean. I personally love it. Have both my games on the $10 tier (was the lowest at the time I purchased but there are $5 tiers now) and haven't had any issues and actually just recently received free upgrades too. It is all self managed, which is definitely not my favorite, but has been a good learning experience and the cost savings are worth it. And like Digital Ocean, they have good tutorials that you can follow step by step pretty easily. You can also allocate your space however you want, so you can divide it easily if that's wanted for any reason. And it's super easy to upsize or downsize as needed. And you are charged by the hour, so if you do expand you just start paying the new per hour price from that point on.

@SingSong Thanks! I appreciate the welcome.

When I applied for AdSense Animal Acres was denied for lack of content as well. But I applied later with Eliyo and got in with no issues. Eliyo has a lot more pages open publicly but there are still a lot of closed pages too. Links are also fully accessible for non logged in user, it just takes you to the login page. Open pages include the guides (which there are a handful), news, the first level forums, the explore area overview and battle arena overview, terms of service, staff and contact pages. I think that's it. Not sure if that helps but I do think having the guides especially was a good bit of content.

Another vote for PHP and Laravel. As for why I picked PHP, just one I was always interested in and very big. It had been around a while and wasn't going away anytime soon. And I actually really like PHP. I started programming with C++ then Java in college, and in contrast PHP being loosely typed is kind of nice. I especially like PHP arrays, just throw whatever in it as needed. As for why I chose Laravel. Well I knew I wanted to use a framework for my project. And did some research, checked out a few options, but ultimatally went with Laravel. It was still newer at the time but gaining popularility, but it was just nice, attractive, easy to use, eloquent (it's object relational mapper - ORM) seemed awesome, and had everything I was looking for in a framework. I have Eliyo on Laravel and would not go back on that. I would definitely chose Laravel again for similar projects in the future. I have also used Fat Free Framework and think it was a good choice for what I was after. I use this for Animal Acres. I needed something that was lightweight, but had routing and some other basic things added in, but the biggest need was for it to integrate with my old codebase without much hassle. This works great for me and even now some pages older and some have been integrated. If there is a file availabe in the directory, it lets it map to it as normal, otherwise fat frees routing takes over. Now I have had some complaints, which I did remedy. One thing is the ORM always felt clunky even for basic things. I was constantly forgetting how to retrieve objects and have to look it up or copy and paste from paste code. Now it really isn't that hard, but for some reason it just wasn't sticking. So fix, I added eloquent to my project. Works great, love it, just wish I would have started doing that right away as now I have duplicates of the common modals such as user and animal with Fat Free objects and Eloquent objects. Second thing was the templating system. I never really got that to work. I was using already generated code that had PHP mixed in and everything that may have thrown it off but just decided not to use it since it's optional. I really didn't try that hard to get it working, but anyway after a while I got tried that, and have added in blade as well. Makes development a lot quicker and more enjoyable. So good changes for me, but the core is still Fat Free and can't say I regret that. I actually wouldn't have a problem recommending it for situations where you need to keep the old base and just work on things a section at time. Would just recommend adding in Eloquent and a templating engine of choice as well.

I enjoy all the color combinations you can get in breeding, and that you can always continue battling so there is at least something to do. I also really like the puzzle game. I would prefer there be some way to completely remove bad combinations for breeding so that it doesn't clog up the offspring list forever. The breeding cool downs are long and so since the main draw for me is breeding, means I don't login that often. Can't really say anything about the community from personal experience since I've never been involved. There has been drama in the past I know. I think the art is attractive and I like it. The navigation is fine. Simple enough to find things I think.

Here are a few more, Animal Acres - http://www.animalacres.net/ Eliyo - http://www.eliyo.net/ Sylestia - https://www.sylestia.com/ Wajas - http://www.wajas.com/

My favorite is blue, a nice light blue though, not really the standard color wheel blue. I use those shades of blues when designing things along with natural blues and earthy tones. But it just depends what I am doing too. But I feel they are nice calming colors in general.

Fun! Too bad I am joining in late and really no time or ability to catch up at this point (I have guests tomorrow so definitely not gonna happen).

@Digital Nice! Well I know I like the adoptables. Not really why I joined, but they are super cute. Hard to pick just one.. so I picked two.

Breaking things into more manageable chunks is really important for me in general. My natural tendency when something feels overwhelming is to just avoid it. Which is obviously not a good response. But if I can force past that a bit and then just get an overview, and break things down, that helps a lot. One of my professors in particular during school helped me get to this point as learning to program was initially hard for me. I also get motivation from my players now that I have games that are released. They aren't always enthusiastic, but I enjoy having something to release for them, and when they are it's fun. This is especially true for Animal Acres. With Eliyo it's more a personal creation that I want to happen, so I do it because I have a vision I want to finish for it. I think people will like it, but it's probably more for me than them.

For me it's always been about creating a world. I've always been creative, interested in writing and art, and game development can be a great expression of that (though I don't do my own art, just recolors since I just don't have the skillset built up enough). I specifically remember playing Zelda Ocarina on N64 and exploring and thinking, I want to create worlds like this. Then looked into what path I needed to take and decided to go into Computer Science to learn programming. Web and virtual pets joined that interest, and I was really interested in web because it could more easily be a solo person experience. But of course now there are so many tools and frameworks out there, this doesn't just apply to web. And honestly once I get my 2 games in a more stable state I will probably dabble in some other areas too. So for me it's more about the end product than the how question. I am very logic oriented though as well. So I think programming is overall a good fit.

I'm a game owner. I currently own two games. A virtual pet site (Eliyo) and an animal sim (AnimalAcres). Would be up for an interview.

Hello everyone. Figured I'd introduce myself for those who I haven't met me. I currently work professionally as a web developer with a focus on PHP and laravel. I learned to programming through education primary, with 4 years of Computer Science education, but have 4 years or so of industry experience in web development specifically now as well. I enjoy programming and helping out newbies when I can, so feel free to message me with questions. I also have 2 game projects that are currenlty live though I wouldn't call them complete as I have lots of plans and updates in progress as well. Eliyo is a virtual pet site focused on breeding and battling that I created from the ground up. Animal Acres is a animal sim site that I purchased and has been around for many years, though I have been study updating and revamping things since it was initially purchased. And I have a third site I work on as well, which is a partnership but that is yet to be released. You can probably tell I am pretty busy between all this. Luckily I mostly enjoy it and my personal projects can be done in my spare time without feeling too drained so progress does still happen. But I do enjoy gaming when I have time. Lots of different ones recently though not really browser games but more console and pc. I enjoy rpgs, like Pokemon and Skyrim the most. More recently I've enjoyed Rimworld, Tales of Zestiria, Pokemon Reborn, and Minecraft (xbox 360 co-op with my husband makes it awesome).