Boltgreywing

7 hours ago, Nate said:

The Games Clubs closed down to make way for the games directory.

@Nate: Wait a minute wasn't the games directory already in the same location already? So let me get this straight. All the time and energy I spent putting these updates in for the blog, not to mention getting it setup mean diddly? So that means I have start this all over again?

Say does anyone know where the gameclubs moved too? I can't find them anywhere now. They are no longer under the games section.

27 minutes ago, Zrcalo said:

imo, for me.. I have a lot of eye issues and usually stay away from sites that use colors in general. If the site's not really muted or in greytones with white being the predominant one, I cant use it. because the eyestrain is just too bad. 

typically when designing a site, you choose one accent color, and the rest are shades of white/grey or muted accent color. but its important to not use over-saturated colors.

just think about it this way..... look at the top most popular websites.... wikipedia, google, etc. and notice how they format their website... also look at even flightrising and on here... I say, to help color blind people and other people, just stick with simplicity.

with the colors in your screenshot as they are right now, I would not physically be able to use your site.

 

edit: 

evidently its called "color burn". where if you're staring at a color too long and move your eyes, the opposite of that color burns into your retina. thats why sites use white or greys as it doesnt do that. eyeburn can also affect how things on your site are viewed as well, and color bleed can really wreck things.

colorblind people can also see all ranges of greys and whites. and there are many many MANY different types of colorblind. If you want to cater to the colorblind, dont use colors.

actually what would probably be the most helpful is simply googling "bad web design" and looking at it under images, then googling "good web design" and looking at that to under images.

@Zrcalo: I am using Webaim pro which tells me which colors to use and which not to use. If it doesn't say pass on all 4 fields then I don't use it, because it becomes impossible to see.

http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

So I then take the time to develop a list of colors that will work and go from there. It might not be the greatest but I notice that blues and greens tend to be the norm.

When a user initially creates an account on Duelingpets they will start off with the default color applied to the site itself.

However if they don't like the color they can then change color using the Add Avatar and Edit Browser button. When they do so they will come up to a screen that looks like this:

In the bottom of the screen there is a colorscheme drop down box that by default holds the default color as you can see just now. Instead we are going to change the colorscheme by using the drop down arrow and selecting High-Contrast.

For the purposes of this demo we will just be using High-Contrast color. However in later builds there might be even more options. The users themselves could potentially create a color choice of their own and select the color they wish and it would change to that. Now that we got High-contrast all we need to do is click the update userinfo button and our new colorscheme will be applied.

After we click the update button our new interface will now look like this:

Now you can see we are now looking at the high-contrast view of the page of the user profile. However this change doesn't just only affect the user profile but other pages as well.

Stats:

The entire site gets converted to the new colorscheme only viewable by the current user who changed it. The other users keep the default color they start off with.

So users can have whatever colorscheme they wish to without being restricted to the color of the site. If on the other hand a colorscheme winds up getting deleted at some point they will then revert to the default colorscheme if that were to happen.

Now this next screen will show only the current user the information of how he designed his pallete as well as the ability to edit and delete said pattern.

The code itself to change colors is all in hexadecimal from 0-f which proceeded by a # symbol. This number symbol is important along with the number of digits that need to be in place for this system to work. When a user destroy a color pallete that he is currently using he defaults back down to the default color like so:

When the user clicks okay their screen then looks like this:

As you can see they have been returned to the default color. On top of that every user who used this color was also returned back to the default at the same time. This is a safety precaution to prevent the website from crashing should a user's colorscheme get deleted while still providing for colorblind to access the site itself.

This code is still in development and their is still many bugs for me to fix. This only works if the colorscheme is deleted by the user or admin. If a user's account gets deleted thats where things will get dicey as there will be more then one colorscheme that will be destroyed as well as needing to change multiple different users using each of the various ones.

This could break the site itself if not handled correctly and might require backend administration which will most likely have to be done manually if things do indeed go wrong. This will require a lot of time and sweet on my part to make certain every users colorscheme is not null and is instead the Default color.

So any questions?

View full news

Bouncy is a relatively simple game with 3 walls, a paddle, and a ball. Each time the ball is hit by the player it will get progressively faster. However the speed of the ball will eventually hit a max ceiling that will border on Battletoads Orange Hard Difficulty. If you can survive that long you will earn a huge amount of points from it. You will only have one life in this game, if you miss the ball once the game ends. There will be calming music during the beginning portion of the game but the music will change as the speed of the ball increases. Eventually you will hear this:

When you hear this you are at the max difficulty rating. A timer will begin to count down and if you survive that long you will be labeled a grand master. Maybe in future builds you will have to deal with walls coming in and baddies.

While this is nice and all there are going to be many technical limitations I will have to overcome:

Collision Detection which will be pretty much my worse enemy, and will need to be as precise as possible for this gameplay to work. Without this working the game will be unplayable. This will probably require a lot of outside knowledge and help. I don't have any money to pay for this as I don't do money transactions online. Not to mention that basically every single game through the history of video games requires collision detection.

Graphic generation will also be a problem. I will need to display graphics to the screen which is a big challenge if I do this in C++.

Number counter will be a relatively smaller problem. The number counter will keep score of how many points the user has recieved and as such will be of lower priority.

Music will most likely be a optional feature for the very first iterations and might not be added till later but something that could still trip me up.

2 hours ago, Corsair said:

1. I'm kind of stuck right now. I want to draw every day but when I go to sit down I don't know what to draw. Do anyone have any suggestions?

2. I was wondering if anyone knows a good place to find podcasts or long video that are podcast-ish I normally listen to the animated anarchy podcast and totalbiscuit's podcast but I've already listen to most of them and the animated anarchy podcast is slow on updates right now. I find I can't focus ironic without something in the background.

 

@Corsair: Maybe try to draw something small like a bat or a mouse? What about something like this to help out a bit?

1 hour ago, Design1online said:

I have some simple game tutorials on my blog and there are lots of game development resoruces and online classes out there you could take and try. Just don't expect someone to be willing to walk you through how to design and develop games without paying for their time.

My blog is http://jadendreamer.wordpress.com

Search online for free game development courses. There are lots of sites out there to get you started.

@Design1online: I am not going to expect them to help me build the next big 3d game or an even better game then Megaman. I have taken a couple of online courses they are pretty useful. I want to start on something small or maybe help out another user on a project to get some knowledge. I'd like to make something simple like maybe pong, snake, or Gorrilas(Qbasic) starting out.

I will give your blog a look as well as the game development courses. I like recieving knowledge as well as sharing knowledge of what I know with other users to help make their games better.

2 minutes ago, Design1online said:

You'll have to check their license, most of them are GPL.

@Design1online: Well I guess it wouldn't hurt for me to check though. One of my goals for my pet site would eventually be to develop my own minigames on my own. While adding an existing one might make me feel better in the short term it doesn't really help me that much in the long run.

I need to gain confidence in designing games with other peoples help first before I shoot off on my own. I want to feel comfortable that I can do something on my own rather then rely on someone else to provide the work. Its kind of like fishing. While you could potentially catch all the fish you want for me, it would help me if I can catch the fish on my own.

7 minutes ago, Design1online said:

There are a lot of HTML5 games on GitHub you could easily incorporate into your sim. Try searching there. Good luck.

@Design1online: Doesn't that count as stealing?

On 6/22/2017 at 0:45 PM, Nova said:

@Boltgreywing Oh good! Definitely keep us posted; I'd love to check out the other color options when you have them available

@Nova: I have the high-contrast option right now almost officially working on my local computer. It still has a few bugs that need ironning out.

5 hours ago, SugarFoxKym said:

As much as I said I wasn't going to, I returned to Neopets. As of right now, I have two Lupes. (A blue one I made, and a yellow I adopted.) I'm apparently better at games than I used to be, having amassed 50k Neopoints in a matter of days.

@SugarFoxKym: Speaking of neopets I just made a whopper sale:

Nigel the Chia charges 20 NP as commission.

Summary : You had 336 NP. After 4 successful transactions, you have 396096.

I originally had bought them at 16 - 17 points range

I received a lot of feedback through my suggestions feature on the old site that there is not a lot of things to do beside pet battling. Some suggested that maybe I add a couple of minigames to my virtual pet site. Others suggested that I might allow pets to befriend other pets.

I am kind of a bit worried about my skills as a game designer. I been through about 4 tutorials or more from various users on game development. I have tried my hand at least 3 games and each has pretty much burned up in flames. I had a Sonarbat java project that I was really proud of but I ran into technical limitations due to a lack of understanding of collision detection and my character would pretty randomly fall through the floor as soon as he would jump, he sometimes get stuck in walls and glitch through certain sections of the stage. I was not able to get very far with and the time I spent on getting the music and colors on the pet wound up being totally worthless.

The second project I attempted was to try porting it to C++ instead since I know that a bit better. Unfortunately I ran into many issues with that as well. I can't even get text to appear on the screen or get anything that I had in java working in c++.

My third project that I attempted was an old text based adventure game which it almost ended but I wound up getting that even wrong.

This has kind of lead me to kind of question my abilities as a developer and I feel very discouraged because of the projects I was not even able to get working. I really like to just get at least one project that is successful even if it is just a clone of the simplest thing imaginable. I have a bit more pressure on myself because my users have told me that they want minigames added to the site itself?

How am I even suppose to do this even if I can't even code a simple text based adventure correctly?

I know this is not something I can manage on my own and I need someone who can help me to build a minigame together. Its why I need someone is a bit more of an expert at this. While I know flash games are good and all, I'd like to eventually build a c++ game in addition to the flash game so that if a user is on a mobile device they can still play games even if their phone doesn't support flash.

Will you guys help me pretty please?

On 6/20/2017 at 8:08 PM, Hare said:

Most people who have severe enough visual impairments (as in enough that they can't see certain things on basic websites) use assisitive technology like screen readers and other accessibility features that come with most devices (Apple especially). 

One of the neat features you can use is color modes. You can access them through Voiceover and other accessibility software. I've used them on my phone, computer, and CCTV (a device that helps visually impaired people read books etc.). From my experience, the color modes are pretty universal, they have the same ones accross different software and hardware (the basic grayscale, inverted, black background with yellow text, etc.). If you want to see examples, you can check out the accessibility features on any iPhone or Apple computer, Google them, or check out the color change options on this site: http://www.afb.org/myafbcolors.aspx

Here's a pic of my phone with inversion on. That's my favorite, personally. They have some other stuff like increase contrast, switch contrast, grayscale, etc. 

I can't speak for color blind people, I have a different visual impairment. Have you spoken to anyone with color blindness about it?

@Hare: I think this might be pretty helpful.

13 hours ago, Nova said:

@Boltgreywing Oh I see. I'm just afraid that unimpaired users might not stick around long enough to find out that there even is an option for different colors. You could potentially make a button that visually impaired player COULD see in order to change their color options? I know that you first and foremost want to design for a specific group of people and I think that's brilliant, but again I'm just afraid that most people would be turned off by the high-contrasting colors (psychology of colors and all that).

@Nova: That is something I am going to have to figure out. I now have accessibility to a 64 color pallete that has fifteen dark colors and 32 light colors. So that will give a bit more versatility. I am working on a new one of 125 pallete with 58 light colors. Each time I make new discoveries the default color will change to the next one up. I have css now hooked up to a mysql database which I am currently testing.

12 hours ago, Digital said:

I would agree with both @Anoua and @Pepper-Head statements on this. Instead of using item sinks a ton, I would focus on items being consumed. You can do quests where users have to turn in items, provide a system of crafting to use up items, and make items consumable. It should feel natural to the user. If you have a sink to deliver x apples somewhere, but you cannot eat the apple, whats the use?

@Digital: I do agree with what they mentioned. My plan is to make items consumable by having a type of drop down counter that starts at x and drops to 0 whether they eat it, or use it in battle. The quest idea is a nice idea but I don't know how to implement something like that yet. For example if an item is like close to 1 and the user doesn't want it anymore then they give it to an npc who gives points in exchange for it.

11 hours ago, Nova said:

I agree with @Hare; I think different color options would be the best way to go. Most of your users will probably not be colorblind, so when they log in and see a color pallet that is specifically designed for colorblind people, they may be turned off.

@Boltgreywing Is there a reason you are making the color scheme specifically for colorblind users? Have you considered making the  colors something easy on the eyes, but then having a button where the users can pick their own color schemes? I only suggest that because if you were to have such loud contrasting colors as your default, it may deter users from playing your game. That's why sites like Facebook use calming colors such as light blue; the psychology of colors makes it so that the user feels the need to stick around longer. But if you have the contrasting blues that you had, the user might think you just didn't know a lot about design (i.e. I didn't realize you were designing for colorblindness until I read more of the thread).

@Nova: The main problem is if I don't have it by default then the color blind people will not be see anything on the site at all. I am trying to plan for color blind people first and if a normal user would like to change it later than can as well. One of the big reasons I am not a fan of white against blue is its a bit too grating. Its too bright.

11 hours ago, Hare said:

There's no universal color scheme for people with color blindness or other impairment, there will always be someone who can't see it well because there's so many different ways eyesight can be impaired. If you have different color themes, that's the best way to go! I would just make ones that are varied, have the default be one that looks best for your site.

@Hare: how do the color blind use the site if it is not designed for them by default if they can't see the buttons or links?

14 hours ago, Anoua said:

Well you wouldn't take aaaaaa and turn it into 0000ff exactly, but if you want it to be a red then you would insert the aaaaaa into the color picker, any will do, but this one is the one I am referencing,

https://www.webpagefx.com/web-design/color-picker/

Once  you do that in the above color picker the hue will already be red and you won't have to change it. So you can skip that step. But you will still have to change the saturation.

You can do that in one of two ways. One way like I mentioned is to move the little white cirlce to the right, the farther you move it, the more saturated it'll be. The second way is to just put a value into the S field on the color picker, it starts at 0. But if you put 100 in, then you can get this color out #AA0000  it will be in the spot you put the aaaaaa in at the beginning.

On 6/16/2017 at 6:30 AM, Anoua said:

One thing I do is that items are consumable. So toys break (this doesn't necessarily mean one use) and food is eaten for instance. So anything that is used will be used up eventually. This may not make sense with all items in every system but both my games have this type of system in place. 

Currently I don't have much else implemented for removing items (though you can throw them away if you choose too) but was wanting to add something in where users are able to sell excess items to an in game character that will buy them for a faction of their worth. I have not planned out the full details for my system yet. But I have seen this kind of thing done where it's a straight currency conversion, so points in your case or other times where it's a special currency type which can then be used to by specific other items in game. And I have seen it done where the character will take in specific items, or any item, or any item but specific ones are worth more and the specific ones would rotate.  

@Anoua: I do like the idea of items being consumable even weapons and armor.

On 6/16/2017 at 0:29 PM, Pepper-Head said:

I think item sinks can be just as important as currency sinks, as long as it's well balanced!

It really depends on how items function for your game. Are there quests to take some items out of the game? Do most items have uses (consumption, crafting material, etc)? If items last forever, does that make them special, or do players gradually try to upgrade or use&sell? What do you think players will do with "junk items" (I think of Neopets and all the stuff given out through dailies)?

@Pepper-Head: I don't really have quest items, for my site I want every item I have to have a purpose and not have any form of junk item. Junk items as dung and rotten apples sound boring. However if they can be used as maybe a type of fertiler for a farm or such then I might consider it. The way i see my site is one who's items where out over time regardless if they are rare or common.

On 6/16/2017 at 6:09 AM, Anoua said:

If an older person person is not able to distinguish between the gray colors you pick, then they should be farther apart in brightness (the B on the HSB scale) as other people likely have trouble too. 

 

What specifically are you have trouble understanding and I can try and clarify if you want. As a quick example, you might use a white for the base (#FFFFFF), then you can use a light gray (#D1D1D1) for the headers maybe where the green is now. Then use colors around this range for the text (#242424) either black or dark grays. Then you can decide well I want my headers to be blue for instance. So go back to the color picker and put in your base color you picked (#D1D1D1), and then move the little circle to the right and move the bar to one of the blues and you can get something like this (#4D94D1) or this (#1771D1) which both have the same brightness as the initial gray, but a different hue and saturation value giving them their color. Hope that helps give you an idea of how you might do this on your own.

@Anoua: My big problem is how do I say take for example gray color aaaaaa and replace it with 0000ff? I am developing a color scheme that kind of obosoletes everything here.

What is it does is css color: <%= getColorAtribute("Header") %>

What this does is take the rubyfied version of this color and apply it to css on the fly.

On 6/18/2017 at 2:57 PM, Cybura said:

@Navy I personally believe that if you are posting to state that FF is up for sale, then it should have been left as that, rather than spreading drama... ^ ^' Like it's really the business of the FF community, for us to handle and resolve, not to be spread to people who don't even actually play FF. But, I guess you can post whatever you want, but I think the drama should have been left out.

@runeowl I am pretty sure at this point, everyone knows who I am, even on this forum, my username can be changed to "lyro" if need be, I am not at all hiding, only reason for this username is because I planned to just promote my game here and that is it... but apparently... I need to do other things as well.

I have made my reply to the forums of FF, and that will be my only reply, just as this will be my only reply to this thread.

@Digital Let me know your thoughts on how this should have been handled, like if @Navy should have just left it to speaking about the sale of FF, or if drama should have been brought to it. And also if the added info besides site sale should have been posted by the Owner instead. I am not sure how these types of things are handled here.

@Cybura: Sometimes the biggest creators of drama at times are the pet site owners themselves and not the members of the site itself. One needs to learn to be a bit more tactful as well as to try avoid using the word drama in this type of circumstances as it is a relatively overused word. If one tries to restrict content of news too much the site itself can become a type of Dictatorship. Information needs to flow whether it is good or bad but it should do so in a way that doesn't generate bias on either end. It needs to state the facts of both sides to show the opinions of each one. A news writer must have no bias regardless of the outcome.

One must be cautious to not create a mountain from a molehill. Your emotions as a petsite owner Cybura need to be kept in check otherwise you can paint your website as a bad picture. Your leader of it and need to  remain calm and gentle even when things are out of your control.

I heard of people using point sinks and point sources to balance the economy. However what should a pet site owner do if they have too many items in the economy? How does one get rid of the excess items?

I heard mentioned that item sinks are important in getting rid of an overflow of items. How often are these things used?

I am thinking of implementing an item sink that exchanges the items for points and having the items themselves decay after each use. Once the durability of an item hits 0 it is removed from the economy.

How do pet site owners handle too many items in an economy?

23 hours ago, Digital said:

I would agree with @Anoua on the tactic, using a greyscale base, you can add colors as needed to then make a scheme that feels more adjusted to your sites purpose or theme.

Keep at it!

@Digital: I don't know how to create a grayscale base.

On 6/14/2017 at 1:37 PM, Pepper-Head said:

Thank you for that! Hmm, I still think there should be more white or light gray or something, and less of a reliance on color. Do you have an example of how this layout would look like on a content page? (explore page, my pets page, etc)

@Pepper-Head: I don't really have a content page available as I haven't applied these settings yet. I'd like to avoid grey on grey as I heard from some older people that they can't distinguish between two closely related gray colors. I could add white for the text portions. I want something that doesn't shine too much.

On 6/14/2017 at 5:24 PM, Anoua said:

I agree more white would be a great place to start.

I know you are just trying to learn things with the color palette limitations, and make your site with color blind users, which is great, but I really feel like you are approaching this wrong. 

Instead you might be better off developing a site without any colors (no saturation on the HSB scale) and so black, white, and any range of gray. Use that brightness variation to make sure things are visible. Then add in colors with the same brightness level for all the grays you used. The idea would be USE the grays, and not stick to black and white. 

Here is a color picker to reference,
https://www.webpagefx.com/web-design/color-picker/

It'll list a hex code for you at the top, and it also has the color in HSB (Hue, Saturation, and Brightness) and RGB (Red, Green, Blue) which are two different color formats or modes. When you move the circle all the way to the left the B under the HSB will go to zero. You can slide it up or down, but it'll always be zero, and you can see all the pure grays along with white and black. 

But say you have the gray range you want and decide to add a color, well move it over to the right a bit and you'll notice the S under HSB going up. That's the saturation. Right now you are using way high saturated colors, but that isn't really necessary and most of the time not really a good idea for your whole page, instead you probably want some variety. Just remember if you move it up or down you are changing the brightness level. The final thing to change is the Hue. That is the bar on the right with the black arrows. And that is what gives you the 'color' such as blue, and red etc.. 

Hues can be a key element with color blind users as well, and so should be considered, but the reality is, there are many kinds of color blindness, not just one. And some, though a small amount, are completely colorblind and so will only see the difference in brightness anyway. Which is why I think you start by focusing on the brightness more and less on the hue and saturation.

 

Anyway if you are still set to sticking with your color palette, definitely add in some more white or at least a lighter less saturated color for the main content area.

@Anoua: I don't really know how to operate in this environment or how to colorize grayscale colors on the fly.

I am working on a new pet formula. I am thinking of 1:4 ratio for atk,spd,def and a 1:26 ratio for hp. I like the atk,def,and spd values.

The restriction is that only 2 fields can be the same and the other field needs to be either higher or lower than the others.

My big problem is with finding a formula for damage section.

My current damage max is 13 for level 2, level 3 it is 31, level 4 is 57 and level 5 is 91.

Can you help me find a method to find a good formula to the damage?

14 minutes ago, Navy said:

@Boltgreywing I know what bots are. What wasn't clear to me is how exactly they're your biggest problem in regards to player trust.

@Navy: Well I heard a lot of feedback that a couple of bots were ruining the rps that my users were doing as well as the chatting aspect. They told me in no discrete terms please get these things out of here.

4 hours ago, Pepper-Head said:

@Boltgreywing I know you've posted about this challenge with palettes before, but I don't remember why you're only working from 27 colors? Is it specifically for people with colorblindness?

I did some googling to try and understand it better. This article seemed to imply it was more about shades, or values, that helped to differentiate a website for folks with color deficiencies. Contrast and different visual cues help to distinguish things, and I think you've definitely got contrast going on but the red+cyan is just really really strong and a little harsh on the eyes. I like the colors you picked for the "Welcome to Duelingpets" and the sidebar! The dark blue background looks a little dated to me, but otherwise isn't bad. I'd definitely say this is a big improvement from the other ones I remember! 

I found some other websites that helped me understand better, and they have some really good tips for designing websites that are friendly to the color impaired!

[ Colorblind Website Filter (test any website by URL) ]
[ Tips for Designing Colorblind Friendly Website ]
I also found some other palettes with some more earth tones and other less vibrant colors!

I think something that can also really help is tweaking the layout a little to rely less on color, and more on defined content areas. Maybe your site could benefit from having white or something where all the main text and content goes, and leave the color to the headers, sidebar, and background?

 

Please forgive me if I'm ignorant and listed any wrong information, I'm really interested in learning and helping, if I can!

@Pepper-Head: Its for color blind users. I am starting with the most restrictive color patterns so I kind of leaned to throwing red as a difference otherwise the whole color scheme would have been mixes of just green, and cyan or blue.

On 6/10/2017 at 7:57 PM, Navy said:

@volka Thank you for sharing your experiences and models!

@Hare This is definitely already proving to be quite useful and informative. I'm really glad to see people respond and to see that others are glad for this information as well. c:

@Boltgreywing I'm not sure I fully understand what you mean by bots being your biggest problem.

@Navy: Bots are pieces of programing that are created by a human that can perform a task without human intervention. Bots come in too types of bots good ones and bad ones.

Good bots tend to be helpful to the users and don't get in the way.

A welcome bot welcomes new users to the website kind of like what digital bot does to make the users feel kind of at home.

Point bots reward users with points if they fave, watch or lama certain type of users. These exist in da. Dahub is a known bot that rewards users.

Bad bots tend to be unhelpful or harmful to the user.

Spam bots flood the sites with spams of marketing ads and other noncense. They also can target the forum if not stopped.

Porn bots flood sites with pictures of peoples private parts from rl in either art, journals or where they can get in. DA is known to have been attacked by these in the past. Sometimes they will post 100 submissions a minute.

I have yet to have had my site go down for nonpayment but i kind of came close to that. I was able to resolve it successfully but my biggest problem is I guess the bots. I believe they kind of discourage users signing up if there is too many of them. One of my biggest advantages to my site is due to the way the code base is structured is that I can take down any feature without affecting the others. This way users can use other parts of the site while repairs or updates are going on. I have a tendency to do a mass update if it is a complete overhaul but most require just one to three database additions.

I also have difficulty in marketing the game due to wording that I use as well as my lack of experience in this field. I am not a market person, more of a hobbyist. The petsite is not for me to make money but for others to have an outlet to play at.