Angel

So it's basically an extremely simple and limited version of hashing (or is it just seeding? can you encode things, or only decode?). In simple cases like the one you described it looks like a neat solution. Although if the task is just to squeeze the genetic info into one db field, I would use either arrays, more complex hashing, NoSSL dbs, or maybe a combo of those. I'm pretty sure there are other (and neater!) solutions which I'm not aware about as a frontender. It won't be int, but image generation flexibility is far more important for a breeding game which has it as a central feature. I don't like to limit a game on the architectural level that much just for the sake of the number of db fields. Even if to start small like in the described example, you surely would love to extend the logic of image generation in future (imagine we need to store not random opacity for those markings, or already mentioned location, scale, rotation, or parameters for procedurally generated things, or something else). Hashing is a good and wide-used practice, but I definitely prefer more flexible approaches to it

@Bingo Since you mentioned you're doing art jobs on a gamedev forum, I supposed you were a game artist and was able to pay your bills even with part-time freelance. This isn't a profession which pays you only the minimum wage even when you're a junior game artist. Game art jobs actually fall into your lap when you're able to produce game art of production quality. I never had problems finding freelance jobs enough to cover the full capacity of several people like me. I even had to make all of my profiles private everywhere because of that. That wasn't always for games, but it was always digital art, design or coding (and I needed all of that and even more when started to create my own games). The demand is still a lot higher than the offer in this industry. If you feel that junior game artist's wage is too low for you, you can expand your skillset like I suggested and just set a higher rate on the same freelance portals that give you jobs now. If you're aiming to get a high paid job in the industry as an artist working in a game studio as your day job, you have to dedicate at least half of your working time to the improving of your art related skills. Otherwise, it would be hard to keep the pace and get enough skills to get that industry job at all even as a junior It's hard to get the entry level skill as you need to be a strong art generalist with at least basic knowledge of game art specifics, and that requires at least 5 years of everyday studies. But I supposed you already had these skills. Sorry if I'm wrong. Though I still don't get how it's possible to have enough skills to do literally any freelance art and don't have to work at least at a print shop, photo studio or ad agency... If your art skills can't pay even for your bills, and you still have a few years of mastering the basics ahead, then this is not a matter of the type of your day job but rather of your health and natural predispositions. Pick what tires you the least because you need all your energy to study. A random person from the web can't help you here, only you know your body well enough. For example, I can't work with people at all because my natural dopamine system doesn't encourage me for social interactions, so they exhaust me nearly to debilitation. In other words, I'm as introverted as possible to be considered (almost) healthy, and this highly affects the jobs I choose even within my current scope. At the same time I love animals and get from them everything I'm evolutionarily supposed to get from people. This means if I ever had to get an unqualified job and didn't have physical disabilities, I could work on a farm or in a zoo, but couldn't as a cashier, shop assistant or (especially) customer support worker. You definitely have your own predispositions to take into account, and those must define your job choice no matter what other people say.

Why would you spend your time on an unqualified job? Unless art is just your hobby and you don't plan to become a game artist and turn it into a full fledged job, you need to direct all your efforts and time into improving your skillset and making your name in the industry. Maybe invest in art courses? Or better art + coding / art + animation / UI/UX design. There's definitely a lack of tech artists, animators and UI designers in the industry right now, and a surplus of concept artists. To find jobs as a concept artist, you need to be the best of the best, but for less popular specialisations you just need to have proper skills. This will provide you more work than you are able to do as a human being limited by 24 hours in a day. Even if you can do just regular isometric game art complying the industry standards, and have a couple of finished projects in your portfolio, you will get enough work to start choosing among offers in you message box instead of sending applications.

I hope you don't mean another forum based "game" like Chickensmoothie which just allows users to upload their own posts (pets and items), and then just just change the ownership by rewriting the poster's id. To create a virtual world game, you need to literally offer users a world and not just make them imagine it and then create it for you. We all have such "worlds" in our heads, but none of us get money for this except the most talented artists and writers who work on them very hard You need to offer a variety of the gameplay and social roles as well, allowing users to chose who they want to be and what type of gameplay fits them. Otherwise that would be just an economic strategy / pet training game / forum / casual farm simulator etc. - put in the specific type of gameplay you offer. User generated content has nothing to do with this particular genre. All of the virtual worlds we know have such content only in the form of player built locations created with a construction wysiwyg and materials offered by the game (meaning that players are actually just playing, not doing the devs' work drawing tiles and objects, developing pets and monsters, calculating balance, writing lore etc.). It's a necessary part of the virtual worlds to provide users a possibility to build their own things through customized craft and visual construction engine. Virtual worlds don't exist without that, but this is not their only part. Think The Sims, Second Life, Starbound / Terraria, No Man's Sky, Minecraft... or even Skyrim and WoW, though they are kind of limited in these terms. A virtual world game isn't something that a single person or even a middle-scale studio can handle unless you're a genius and developing a new Dwarf Fortress.

The difference is pretty much the same as between the Sims and Cafe World. You either specialize in a certain type of gameplay (breeding and collecting in case of pet sites) or try to offer as much possibilities as possible basically imitating a world as far as it makes sense for your game. Atm there are no pet sites qualifying for the virtual world genre. I hope we'll get some soon.

@GeekGirl You need Paypal Pro for that. For me personally it's useless because it's not available for businesses outside US and UK. My client is from US but still they have issues with it. They weren't approved for PayPal Pro even though they are a completely legal successful medium sized company. I don't feel comfortable providing any specific details about them, but the rejection reason was related to their business model which is very close to what we do here.

My major client uses Stripe in addition to Paypal. Users still prefer Paypal, but Stripe allows to setup payments directly on your site (providing a few steps less in the purchase funnel) without unreasonable and hardly achievable requirements like PayPal does. Stripe also has a nice support, and it is tons less buggy than PayPal. However, the number of purchases through Stripe never went above 5-10% of all for my client. I encourage you to introduce it as your payment system just because it's a good deed Users still prefer PayPal only because they are familiar with it and don't want to explore other options. It's a nice idea to push them a bit Though you'll probably lose some of your customers because of that. But if everyone continues to offer PayPal as an option, we all will have to deal with it for the rest of our lives.

4x real size or more. If an item is going to appear at 100px, the sources need to be at least 400px.

@kami Having an Instagram account and getting orders through it are very different things Each of the industry professionals have at least a dozen or two of social profiles everywhere including top 3 social networks. I'm a little biased because I have info only for gamedev industry, but headhunters in gamedev don't use generic social networks with ui which doesn't allow to represent your portfolio, employment status, working history and other things like that easily. This is the area where proposal exceeds demand for a few years already, and recruiters don't need to dig the professionals out of the piles of unrelated data. Try asking those big fishes you listed where they get the work that nets them cash. I bet this won't be Instagram, Facebook or Twitter

Weird but Twitter worked for me as a historical timeline by default. Though I actually used it only one time for a few months when first a revolution and then a war started in my country. It was my main source of info with a few seconds accuracy. It was crucial to have exact info delivered instantly without reordering, and it worked perfectly. Maybe they have changed something for the last two years? If so, I guess I know why their popularity has declined. Twitter would be pretty much useless if you can't get the news instantly. Instagram isn't a network where professionals find professional artists. Behance, ArtStation, LinkedIn and other dedicated social networks are. Instagram even doesn't provide tools to create a user-friendly portfolio (a photo album with photos in popups is the worst solution ever for this) or a system to make portfolios easily sortable and findable. You can get a lot of low segment amateur-ish orders there, but getting a nice position or a large order is something that may happen only due to a big luck and not because someone was searching Instagram for a professional like you intentionally.

Did you try switching the ordering in your newsfeed from Top Stories to Most Recent? It sorts posts in the historical order. Yes, FB does incorporate ads in between, but they don't alter the ordering of the posts itself, and can be easily removed with lightweight adblockers. I will laugh if the whole marketing point of Vero is for these two clicks that turn FB into a historically ordered newsfeed with no ads...

Actually all of the generic networks I use show posts in historical order, and there's a whole heap of them. I don't see where this problem comes from. Instagram? Drop it, it never had anything useful. It's designed to be a useless bunch of selfies from the very start, it's not even technically possible to spread almost all types of useful info through it. But it's rather an exclusion than a rule. I also don't see why would you need a historical order on an image sharing service. I use Pinterest a lot, and this feature would kill it. Also seeing things in order doesn't mean no algorithms in any way. I guess Vero promoters redefined "algorithms" to give it a very strict and negative meaning (filtering posts to show paid first) which is not what this word means at all.

Eh, "no algorithms"? So basically these guys saved a ton of resources for not coding and supporting smart neural networks, essentially getting back to the state of 2000s when first poorly usable and wonky social networks were only developing? And they call that a feature and try to market it as their main advantage? No, thanks.

1) Simple but not ideal solution. Write a bot to do the work for you. If there are things to abuse and obvious abusive user behavior patterns, ban for them automatically. If you can't tell multiaccounting from fair play automatically, no harm done and nothing breaks the game in most of the cases. In this case a user just plays as several separate real players, and there's nothing wrong with that. You'll need to do routine check maybe once a week spending 30-40 minutes to investigate the disputable cases manually. 2) Difficult but ideal. Redesign the things that can be abused through multiaccounting so they can't be abused anymore. Make managing several accounts less profitable than one. Even if you find a global way to prevent users from creating more than one account (which is technically impossible), players will still abuse your imperfect game balance if it's possible to abuse it at all. A good game doesn't punish players for something they can technically do because this is the fault of devs who allowed that. It battles with exploits on the game design level instead.

There's a thread which covers your first question.