hurricaneviolet

I always describe it as "it feels like my brain is melting". It's the same feeling I get when I've been playing a video game and have to re-do the same part of the same level over and over and over and over because I keep dying. It's also the same feeling I get when I have to drive for a long time and I start to get bored. My brain is prone to meltdowns, I guess :P.

Updating that I have found someone!

Hello! :). I'm looking for someone who can do a horse/environment painting for the background of a HTML5 game! It's for horsephenomena.com. Since HP is not art-heavy, I don't have a specific style requirement that you'd need to match. I have some examples of poses that I like and the sort of background environment I'm looking for, but as a general overview, it would be 1 horse facing forward in a desert-type environment. If you're interested, PM me with your prices and examples and I will give you more specific information on what I'm after :). Thanks!

Hello HP!We've got some new stuff for you this morning! new animal awards! There is now an animal award for being the highest pointed in your breed! It awards 5000 animal points when you earn it. Animals who currently are the highest should receive their awards tonight! We've added in awards for generations 21-40! This should cover every animal on the game, because as far as we can tell, the highest generation is currently 30 for dogs and 24 for horses. If you have any animals who do not have the correct award, please message me on account #1 or Blitz on account #2049 to have it corrected as soon as possible! To make sure we can get them fixed as quickly as possible, please include the animal ID and what generation they SHOULD be in your message. bank interest You can now save money and collect interest on your saved bank amount. Upgraded players get .02% weekly interest, and basic players get .01% weekly interest on any amount saved. Interest will be available to collect every Sunday and will be added to your savings amount, but you have to press "collect!" just like you have to pick up your weekly paycheck each week. This means if you deposit $1 mill HPD (1,000,000), you will earn $200 HPD per week if you're upgraded or $100 per week if you're a basic player. You can add as much to savings as you want for free, but there is a .05% fee on any money you take out of savings. This means if you have $1 mill HPD (1,000,000) in savings, you will have a $500 HPD fee, so you can withdraw a maximum of $999,500 HPD. But why a fee? The fee is there for a couple of reasons. The first reason is to encourage you to save money and not use the savings option as your regular bank account. If you're upgraded it will take less than 3 weeks of leaving money in savings to earn more in interest than the fee will be. The second reason is because whenever we add ways to move money into the HP economy, we have to balance it out to curb inflation. So how will this work in practice? Say you're saving for a project 6 months from now and you deposit $500 mill HPD, that means you will get $100k/week in interest, which would be a total of a little more than $2,600,000 earned in interest by the end of the 6 months, if you deposit nothing else. Then if you were to withdraw all of the money, your fee would be $251,300 HPD. So your $500 mill will have turned into $502,348,700. What if HP's economy changes so that the interest and fees no longer make sense? We will adjust them as needed, but this is our starting point. transferring animals You can now transfer animals between your own accounts without putting them up for sale! On the bottom of horse and dog pages, there is a new box that contains a dropdown list of all of your accounts connected by email. You can choose a new one and press send and that's it! It's a drop down list of your accounts rather than letting you type an ID to prevent any accidental transfers to the wrong account. We've got more new stuff coming your way soon! :). As always, please let me know if you find any bugs or have any questions. Also, remember we're hosting a chat party this Friday at 7 pm HP time! Join us for games and giveaways! Happy Tuesday, HP! -Sam View full news

I'm terrible at naming things. HP took me two weeks to name and I'm still not super happy with the name 8.5 years later, haha. But that's basically how I did it. I chose a base word and then just tried different combinations until I fell on something I liked.

Did you know that every month on HP we pick a rare-on-HP horse or dog breed to showcase on the game? Along with our spotlight, we do a giveaway of a pointed pair of that breed, drawn as close to the 15th of the next month as possible. This month's breed spotlight is: Selle Francais About the Selle Francais The Selle Francais is a French horse breed known for it's jumping ability, but also skilled at Dressage and Eventing. They are most often bay or chestnut in color. However, due to the diversity of the breeds used to make up today's Sell Francais horses, there are no specific breed standards for appearance. They are a sporthorse with balanced and powerful gaits, which makes them ideal for show jumping. Selle Francais on HP There are currently only FOUR Selle Francais's on HP under 21 right now. Click here to browse Selle Francais stock images on DeviantArt.com Giveaway We are giving away a store pair of Selle Francais with 250k points each! To see the full thread and enter the giveaway, click here! View full news

Personally I'm not a fan of true death (I sound like I'm talking about True Blood right now, haha) on pet sites where the pets disappear forever. On HP, animals retire at a certain age so they can't be bred anymore or show anymore, but players can keep them "alive", or they can retire them which means they they can't be sold/images changes/anything, but you can still see a page with their basic info. Some players keep their retired animals forever and some actually retire them, just depends on the person.

I'm 23 I'm a woman I live in Omaha, Nebraska, USA I work full time on my game Horse Phenomena, but I went to school for culinary arts/hospitality 2 cats (Mr. Doo and Noodle), 1 dog (black lab x pointer named Sully), 0 kids

Updated with what's still for sale! I will consider reasonable offers.

I'm a strong believer in not going public at all until you have a firm opening date (by which I mean the game is basically done and you're just putting finishing touches on). If you're opening for testing, I recommend also not opening for that or advertising for it when the game is still in an "unfinished" state so you can have people test the complete product and not bits and pieces. I say this from my own experience (I've gone public too soon on lots of projects, and it's never paid off), but also from watching other games do their thing. When you start talking about it, and then something happens and opening gets pushed back, or it takes longer than you thought, or whatever the case may be, the hype dies down. It's hard to keep the lid on things because it's exciting, but I think it's worth it in the end. I would recommend making your social media accounts now though to save the name. But I would just make them and then save the logins for later use.

I will PM you now!

This is kind of personal, but I'm generally pretty open about mental illness, so: I have ADD which I take medication for (and have on and off since high school), and I also have issues with generalized anxiety and OCD. I have also run a successful game for 8.5 years, and continue to make a living and support myself from the HP. Like with anything in life, the better I am managing my mental health, the easier it is to work on the game. So, that's my advice for you: make sure you are getting the appropriate help and support for your mental illness. I don't know your situation, but for me, regular therapy and medication makes worlds of difference. For the most part, as long as I am diligent about working on my mental health and doing the things that I know work for me to keep my issues at bay, or work around them, then I can function like an average, well-balanced person. But, if I don't take care of it, I end up barely being able to drag myself out of bed, let alone doing anything useful. You kind of just have to find what works for you to keep yourself on task the way you want to be. It helps tremendously to have other people help shoulder the burden, but part of it needs to be you finding ways to work with and around the mental blocks. For me, I set up reminders, I keep a detailed planner with what I need to do each day for the next couple of weeks (and then change things as needed), and I have a dry erase board that I use for big projects which is split into three sections - to do, in progress, and done - which I then write every small task/detail of a project on a sticky note and put them up in the appropriate categories as I'm working. That way I don't forget things, and I have constant reminders of what I need to do to stay on task. And I use the strategies I've learned in therapy to help manage the mental illness. When I can feel it creeping up on me, I go through my checklist of triggers and then I do the things that I know help. So for example, if I'm starting to get anxious and I haven't left the house in days, then I have to force myself to go out and get lunch or go shopping or something to manage that anxiety before it turns into full blown cabin fever. One thing that I found particularly helpful was something John Green said in a podcast. He struggles with OCD and he was talking about how working out for an hour a day, even when he doesn't want to or doesn't feel like he has time, helps him to be more productive. He says that by doing something that is good for his mental health (in his case, working out), it ends up giving him more time in the day, because he is devoting less of his time to obsessive thinking. I think that can apply to lots of health situations, though. It's all about finding ways to manage your symptoms, so you can have more time for the things you want to do, need to do, and are passionate about. However, sometimes, despite the best coping techniques, things just don't go as planned. Which is unfortunate, but remember to be kind to yourself, and understand that sometimes you won't be able to move ahead as planned, but that's not the end of the world. I think most people who work on creative projects go through hyper focus and burn out to some degree, and it's normal during development for burn out to happen. Development is hard and draining. Even after a game opens, burn out happens. But you just have to keep working on it when you can, and eventually it will come together. That's my experience with doing this and coping with mental illness, so I hope some (or all) of it is helpful to you!

Congratulations to the October Club Presidents! Are you a club president? Message me on account #1 with your contests/events to get them featured in our weekly club happenings post!As long as we have events and club news to post, we will be doing one weekly! But you have to send it in to me every week for it to be included. Draft Horse Club currently has a share your draft pictures event, HPD Raffle, Horse Graphic Raffle, and Dog Graphic Raffle happening. Check out the club page for more details! Horse Clubs Tronic president of All Horses Club Audacious president of Colored Breeds Club Insomnia president of Crossbreed Club Famous Shamus president of Draft Horse Club Songbird president of English Discipline Club Broken Vow president of Gaited Club Amphitritê president of Mythical Horses Club Azalie president of Pony Club Insomnia president of Race Horse Club Inaya president of Rare Horse Breed Club Chaotic president of Western Discipline Club Dog Clubs Kaleiya president of Agility Club Insomnia president of All Dogs Club Kaleiya president of Hunting Club Blitz president of Mutt Club Insomnia president of Obedience Club Kaleiya president of Rare Dog Breeds Clubs Kaleiya president of Wild Dog Club View full news

Those quotes speak to me. Especially that totally 100 million people can tell you you're great, but if one person says you suck then immediately you're like "Oh no! What if everyone thinks this? What if they convince all the people who like me that I suck? What if I really do suck?!". I've had to make peace with the fact that I can't please everyone, and some people just don't like my game. That's fine. And some people just suck themselves, honestly. You can be doing everything "right" and they will still go on a character assassination bender. Someone once told me that they hoped I died on a game gossip blog. It's really hard to separate yourself from that and not take it personally. To another point, I am close friends with some of the players on my game, but I'm friendly with everyone. I'm in chat a lot and on the forums, so I know what's going on it people's lives, and I talk about my life, my pets, etc. But it doesn't really go beyond that. I may or may not have them as friends on Facebook, but there's nothing personal about me on there, it's just an extension of my professional persona. I think that, for me, it makes sense to be friendly and have my life out there. It's part of being an internet personality (which you are if you own a game like this, whether you want to be or not). But it doesn't affect my authority negatively. At the end of the day, it's my game, and the rules still apply, even if we talked about how our cats look alike last week. If you're friends with a cop, they're still going to hold you to the laws.

Kind of digging up an old topic here, but I usually get on, respond to messages/emails and resolve anything there, then I go and respond to forum posts and mod forum posts, and generally sit in the game's chat while I work on whatever else needs to be done that day (which varies greatly by day, it just depends on the current projects or events happening, but this can include anything from talking to programmers/artists, working on new plans, organizing events, changing the layout, fixing any issues, etc.), and I try to flip to the online list to send welcome messages to new players when I see them online. We have a social media manager, so I don't do any of that stuff, and the mods generally take care of the mod stuff, but I will also do any mod stuff if I see something that needs to be done. Edit to add: I used to have to do a lot of data entry type of stuff as well (just an example, but handing out prizes from contests takes hours, or if a bug causes points to manually be adjusted or something), but now I am at the point where I can pay one of the admins to do that stuff to give me more time to focus on other things. But that was a huge part of daily game ownership for me for a long time.

We've honestly never had much success with anything beyond word of mouth and people finding us through Google. We do have social media and have paid for ads in the past, but with mixed results. Our social media accounts, as well as email campaigns have worked very well to bring old players back, but as for finding new ones, I still haven't figured that out.

It depends on the situation. In the example above, if no one really knew it was a glitch and everyone was benefitting from it, I would leave the points in place, fix the bug, and move on. It was our fault it was happening, and it would be unfair to take it away. However, if a few players knew about a hole in the system and were purposefully milking it, I would remove the points and fix the glitch. Depending on the severity, I would also take disciplinary action against the players. I've had both situations happen. We had a bug on HP that we didn't know about where people could send a negative amount of money through the bank which would take it away from them, but then create money on the other end of the transaction. So a few people were creating billions of game dollars before it was discovered. Those people were banned, money was removed where we could find it, etc. However, more recently, I discovered that an item in our cash shop wasn't working as intended and instead of increasing energy by 10 for life, it was increasing it by 20 for life as long as you had bought a weekly +10 boost first. It has been that way for who knows how long before I discovered it, and most people weren't aware that it wasn't supposed to work that way. So I had it fixed, and nothing further happened from it.

HP isn't a new site/developing a community, but I do have some experience with this, haha. HP has a great community. Seriously, they're amazing. And it's one of the things the game is most frequently complimented on. But it wasn't always that way, and I've worked on other games that had a different experience. I think the biggest things are: 1. The staff. They need to be welcoming, they need to enforce the rules evenly, and be interacting with the community in a positive way. Even if that just means sitting in chat and talking to people about their day, or making sure that every forum topic gets a reply. 2. No drama. Seriously enforce a zero tolerance drama policy. I'm not saying ban people with a flair for the dramatic, but the staff should NEVER be involved in it and you should work to shut it down when it starts. Drama kills online communities because the people who you actually want to play eventually can't stand it and leave (or never start playing in the first place). Any of you cutting back on your Facebook and Twitter time recently because it's always a giant troll-fueled mess? I know I am, and the same thing applies to games. Even if a player is not directly involved in the drama, they don't want to see it. When someone flips their lid on you personally or the staff, even if it's public, don't feed the trolls. Be professional, but firm (don't be a doormat), and have someone else read your replies and tone-check you if you're worried. If they're freaking out, they want you to respond the same way so that they can start the drama. Just don't add any fuel to the fire and they will get bored and leave. This is kind of a generic example, but "I'm sorry you feel that way, but [insert reason why they can't have what they want]" is a great go-to answer. But, the thing I think is especially serious, is stopping any drama between players when it's reasonable. If two players aren't getting along, that's their business. But if one of those players is telling other players that "so-and-so is terrible and oh my god can you believe what they did?!" it's bordering on cyberbullying and you need to put an end to it. I guess what I'm saying is that it's important to find a balance between being a neutral third party, and knowing when it's needed for you to step in and stop things. Also, if it's an option for you, implement a hellbanning system. It's honestly a lifesaver. If you keep a level head, eventually you will weed out the people who feed on discord and you'll be left with the people who make up a great community. I know from experience that it's hard not to fall into the trap of wanting every player to like the game, and the players who cause problems appear to be the most active players in the community because they're always in chat/on the forums, and they're always the first to message you about something. But those players in a lot of cases are actively turning others off from your game. I hope that helps someone! When I opened HP, I was 15, so believe me when I say that HP didn't always have a great, drama-free community. It took lots of years for me to figure out what I was doing, haha. But those are really my best tips. I've also bought games where the community hated the sale and they hated me because I was so different from what they were used to, and they didn't like me coming in and changing things. One of those games, I admitted failure and re-sold. The other one, I did get people to come around, but the game is now closed for different reasons. If you've recently bought a game, or opened one, and it's not going well, just know that you can always start over with the community. Even if you have to be like look, I know that we've got some community problems, but here is how I want to work on them, and go from there.

HP does a lot of seasonal stuff! We do change our layout with the seasons (the background and the color scheme). But we also have some seasonal events that we always do, especially around the holiday season. We do Trick-or-Treating in October, hand turkeys and Cyber Monday in November, 24 Days of Christmas in December, and then we have an annual mascot contest. We regularly run events and contests, but those are our annual seasonal events. Players appreciate it, and it's fun for the staff too.

I've done it both ways, and for me it has always worked better to release a more polished game. You should have a few testers who will play through everything and report bugs or make suggestions, but opening to the general public is just asking for trouble in my opinion. A game like this is never "done", and when you're years in and look back on when you first opened it probably won't even look like the same game. But I think a game should be playable to it's fullest planned extent when it is open to the public.

Bumping this! Still lots for sale.

Anyone who has been paying attention to the news over the last couple of weeks has seen the devastation all over North America from Hurricane Harvey, the Northwest/Canadian Wildfires, and the looming Hurricane Irma. It's a very scary time for a lot of people who are hoping to stay safe and minimize damage to themselves, their loved ones, and their property. We have lots of HP'ers who live in affected areas, and we want to do our part to help! Rather than choosing a specific cause or organization to collect donations for, we are instead allowing you to choose your own cause to donate to directly. We have a limited supply of HP stickers to send to those who donate, or a free 2 week upgrades for those who don't get a sticker! Sticker availability is first come, first serve, and I will update this post once they have run out! Anyone who donates at least $10 USD (or other needed items, like food, clothing, or blood) between now and 9/14 to an organization directly helping those affected by Harvey, Irma, or the wildfires should send a screenshot or photo of their donation receipt to account #1 to claim their sticker or upgrade time. Not sure where to donate? There are lots of great organizations to choose from! Here are some suggestions: The American Red Cross (when you donate you can choose Hurricane Irma, Hurricane Harvey, or Disaster Relief which will provide relief to those affected by the wildfires), the Houston Humane Society (to help provide shelter and care for animals who were separated from their owners or hurt during the storm), or United Way of Houston. The New York Times has even more suggestions on where (and where not) to donate here. --------------------- Our fall layout is up! Here is a preview: View full news

More art has sold! Everything else is still available. I will consider offers.

Finally got an update from PayPal and this has been fixed! So, if anyone else has been having issues, it should be resolved now :). Recently, I've been having problems with PayPal, and I'm wondering if anyone else is having the same issues! I've submitted a support ticket with PayPal, but no reply so far. Here's what's been happening: When some players (most transactions are fine, but this is affecting some people every time they buy an upgrade, including me when I test) purchase something, their payment goes through, but somewhere along the lines PayPal changes their item number to "Shopping Cart", which then causes a problem because that's not a valid item number so they aren't getting what they paid for. Also, interestingly, those customers don't seem to be getting their emailed receipt from PayPal. I'm not sure if this is an IPN issue, or a bug with PayPal, or a problem with us (although, I don't think it is, nothing about HP's PayPal code has changed recently and it seems to be working fine for most people). So that's why I'm posting here - to see if anyone else has been having problems, and if so, if you know the solution!

When you're setting up adsense, it's their code that's in the <head> tags. Which should be in your header.php file (or whatever you have it named). But when I said this: I meant that I made sure there were links to all of the publicly viewable help pages, information pages, forum, etc. from the site's navigation bar that is easy to get to from the index.php page. Your navigation would also be in your header.php file. I think that's what you meant? <h1> tags are more for a heading, to emphasize your text headers, like on titles and above posts. But they aren't (necessarily) a part of your site's header.