Nate

I COMPLETELY 100% agree with you. I'm 28, and grew up with all those cartoons you listed. The rubbish that my kids watch on cartoons these days are terrible! There is no depth, or story, or even "Teaching morals" in them anymore. It seems they are simply designed to be "how can we zombify our viewers to watch it with a blank expression". On a side note: Looking back though, as a Child I always saw Tom as the bad guy.. As an adult though watching them back, OMG, Jerry is the instigator in pretty much all the episodes. Tom FTW.

I think Cron jobs are fab provided they are utilised correctly. For example with NPC Shops: A good way to save on resources would be to utilise the users pageview to restock the shop. You could add a column for each NPC shop with a timestamp of when a shop should restock next. When loading the shop title etc check this value to see if this timestamp has passed. If it has, perform a restock of that particular shop and then update that timestamp for the next time the shop should update. The benefit of this is that if there is a shop that gets visited only a few times a day, it wont be using resources every x minutes when the cron would run. It also means no additional resources when checking, because when a user views the shop, you will be retrieving the NPC Shop title name anyway, so it wouldnt be any additional drain on the system to get the timestamp too You could even then use that timestamp to show the user: "Next Restock:" - "in 5 minutes", "in 3 minutes" "in less than 1 minute!"

A great review of @PaulSonny . I can say that from my interaction with him on TGL and on Discord, he seems like a very genuine and honest person, and I would certainly consider hiring him in the future if/when my project gets big enough

I've tried free and small/cheaper hosts before, however I actually got screwed over by one of them (Host Addon).. They blocked me out of my account for no reason, continued to try to take payment (i blocked it after no support responses), and to this day, 7 or so years later.. I'm STILL receiving my "monthly affiliates report" email from them. Auto-spam. The BEST host i have ever used in HostGator. I'm been with them for like 6-7 years and they have always helped me with issues etc (like the time I tried to restore my local database onto their server and ended up removing my own admin permissions within phpmyadmin on their cpanel console.. wtf haha). Also some people do have bad experiences with them, i gotta say, ive never had a bad experience. I currently pay about £9 a month for theirn "Baby Plan". It has unlimited bandwidth, 5TB of Storage/Nodes, unlimited emails/database accounts, and unlimited addon domains. I'm currently hosting around 16 websites on there with no problems. Edit: Full disclosure: I also purchase ALL my domains through 123-reg.co.uk and point them at hostgator nameservers.

There are so many things I would do if i (knew how/had the time) to make apps, but ultimately there is only 24 hours in the day There are games out there which can teach you coding, but they always oversimple or too complicated - there is a gap between the 2 which no website/app has managed to fulfill. As for Social Media, I like smaller startups that compete with the "big names". The best example I can give is VidMe (My Link), which is currently prime competitor to YouTube. Ultimately it does stand a chance to actually compete with it. I dont think anything will ever replace Facebook or Twitter. People have tried making similar platforms to compete with them, but users simply dont seem eager too migrate.. Perhaps there is too many social media platforms out there.. I dont even understand Instagram or Pintrest (an i have tried them intensely too) Edit: I just recently started using LinkedIn too, which I'm actually finding beneficial to my career (i didnt think it was possible haha)

I always liked being able to call my pet what I like, but then you lose a sense of uniqueness. IMO, the biggest issue with forcing unique pet names is that you end up with names like "B34stsl4y3r_13_09_1999". What do you prefer? Unique names - you can "snag" that amazing pet name? Or non-unique - you can have the same as someone else, but lose some of your pets uniqueness?

Yep , there are quite a few people here from vpl. Welcome :-)

Welcome! Be sure to create an Adoptable and add your game to the games list :-)

Welcome @MisticPets. Be sure to add your game to the games list (if you haven't already by the time you read this :-) )

Welcome! You have joined a great Community!

Great news! Like @PaulSonny suggested, we should try and get the list more populated :-)

Thanks @Hare for the insight. I'll definitely check out those links. Hopefully it will inspire me ???

This is great news. Thanks for the update! ?? Edit: is it broken? The widget doesn't seem to be updating..

Haha yep! OR even if you try to join a super popular site and the first 5 usernames you think of is taken

Haha thanks, I appreciate the support I'm using @Digital's link to come up with random words haha

Good idea! Thanks for the suggestion, I've noted it down I think i would like to try and get something in the name that implies "there is a story in this". Ideas I've had before are things like "A Beast Story", "My Fable", "A Tale of Time", "Lifetime Stories" but one of 2 things happens: Either I'm not "OMG YES" about it, or the www.com is taken (EG, i really like "My Fable" but it is owned by a domain hosting company argh)

I'm in too!

I cant stand sushi, sorry! As for my cravings, I've been addicted to this baby for many years: Although my family and friends are forcing me to cut down due to it affecting my health

Pop Quiz: I prefer dates in DD/MM/YYYY... -------------------- Yep, UK here From a town called Redditch (Near Birmingham).

.. watching his best friend Juliet get arrested for a crime she did not commit. Perhaps ..

^ This wins the debate.

Haha yep! It's been an on-and-off thing where sometimes I might not do anything at all for a month or 2, and then I'll spend like an entire week working on the details of it, then another month of not even thinking about it, then 3 days of changing my original specs etc. It was the cycle for a long time lol. I just never committed to actually coding it until 2015. Game Concept Firstly, assume ALL the "standard" virtual pet site features (inbox, explore, boards, trading, shops etc). The following are some of the differences to the "norm": - "Pets" are referred to as "Beasts" and can be captured via Minigames (Think 'Viva Pinata' Romance Dance) - Every beast has 2 elements of the 5 available (Fire, Water, Earth, Mech and Undead). Each beast's primary element cannot change, however it's secondary one can be changed by the user (ie, you may capture a Fire/Water beast and change it to a Fire/Undead). The typing makes a major difference in battling with an obvious 5-way Rock->Paper->Scissors format. A beasts primary and secondary type make a dramatic difference to the appearance of the beast. (Essentially it is going to be a LARGE art cost haha!) - Single-Page-Application - The virtual pet site loads all pages using Ajax. - HTML5 Games are single and (real time) multiplayer - upto 8 players. - Clans actually have a purpose -- level up and gain rewards together with clan-specific functionality (quests, games, wars) - "Party Chat". Friends/Party are integrated into the sidebar, so you can create/join a group of friends and text-chat to each other while navigating round the site without leaving your page. And the Core Unique Selling Point which I'm currently developing: - Storyteller There is an NPC the user can visit where they can hand her stories and she will "read them". What actually happens is that the stories are set in the past in particular times (10 years ago, 250 years ago, 1,000 years ago etc etc) and whenever a user activates one of the stories with her, they are essentially completing a plot/storyline. Their entire "Explore" area changes to reflect the current time period they are in. Almost like you have travelled back in time until you complete that story. I've configured the explore area so that it will show the user all the features within the explore area, that are relevant to their particular story. I plan to also set it so that all the NPCs at each of the features are different depending on the time period too.. although it is going to be very costly for me once I find an Artist to do it. The best example, would be.. in the world when you visit it today ("Present Day"), you will see that there is an island far off to the west of the world, scorched and covered in black and filth, and that is where the Undead Society live. You will also note that there is a Spire in the center of the world where the Dragon/Fire society live. If you read a story that takes you back, say 1,000 years and visit it ("1,000 years ago"), you would see that the island is lush greenland and the dragons/fire society is based around the island. Initially the user would be confused, however after visiting more different time periods, they will visit "400 years ago" and participate in "The Great Fire War" which ravaged the island, and ultimately forced the dragons to find another place to live. The user plays an active part in defeating the bad guys and relocating the dragons to the spire.. and suddenly the present day world makes a little more sense to the user. In addition to this, the user might visit that island "250 years ago", and there might be one or 2 Undead NPCs based there with no other functionality other than to declare the island looks like it might be a good place to setup camp.. Then "150 years ago", there is a small village of people with Undead beasts.. which then explains why in "Present Day" there is a full on Undead encampment. The brilliance of this system, is that we can ultimately continue to add historical stories to the world. We can also then enable it so that only certain items are available in certain time periods to bring back to the present. Ultimately I envisage some sort of "collectable" feature where you have to collect one of every portrait of all ruling Kings/Queens over the last 1,000 years or more, or perhaps Beasts that are only available to capture in certain time periods and other "give people a reason to go back in time" things like that. I guess the keyword more than anything is Storytelling. Overall, my main caveats are: - It must be as shorter if possible.. I dont like long names like "Stories of the Unwanted Kingdom of Delaware" - It must be real words (and not include "-pets") - It must have the .com available (<< this is the hardest part for things i have liked previously). Great suggestion thanks, I'll definitely check that out. Looks lik there could be some really good ideas here! Haha yeah, I'm constantly thinking of new things i would like to add to it, however im still currently focused on getting the core things coded. I'm happy to release without everything there as long as there is a base game to start with on release. I agree with the name - you want something that someone can relate to or understand what the game is about without sounding to generic. I'm hoping to build up a list of things i like and narrow it down from there, but at the moment im really not sure where to start haha.

No problem, and nice update

One thing i know was quite popular on VPL, was a thread regarding the legalities of owning a virtual pet site. There are many things you need to be aware of when doing it.

Welcome to TGL!