Pet site vs Pet world

[Boltgreywing]

What is the difference between calling a website a pet site vs a pet world?

Is there any really major distinction between the two or is it just a naming difference?

[Mobotropolis]

In my eyes, nothing. 

A Pet Site is a website who's main objective is capturing/creating/breeding monsters. You usually have to do some matter of busy-work to earn money and items to take care of your acquired pets. It could be farming dailies. It could be playing mini-games. It could be quests or special events. All designed to get you coming back to the site and putting it into your routine. 

I noticed about ... 10 years ago that a certain Pet Site began to refer to itself as more of a Virtual World than a Pet Site. That may be because it was technically part of a larger's company suite of gaming sites, and on a corporate level they referred to all of the games as Virtual Worlds. Yet that type of terminology spread, and games seemed to shift towards attempting to provide an immersive experience for its players. 

Again, in my eyes, it's the same thing. 

The vast majority of games out there today technically qualify as being a Virtual World. They explain the circumstances of their world to the players to help them understand why they need to do the things they need to do to progress in the game. Even games that don't technically have a map for you to explore tend to have story and lore. It helps you understand the creator's artistic vision. It also gives hopefully entertaining reason for you to do busy-work for hours. 

[Aminirus]

To me there's not much of a difference in terms of definition, but there could be potential differences in the choice of words and how they sound. 

Pet Site to me is pretty generic and I probably wouldn't expect much from it other than the basic aspects of a pet based game. When I read Pet World, that intrigues me a bit more as it sounds like they could potentially have lots of other options that go beyond just breeding and collection, and could maybe have more in depth and exciting material. 

Not everyone would think this way, but it's what comes to my mind when I read the two. I'd be more inclined to check out a game that said Pet World or Virtual World rather than one that just says Pet Site

[Angel]

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.

Edited August 9, 2018 by Angel

[Boltgreywing]

On 8/9/2018 at 6:01 AM, Mobotropolis said:

In my eyes, nothing. 

A Pet Site is a website who's main objective is capturing/creating/breeding monsters. You usually have to do some matter of busy-work to earn money and items to take care of your acquired pets. It could be farming dailies. It could be playing mini-games. It could be quests or special events. All designed to get you coming back to the site and putting it into your routine. 

I noticed about ... 10 years ago that a certain Pet Site began to refer to itself as more of a Virtual World than a Pet Site. That may be because it was technically part of a larger's company suite of gaming sites, and on a corporate level they referred to all of the games as Virtual Worlds. Yet that type of terminology spread, and games seemed to shift towards attempting to provide an immersive experience for its players. 

Again, in my eyes, it's the same thing. 

The vast majority of games out there today technically qualify as being a Virtual World. They explain the circumstances of their world to the players to help them understand why they need to do the things they need to do to progress in the game. Even games that don't technically have a map for you to explore tend to have story and lore. It helps you understand the creator's artistic vision. It also gives hopefully entertaining reason for you to do busy-work for hours. 

@Mobotropolis: That is a pretty interesting description that could definitely open up a lot of doors with a virtual world.

On 8/9/2018 at 8:56 AM, Aminirus said:

To me there's not much of a difference in terms of definition, but there could be potential differences in the choice of words and how they sound. 

Pet Site to me is pretty generic and I probably wouldn't expect much from it other than the basic aspects of a pet based game. When I read Pet World, that intrigues me a bit more as it sounds like they could potentially have lots of other options that go beyond just breeding and collection, and could maybe have more in depth and exciting material. 

Not everyone would think this way, but it's what comes to my mind when I read the two. I'd be more inclined to check out a game that said Pet World or Virtual World rather than one that just says Pet Site

@Aminirus: The more I look at my site the more it doesn't seem to fit the traditional role of a pet site.

On 8/9/2018 at 10:54 AM, Angel said:

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.

@Angel: Who knows maybe my site might be the first to qualify as a pet world. Cause the way I am thinking of designing the site is along the lines of complete user content. Basically the user will be creating everything from items, pets, npcs and maybe several other things. I think my site will probably fit the pet world description.

[Angel]

1 hour ago, Boltgreywing said:

Cause the way I am thinking of designing the site is along the lines of complete user content. Basically the user will be creating everything from items, pets, npcs and maybe several other things. I think my site will probably fit the pet world description.

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.

Edited August 11, 2018 by Angel

[Mobotropolis]

On 8/10/2018 at 8:58 PM, Boltgreywing said:

@Mobotropolis: That is a pretty interesting description that could definitely open up a lot of doors with a virtual world.

@Aminirus: The more I look at my site the more it doesn't seem to fit the traditional role of a pet site.

@Angel: Who knows maybe my site might be the first to qualify as a pet world. Cause the way I am thinking of designing the site is along the lines of complete user content. Basically the user will be creating everything from items, pets, npcs and maybe several other things. I think my site will probably fit the pet world description.

Yeah. I took a look around your site when I did my audit in May and remember user-submitted content being the concept. 

In fact, it was one of the few websites I distinctively remember during the audit because it had an unusual concept.

Think that's a vital first step. 

Since I already decided I'm not going to do anything with this idea let me share a bit with you. 

During one of my Idea Dump/Jams I started comping something called MyVirtualWurld. 

It combines the the Virtual World concept with a Pet and God Game. 85% of the content (roughly) is User Generated.

It would be up to the staff to: 

• Provide Starter-Content so users understand how the mechanics work
• Provide an over-arching world that explains how something like this exist
• Provide the Hosting and Functionality so people can manage their own games, called Wurlds. 

Users are thrust into a Universe and assume the rule of a young God or Goddess who as a show of their power by their God-Parents must shape a healthy world full of little creatures and protect them from harm. They create a little Ant-Farm-like Universe and within one of the titular Wurlds where most of the action in the game will be happening. 

Within your Wurld everything; from the name of your Wurld to the creatures that live within it, would have been created by you -- or bought from the Marketplace which I'll get to in a minute. You name your Wurld and create/upload an Image Map that has your various areas. Or you can just have a list/series of links for a simple version. 

After that you create your creatures. 

You can either upload your images or buy artwork from the Marketplace. Then, you name them and can set the game to generate pretty much any stat, called attributes, at random upon the creature's creation. You decide how many stages the creature has. You decide whether it can be created by a link, discovered in an area, or unlocked through a quest. I actually think the majority of the programming work would be in here; allowing creators to only be limited by their imagination. 

Then there are the other things you can create: Items, Shops, Dailies, and Quests. You touch not a line of code with any of them but rather go through menus that link up with each other and allow you to get something working in a couple of clicks. 

I think the aim behind this idea was less about making a super special and unique game and more about the social aspect of creating. I wanted to create a social network-like community of creators who either played each others games or took part in the other major part of this game; the Marketplace where you could sell your work or buy the work of others. That (and selling add ons to the Wurlds) was going to be how the game generated money. You sell extra Wurld and Pet Slots and whatnot. You get a cut of whatever's sold in the Marketplace. Sellers can choose to either sell one-off rights (meaning if someone buys it no one else can) or they can sell unlimited rights (multiple people can buy an artwork). 

I didn't abandon the idea because it wouldn't work. 

On contraire; I feared that it would work too well. 

The question I couldn't easily solve for was how I was going to moderate people loading their own pets and items onto the servers and into the marketplace. Free-Upload will be Chaos when you get up there in User-Count, but getting everyone's stuff up and approved at a reasonable pace would require around-the-clock staffing. 

 

[Boltgreywing]

On 8/10/2018 at 7:47 PM, Angel said:

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.

@Angel: I don't plan on making it a chicken smoothie type site. Users will be able to take control of just forums and groups not individual galleries and the like. I don't think my site does the wysiwg approach. I probably can't call it a pet site but I can't call it a world either. Its just different.

On 8/13/2018 at 7:56 AM, Mobotropolis said:

Yeah. I took a look around your site when I did my audit in May and remember user-submitted content being the concept. 

In fact, it was one of the few websites I distinctively remember during the audit because it had an unusual concept.

Think that's a vital first step. 

Since I already decided I'm not going to do anything with this idea let me share a bit with you. 

During one of my Idea Dump/Jams I started comping something called MyVirtualWurld. 

It combines the the Virtual World concept with a Pet and God Game. 85% of the content (roughly) is User Generated.

It would be up to the staff to: 

• Provide Starter-Content so users understand how the mechanics work
• Provide an over-arching world that explains how something like this exist
• Provide the Hosting and Functionality so people can manage their own games, called Wurlds. 

Users are thrust into a Universe and assume the rule of a young God or Goddess who as a show of their power by their God-Parents must shape a healthy world full of little creatures and protect them from harm. They create a little Ant-Farm-like Universe and within one of the titular Wurlds where most of the action in the game will be happening. 

Within your Wurld everything; from the name of your Wurld to the creatures that live within it, would have been created by you -- or bought from the Marketplace which I'll get to in a minute. You name your Wurld and create/upload an Image Map that has your various areas. Or you can just have a list/series of links for a simple version. 

After that you create your creatures. 

You can either upload your images or buy artwork from the Marketplace. Then, you name them and can set the game to generate pretty much any stat, called attributes, at random upon the creature's creation. You decide how many stages the creature has. You decide whether it can be created by a link, discovered in an area, or unlocked through a quest. I actually think the majority of the programming work would be in here; allowing creators to only be limited by their imagination. 

Then there are the other things you can create: Items, Shops, Dailies, and Quests. You touch not a line of code with any of them but rather go through menus that link up with each other and allow you to get something working in a couple of clicks. 

I think the aim behind this idea was less about making a super special and unique game and more about the social aspect of creating. I wanted to create a social network-like community of creators who either played each others games or took part in the other major part of this game; the Marketplace where you could sell your work or buy the work of others. That (and selling add ons to the Wurlds) was going to be how the game generated money. You sell extra Wurld and Pet Slots and whatnot. You get a cut of whatever's sold in the Marketplace. Sellers can choose to either sell one-off rights (meaning if someone buys it no one else can) or they can sell unlimited rights (multiple people can buy an artwork). 

I didn't abandon the idea because it wouldn't work. 

On contraire; I feared that it would work too well. 

The question I couldn't easily solve for was how I was going to moderate people loading their own pets and items onto the servers and into the marketplace. Free-Upload will be Chaos when you get up there in User-Count, but getting everyone's stuff up and approved at a reasonable pace would require around-the-clock staffing. 

 

@Mobotropolis: I think I can manage the upload traffic but will probably have to hire additional staff as it gets bigger but I think it will be worth the expense.