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tiff

Game Owner
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Everything posted by tiff

  1. Saylua is an in development virtual pet game that takes place on tidally locked planet split into a light and a dark side. There will be different regions and creatures to discover on each of the sides. Site: https://saylua.com/ Discord invite: https://discord.gg/CPet6aq Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/officialsaylua/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/officialsaylua Tumblr: http://saylua.tumblr.com/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/saylua
  2. Your art is awesome! I hope you can find enough work to cover your costs.
  3. Aww, I'm super honored to see all the responses on this thread! I hope we can do a good job and not disappoint~ @chutkat is indeed our wonderful lead artist, responsible for much of the beauty. The scenery art is also by Lyraina ( http://lyraina.deviantart.com/ )! I co-own the site with @mike! We share responsibility on the programming and writing. Both of us are professional programmers outside of our work on Saylua. So far we've been somewhat light in our marketing for the site and haven't released a ton of specific information on our plans for the gameplay, but we're trying our best to make the game into something that we love! I think for now, our Tumblr is probably the best place to follow if you want to learn more! I want to try writing a big info post with more information on our current vision for the gameplay sometime soon. We also have a Discord server where we often directly ask fans for feedback on things! I'll also try to post more updates here!
  4. I'm most active on Aywas and Mycena Cave these days.
  5. I've played a lot of virtual pet games over the years starting with Neopets, and I think many people in this forum have as well. Despite playing them myself, though, I've often found myself wondering: What is the point of a virtual pet game? By that I kind of mean: what does the virtual pet game genre offer that other kinds of games don't? For example, these days I think a lot of the casual gaming demographic tends to focus more on mobile games than browser games. And browser games generally don't offer the sort of immersion and polish you find in PC games or, honestly, even mobile games. So, what is it about virtual pet games that makes us choose to spend time on them over all the other sorts of games out there? For me, I think community interaction and playing with virtual markets are some of the main reasons I tend to enjoy virtual pet games. These things are not really found in most other kinds of games except say... MMOs. But, I spent a lot of time on MMOs back in the day and found them to generally feel a bit too committal/time-consuming for my tastes. So for me, I think a lot of what makes petsites nice is that I think they capture a lot of the aspects I enjoy most from MMOs (player economies and feeling like I am becoming part of a virtual world/community) but in a much lighter form that doesn't feel like it demands a lot of attention. What about you guys?
  6. When I was younger, my dream was to one day start a successful online business. Not like super successful but something that made just enough money to live off of. I think as I got older my priorities have shifted some though. Mostly, I enjoy my day job enough to not really dream of quitting haha. I think these days I mainly just want to make sure I keep improving my skills while working on creative projects that challenge me. For now, that means working on Saylua. In the future (I predict ~2 years) when Saylua has gotten to a stable point where I don't feel like I have to be super dedicated in developing it anymore, I think I want to try my hand at writing and drawing a graphic novel. Or, well, my dream there at the moment is to create a series of comic short stories that can be put into a nice anthology together. I have a thing for comic short stories. And once I feel happier with my art and writing skills, I think I'd want to loop back around to adding more programming to my life again by trying to create a PC game of some sort haha. But that's far enough in the future that by then, my desires might have changed again.
  7. I am currently estimating a closed alpha for Saylua in October 2017 with an intention to have a wider release soon afterwards in early 2018.
  8. My first username on Neopets was shabowcat. I named myself after my cat named shadow. And I remember being super surprised that "shadowcat" wasn't already taken, but then I realized I had misspelled the name hahaha. Before then, I used to go online by various variations of pokefan haha.
  9. Another Tiffany! Welcome
  10. Yup! I remember being 11 and feeling like knowing HTML was the coolest thing ever haha. It was easy, but also fun to like figure out how to make basic web pages! Then from HTML, it's not too far of a step to start using basic PHP (I first used PHP so that I could use the include function to prevent myself from having to copy and paste my website layout everywhere haha). Or maybe you end using learning JavaScript as you try to figure out how to spice up your web pages some. Then from there, you eventually realize a lot of other programming languages kinda look like those languages, so other languages don't look so scary anymore. And things can just keep going from there~
  11. @Hare and @draculaYay, I'm honored you both are interested in using these! Leporidae looks cute~~ I realized I hadn't actually thought of this. I have some online art galleries, but I'm not super active on any of them. So I think it might be best to just credit me as Tiff Zhang with a link to my general portfolio: http://tiffzhang.com/
  12. That's a tough one, and one I've tried to think about a lot. To start: I think an interesting premise can be very valuable in that it can get people excited about a story early on. This is very useful both for marketing a story and also for getting an audience engaged early. However, a lot of works are very memorable despite having premises that seem sort of boring, and some works have very good premises which are executed poorly, so ultimately the final quality of the work is not that great. So, what else is there? I think as far as plots go, there are some things that tend to be better. For example, it's good if you can make your plot not too predictable. I know people often complain about plots being too predictable when they watch movies or play games. In my mind, making a plot not too predictable is partially about avoiding cliches, but it's mostly about creating interesting dilemmas where the solution is not obvious. I think it's also important to realize that making a plot have random twists doesn't make it better if the twists don't fit in well with the story. (See: Jumping the Shark) I remember a long time ago, I heard the writing advice that you should always make sure you make your stories start with some sort of question that the reader wants an answer to. I think this can be a good way to keep people wanting to know more, but it is important to make sure that the answers to the questions you present are also interesting. Mystery for mystery's sake can be cool, but I've read a lot of works which seemed to try very hard to build up an atmosphere full of intrigue and tended to fall flat as they failed to provide interesting answers. I tend to also get very impatient at works that overuse this tactic and make the plot drag on without closing any plot threads. At the end of the day, I think I could go on and on about the sorts of things which make a plot well-structured or interesting. I could give you a giant list of cliches to avoid and so forth. But let's you follow all of the conventional advice on what makes a good plot, and you take absolute care to make sure you construct a beautiful plot with no plotholes, lots of interesting mysteries, and some unique dilemmas with clever solutions that are not obvious to the audience. At the end of the day, this might be a nice story, but it might still not be that memorable. Personally, in my opinion, while having a well structured and thought out plot can make me feel that a story is well-made, a good plot is not specifically what I believe tends to make stories memorable. When I think about a story that I thought was good, I usually remember the strong emotional reactions I had to the story. ie: "It made me cry" or "It was sooooo funny" or "x character was totally AWESOME!". These things can exist even in stories which have "sloppy" plots with lots of loose ends. At the end of the day, I think people tend to enjoy stories for the feelings they get: relating to characters, feeling happy or sad, feeling that a work "speaks to them". As for how to create that sort of emotional impact, that's a topic that can and does have books written about it haha. I know I was sort of vague here. I have a lot of thoughts on the topic of what makes a story/plot good, so I think I may or may not return to this thread later with more specific examples of some of my points. I will also say I absolutely not a professional writer by any means, so my opinions are just those of someone who enjoys stuff. But, I do like to read about what makes writing good, and I've read two books on writing that I both very enjoyed and felt had good insight: "On Writing" by Stephen King and "Writing for Emotional Impact" by Karl Iglesias. I would recommend reading either or both of those books if you want to know more about how to write a good story. Or, if you haven't already, I think everyone who writes should read some of TV Tropes' guides on writing.
  13. Neopets! And Pokemon sort of. I actually never really got into customizing my profile, but I wanted to make a website for my Pokemon Guild on Neopets, so I set up a Geocities site. Then, even after I quit Neopets, I kept going and continued to run my Pokemon Guild's website as a generic Pokemon fansite. And I did this for like 7 years from late elementary school through high school haha. I would just keep making random changes to my Pokemon site, make new versions of my website and so on, and learn stuff so I could add new features.
  14. Aww, these are cute! Super nice of you to offer them up for free.
  15. I'm just a hobbyist artist, but I started seriously trying to get better at art when I was 11 and discovered Oekakis for the first time! I remember those were a lot of fun back in the day, so I am a little sad that they're pretty much all dead these days. And nowadays, Java applets are not being supported anymore by browsers either, so it's a pain to even try to use them at all. I remember I'd spend a lot of time looking at the art tutorials on Suta-Raito and Mew's Hangout if anyone here remembers those sites haha! I learned about Oekakis from Suta-Raito. And I remember when I first drew on various Oekakis (I think Oekaki Central was actually my first), people gave me tips on how to improve my art, so I was able to get better. It's funny and super cool how small bits of content that random creators put on the Internet can end up influencing people's lives.
  16. I'm also a fan of avoiding jQuery haha. Though it can be somewhat frustrating that a lot of JavaScript libraries out there seem to assume you use jQuery. Lately, I've been mostly writing in ES6 and then if I want some slightly more complicated JavaScript shenanigans, I use Inferno, which is basically mostly a faster React. Though the main guy who maintains it joined the React team at Facebook not so long ago, so who knows what its future will look like haha. For certain HTML5 game type features, I like using PixiJS. In the past, I used Backbone and Polymer a lot.
  17. I currently live in San Francisco, but I haven't lived here too long. About this time last year, I lived in Atlanta.
  18. Yay, welcome, Myla! Training llamas sounds super cool and cute. @@ I hope you enjoy the forums here!
  19. Welcome, glitch! I know you from Mycena Cave. I hope you enjoy the forums!
  20. @Nate Yay, I'm super glad the items will be handy!! I'll look forward to learning more about your game.
  21. Thanks for all the compliments, everyone! I'm super glad to get a chance to share some work with the community and hope they'll be useful to someone someday.
  22. Thanks for the update! I hope everything goes well! I've been impressed by the way this site has been run so far.
  23. Nice! Thanks for sharing this. I might check it out later.
  24. I was curious about this since I've often heard people say that the community is one of their biggest factor in determining whether they stay on a petsite or not. I guess for some starters, I think a good community tends to be pretty active. I think the activity level you like in your communities probably depends on personal preference though I tend to like communities that are active enough that I feel like I can get like a response to a new forum thread within a few hours or so.
  25. Aww, that's super nice of you! I hope it finds its way to a good home.
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