hurricaneviolet

Hi! I’m looking for an item artist for horsephenomena.com. It’s only a few items that we need so it’ll be a pretty small/quick job. Please send me examples of your work if you’re interested :).

Found someone!

I haven't developed alone, it's been me and a team of rotating freelancers, plus the mods and admins to bounce ideas off of, but I've been running my game for 10 years and have worked on many others, and I'm always open to chatting game development! I just don't check the forums much.

Hello! We're looking for someone to do a new background for Horse Phenomena (https://horsephenomena.com). Open to different styles, but the basic requirements would be: The background would feature a horse and a dog along with some nature imagery Would need 4 seasonal recolors + night mode recolor (will provide general color palettes for each) Full rights to the images (for use on the game, advertising for the game, game merch, re-sale, etc.) Would also need .psd files for the images Must be willing to sign a contract for image rights, price, etc. If you're interested, please message me with some examples of your work and prices and we can discuss the details further! Thanks!

Unfortunately in this business it happens all the time.

WHOOPS. Realized this was in the looking for work section, not the hiring section. Could an admin delete this please?

Adsense is Google's program for you to serve ads ON your site, not to advertise your site. (I do have experience with this as well.) Google Ads is for you to advertise, and I've done it a really long time ago and didn't get a whole lot out of it, but their advertising methods have changed a lot in recent years. It's worth a shot! Ultimately $50 isn't a whole lot to spend on an ad campaign, but you can do it and see where it gets you! For whatever it's worth, I haven't had a lot of luck with any type of online advertising - between ad-blockers and people training themselves to ignore them (when was the last time you actually paid attention to a banner ad, let alone actually followed it?), the return on investment is pretty low in my experience.

We will "close" (i.e. ban them) accounts for players who want to take a break and come back and open their accounts again later. I completely delete accounts when players request it (also I'm pretty sure we're required by law to do this when requested, at least in terms of removing their personal information from the account, but I'm not a lawyer, so don't take my word for it), and I also purge old and inactive accounts sometimes. When an account is deleted, the animals on it are moved to the rescue account to be re-sold and everything else associated with the account is deleted besides financial records. I think it's bad practice to not allow account deletions at all - people should be able to control what websites they have accounts on and where their personal information is. HOWEVER, I would not allow users to delete their own accounts just because it's pretty common for people to share their account info and I don't want someone with a vendetta against a player to delete their account and I don't want players to break a bunch of rules and delete their account before it can be banned. That's asking for trolling, in my opinion.

Honestly, I think the short and simple answer is that your bug reporting system is fine as long as you can easily find what people are reporting and people can figure out how to report things. On HP we have a section in the forum which is good because it makes it all super public so other people can see the issues and comment if they have the same issue, and they can see staff responses to it. People also message me about bugs, and I keep a separate list. As far as a good rate of bug fixing, it depends on the bug. I think in general the best time to fix a bug is ASAP, though. At least on a live game. When it no longer serves the game. I can't think of a time when I've shut down a feature because it was too bugged (although, I can't say for sure that it's NEVER happened - 9 years is a long time to remember things :P), but we have completely revamped and changed features that were chronically bugged. ALWAYS. I'm not sure what you mean here. If you mean if a player reports something like "I think the bank gave me too much money, is this a bug?" no, I don't hold those funds. I either investigate and reverse it once I find out that it was a bug, or if it was wide-spread enough and small enough, I let it go because it was our fault. We once had a bug where anytime someone used an upgrade coupon it was giving them 25 mill in game money on top of it. I was pretty sure based on what the bug ended up being that it had always done that, but I only knew WITHOUT A DOUBT that it has happened for the last two coupons, so I only reserved it for the last two coupons. If it's affecting gameplay in a major way then it is an ASAP type of thing. If it's something I can fix easily, I do it as soon as I have time. If it's something I need to hire someone to fix and it's not affecting gameplay, but are sort of annoying, I deal with them the next time we have other bug fixes or programming done. In the news, on social media, and on the forums if it's widespread, or I just message the reporting player and let them know if it only affected them. It really just depends on the bug and how it's affecting them. If they can't play major parts of the game, any amount of time beyond you finding out and contacting a programmer (or looking at it yourself) is unreasonable to them. If it's a small bug (for example when they buy feed it tells them "Congrats, you bought a cat!" but still gives them feed), then there's not really an urgency, but you should still deal with it as soon as you can. You should start compensating players as soon as you can. If you're not able to compensate players right away, you should be keeping them up-to-date in the news (or however you communicate with your players) about the fix and when they can expect compensation. Not beyond what I have already said. Hope that helps you!

This is something we've struggled with on HP, but inflation is relatively under control now. 1. We track the economy, like the overall amount of dollars floating around out there. 2. MONEY SINKS. Everywhere. When we run games we charge entrance fees. We will randomly sell rare game items for game money to pull money out of the economy, or have a game money auction on a low account ID and pull money out that way. 3. Adjust the pricing in the store accordingly. If the average player has 3 billion dollars and a new pet costs 500 dollars, that's not serving anyone. 4. Taxes. We tax the earnings from shows, at I think 3%. To help new players, we start new accounts (truly new accounts, with new email addresses and everything) with a 7 day upgrade and some extra game dollars. Then they get a welcome message explaining how to make the most out of their trial upgrade, and if they respond to the welcome message, we send them some more game money. Then they can also buy a Starter Pack which comes with game money for the first week. We also have a separate, cheaper store for non-upgraded players. Also, I think this is pretty obvious, but you need to be very careful about the ways you give players to "create" new money. There can be an infinite amount of ways for them to earn money, as long as that money is coming from other players and not being created by the game, so make sure to put limits on how new money enters the game's economy.

Also June. I heard from him after this and he apologized and asked me to send the list of bugs again, so I did and then never heard from him again. I've already paid someone else to fix his bugs, so I haven't pursued it any further.

I found someone, thanks everyone!

Hello! I am looking for someone who can fix a few bugs on horsephenomena.com! They should be relatively simple, but if things work out and you’re interested, I also have some bigger projects in mind for the near future. HP is an open game with active players so I need someone who is timely and good at communication. If you’re interested please PM me with your hourly rate and examples of your work :), and I can tell you more about what needs to be done. Thank you!

I allow it on HP as long as they are all upgraded, basic accounts are limited to 5, and if people drop upgrades and are over the basic limit, we ban the extras but let them unban later to upgrade if they choose. With the way the game is set up, it makes sense to allow multiple accounts and it works well! The biggest problem we have is that the game is set up to give truly new players a 7 day trial upgrade, and not existing players just making new accounts, so some people try to take advantage of that, but the mods are pretty good at catching them and then we reverse the extra trial upgrades and any of the money they earned from them.

I also was working with him and he went dark on me too. I PM'ed you with some other possible ways to contact him.