Regnant

On 2/9/2018 at 12:08 PM, Tasinei said:

I'm interested! But I do have a question, how long would each part be?

I can jump off and on writing some myself or finishing any paths, so however many segments you want to write (one segment is some text, and a set of options) is great with me!

I'm wanting to make this pretty long, but if you only have time to do a few parts that's just fine

I'm looking for a writer to help me with creating a choose-your-own-adventure style story for Ekos. Let me know if you are interested with some examples/pricing. There's no big time frame right now, as I'm still finishing coding on some of the site.

Basically, it will need to be a series of different paths that a player will travel along. sentence or two of events, options the player can take, and then how it links up with other events. Here's an example:

(Start) {Alias} sets off on their journey...

1. Go north to the forest. (2)
2. Go west to the mountains.
3. Go east to the lake.

(2) Forest
{Alias} walks into the forest, following a deer trail. It's very peaceful, and there's the sound of birds and rustling leaves from a gentle breeze. As {Alias} is taking in the smells and sounds, they loose track of the trail.

1. Go back the way you came. (3)
2. Just keep moving straight. (4)
3. Follow a bird. (5)

(3) Go back the way you came
{Alias} turns around back in the direction that they first entered the forest. {Alias} pauses, seeing a deer. Might be a good way back to the deer trail, yes?

1. Follow the deer slowly, and try not to startle it.
2. Why would the deer be scared? Walk up to it and ask for directions.

(4) Just keep moving straight
As with most that get lost in a forest, {Alias} finds themselves walking in a circle and ends up back to where they started. Still lost.

1. Go back the way you came. (3)
2. Follow a bird. (5)

(5) Follow a bird ** gain blue jay feather
{Alias} follows a blue jay... stuff happens >_>

Sitemaps help search engines index pages of your site. It’s a very nice addition to any SEO practice! Every sitemap has the same structure to it, and I’d suggest including both pages and images. 

Sitemap Set-Up

Create an empty XML file (most people call it sitemap.xml) and insert the following.

Top Wrapper

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

Bottom Wrapper

</urlset>

Every page will then have it’s own code within those tags.

Example page:

<url>
	<loc>https://ohudogs.com/</loc>
	<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
	<lastmod>2017-04-12</lastmod>
	<priority>1</priority>
</url>

The only required item required for each page is loc, which is the URL of the page you want your search engine to find. 

changefreq is how often the page should be re-crawled for new content. The options for this are:

• always
• hourly
• daily
• weekly
• monthly
• yearly
• never

lastmod is when the page was last changed, sort of similar to changefreq in how a search engine will use it. If you are using changefreq, you probably don’t need to use this. It may be nice to put on your news overview page though and update it whenever there's a new post!

priority is how important a page is compared to others, on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0. When a search engine is showing results and it gets to your site, it may use the priorty to choose which page to show. Homepage and registration should probably be set at 1, with other pages set less than that. The priorty is relative, so setting everything to 1 is the same as setting everything to 0.

A completed sitemap might look something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
	<url>
		<loc>https://ohudogs.com/</loc>
		<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
		<priority>1</priority>
	</url>
	<url>
		<loc>https://ohudogs.com/about/</loc>
		<priority>0.5</priority>
	</url>
  	<url>
		<loc>https://ohudogs.com/register/</loc>
		<priority>0.8</priority>
	</url>
</urlset>

Images

Want your images to show up in searches too? You can add images to a sitemap in the same way! You can either have these in the same sitemap, or create a separate one. You can submit more than one sitemap to search engines.

<url>
	<loc>https://ohudogs.com/imgs/dogs/gin.png</loc>
</url>

PHP Sitemap

If you have a lot of pages, or a lot of images, it be nice to automate your sitemap. Instead of an XML page, create a PHP page with an XML header.

Below is an example of a PHP image sitemap, that’s grabbing all images from a imgs/dogs folder.

<?php header('Content-type: application/xml');
echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">';
$imgs = scandir('imgs/dogs');
foreach ($imgs as $img) {
    if (strlen($img) > 4) {
        echo '<url>
          <loc>https://ohudogs.com/imgs/dogs/'.$img.'</loc>
        </url>';
    }
}
echo '</urlset>'; ?>

Search Engines

robots.txt

After you have your sitemap made, add it to your robots.txt file with the following line.

Sitemap: https://ohudogs.com/sitemap.xml

Google Search Console (aka Webmaster Tools)

To submit your sitemap to Google, login to your Google Search Console account, select your site, and then go to Crawl --> Sitemaps. In the upper right hand corner, you should see a Add/Test Sitemap button

Bing Webmaster Tools

Hey it’s a free tool, might as well get those people using Bing too! Login, click on your site, and scroll down to Sitemaps, and click the “Submit a Sitemap” button.

View full guide

StarFox Command is a pretty fun strategy game, and also has a variety of different endings and types of challenges.

Okamiden is also awesome (and just beautiful) and it doesn't matter if you have played Okami (PS2) or not. It may make it more fun, but not a requirement

If you are OK with a bit of extra work to play it, I highly highly recommend Tales of Innocence. It's an amazing 20hr heavy storyline based game with a great group of characters. It's my #2 favorite game! You can find downloads of the Japanese NDS file easily, and then an English translation patch is available at http://a0t.co/innocence/. You then need to get an NDS flashcart and a memory card. If you are really interested, I can send you the info of where I bought mine and how to set it up.

I agree. Let people filter by top rated in the full list, but in the sidebar have it be random features

Only concerts I've ever been to were for the band Starset

They were both awesome! They played at a planetarium so everyone was close to the band, seated, and there were various space-themed things playing overhead. Since all their songs fit in with this little space travel story, it was amazing!

I'm not one for crowds either, so the venue was an amazing choice!

Sitemaps help search engines index pages of your site. It’s a very nice addition to any SEO practice! Every sitemap has the same structure to it, and I’d suggest including both pages and images. 

Sitemap Set-Up

Create an empty XML file (most people call it sitemap.xml) and insert the following.

Top Wrapper

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

Bottom Wrapper

</urlset>

Every page will then have it’s own code within those tags.

Example page:

<url>
	<loc>https://ohudogs.com/</loc>
	<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
	<lastmod>2017-04-12</lastmod>
	<priority>1</priority>
</url>

The only required item required for each page is loc, which is the URL of the page you want your search engine to find. 

changefreq is how often the page should be re-crawled for new content. The options for this are:

• always
• hourly
• daily
• weekly
• monthly
• yearly
• never

lastmod is when the page was last changed, sort of similar to changefreq in how a search engine will use it. If you are using changefreq, you probably don’t need to use this. It may be nice to put on your news overview page though and update it whenever there's a new post!

priority is how important a page is compared to others, on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0. When a search engine is showing results and it gets to your site, it may use the priorty to choose which page to show. Homepage and registration should probably be set at 1, with other pages set less than that. The priorty is relative, so setting everything to 1 is the same as setting everything to 0.

A completed sitemap might look something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
	<url>
		<loc>https://ohudogs.com/</loc>
		<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
		<priority>1</priority>
	</url>
	<url>
		<loc>https://ohudogs.com/about/</loc>
		<priority>0.5</priority>
	</url>
  	<url>
		<loc>https://ohudogs.com/register/</loc>
		<priority>0.8</priority>
	</url>
</urlset>

Images

Want your images to show up in searches too? You can add images to a sitemap in the same way! You can either have these in the same sitemap, or create a separate one. You can submit more than one sitemap to search engines.

<url>
	<loc>https://ohudogs.com/imgs/dogs/gin.png</loc>
</url>

PHP Sitemap

If you have a lot of pages, or a lot of images, it be nice to automate your sitemap. Instead of an XML page, create a PHP page with an XML header.

Below is an example of a PHP image sitemap, that’s grabbing all images from a imgs/dogs folder.

<?php header('Content-type: application/xml');
echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">';
$imgs = scandir('imgs/dogs');
foreach ($imgs as $img) {
    if (strlen($img) > 4) {
        echo '<url>
          <loc>https://ohudogs.com/imgs/dogs/'.$img.'</loc>
        </url>';
    }
}
echo '</urlset>'; ?>

Search Engines

robots.txt

After you have your sitemap made, add it to your robots.txt file with the following line.

Sitemap: https://ohudogs.com/sitemap.xml

Google Search Console (aka Webmaster Tools)

To submit your sitemap to Google, login to your Google Search Console account, select your site, and then go to Crawl --> Sitemaps. In the upper right hand corner, you should see a Add/Test Sitemap button

Bing Webmaster Tools

Hey it’s a free tool, might as well get those people using Bing too! Login, click on your site, and scroll down to Sitemaps, and click the “Submit a Sitemap” button.

I'm using A2 hosting and they have great support, an easy control panel, and good prices. Plus they can add Let's Encrypt to your hosting account so you can get free SSLs

2 hours ago, PaulSonny said:

Do you have links to both those sites? I'd love to take a look.

https://ohudogs.com is the little click site (interview for that one on here)

https://lorebeasts.com/ is the other one I'm looking to hand off

Just now, Digital said:

Would you be willing to do a quick 7 question interview about your experiences with both sites?

Sure

I currently own two games: a small click-adoptable site (pretty basic), and a bigger exploring-based site which I'm actually looking for someone to take over.