Wayau (Alpha!)

[Earl Grey]

EDIT: We are now in very early Alpha testing. If you enjoy Art Role Playing games, we are currently testing the initial stages of our ARPG system! Please do come and join us and help us to test the game! https://wayaupets.com/

 

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I've been pouring hours into coding for a new game concept. Building every system from the ground up is a challenge but very fun!

The project is nameless at the moment (Lost Fables being my collection of projects)

There's a lot I can talk about during this experience so I guess this will serve as a 'Dev Log' of sorts to show what's done, what challenges I've run into/overcome and updates being made.

 

Concept

The idea came from being around people in ARPG communities, pet communities, Animal Crossing fans and the like. - I have always had my foot in these communities, doing coding work for some of them from time to time, I got more exposed to what they are, how they work and the amazing people in these communities that come together.

I noticed a lot of stuff while coding that really bothered me however, the way some things are done, the processes people use, the frameworks that are recycled. Most of them seem like patchwork versions of each other. I would often bring up ideas to people I was helping but they were always set on being just like the competition and not wanting to rework their entire game (understandable)

So I wrote down the things that annoyed me about the other games and began working out ways to possibly (in my opinion) improve upon them. I have some unique ideas about what I would like to see in a game which (honestly now that I look at my plans) is much more than just a pet game!

So I have been working hard on getting a lot of the base code and structure in place to build upon. From here on you will be getting details about the things I've been working on, things I have failed at, things I have reworked.

 

Pet Link

An idea I liked (but thought should be a minor feature) is sharing your pet and letting strangers help you with raising them/leveling them etc.

In my case I wanted it to be something that can be done but wouldn't affect your game performance (It's not fair on other players if someone gets everything because they have a lot of friends or good at marketing/getting clicks) so the reward is after x-amount of clicks or 'praise' then the pet gets a small amount of exp and a fame point. - Fame simply shows how popular that pet is (As it has received a bunch of clicks). (I will be using fame in other aspects of the game too).

I wanted this page to be simple and attractive while also customizable. Users choose the background colors to display.

The idea behind this is players are able to promote the site in a fun/interactive way and those who click the links are able to help the player without registering, and are now already on a website which may fuel their curiosity and encourage them to try it out too! - I think of it as a way of rewarding players for advertising the game.

 

Pet Colors/Markings

I wanted the pets of the same breed also have a little more personality. Changing the colors and adding in patterns/markings is something I think helps to bring a bit of life into the game. I notice a lot of games do this, yet they all create images (this is done by taking several layers, the base color, overlaying the markings and then exporting it to an image). This is a proven way to do it but this can lead to thousands of images on the server, taking space and costing more to host. Instead the database holds the coat color, the marking color and marking type. CSS overlays these elements right there on the screen. Want to share it with someone? No problem. Instead of exporting the image as a file on the server, I print the image to the screen and the player can save the image to their desktop! or share the link which contains the variables needed to 'draw' the image on the screen. - Easy!

Breeding

Breeding took time. A lot of time. A stupid amount of - 18 hours...

This wasn't all coding. In fact a lot of it was "How do I want to do this?" a LOT of balancing the rarity of the various colors and markings, trying different methods of coding, rebalancing, coding it more efficiently, rebalancing.

I'm not sure I'm happy with it 100% and this is something I will be revisiting consistently throughout development. It works right now and it works really well. But I am one person testing it and the balance of rarity is likely going to be crazy different at scale. Code-wise it's probably mostly where it needs to be but those numbers are tough to nail down.

Here's a psudo-breakdown of how I handle things (This does not reflect the real code or values in any way).

Spoiler

First I determine how rare something is. These are not my actual numbers but an idea of how it works

$roll = rand(1,100);
if ($roll >= 1 AND $roll <= 10) {$color = “Red”;}
if ($roll >= 11 AND $roll <= 50) {$color = “Blue”;}
if ($roll >= 51 AND $roll <= 100) {$color = “Green”;}

The above makes a roll between 1 and 100. Red has a 10% chance of being passed while Green has a 49% chance
Now each male and female gene is passed through to determine which one has the rarer gene. In this case the make has Blue where as the female has the rarer red.

$check= rand(1,$male);
if ($check<= $female { $dominantgene = $female; } else {$dominantgene = $male; }

Again, the above is not the actual code but this gives you the idea. We take the rarity of each. If the female is rare then we use her as the low number between 1-female number (10) and we roll against the higher number male (50)
if the result is between 1-10 the female gene wins, where as between 11-50 the male wins.
The female is still harder to pass with a 20% chance where as the male has a 80% chance.

 

Getting the right balance for this will be difficult and not something that I can’t truly achieve without heavy testing. That’s probably going to be refined more as the game is developed and the first users begin playing. However from my few tests, taking a rarity of 0.01% against a 59% creature, I can tell you, it’s near impossible for a user to get. However if breeding a rarity of 10% the rarer 0.01% becomes closer to 10% while the other is more like a 90%. (Sounds weird right? It may not make sense but the take away is breeding a rare with an ultra-rare makes the odds more like breeding a common with an uncommon. = easier to do.)

The Backend Stuff

Beyond pet systems the rest of the site are things I am very familiar with and have an admin panel which I've been working on for several years to manage. Logins, session handling, user management, ticket system, bug reporting etc..

All of this I could probably create an entire dev blog about so I won't go in depth with any of the non-pet related backend stuff here, even if that does take up about 90% of the project thus far ^^

Going Forward

I will update this thread as I go, detailing different systems and how I plan to approach them and what the end results might be. This will be interesting for myself to look back on in the least to see where things started and where things end up. - If you like this post and would like to see more, please let me know as it may motivate me to post more often ^^

Also if you have any questions, need help with something feel free to ask (Though I code my own stuff from scratch in PHP and procedurally so I won't be much help with framework issues).

Edited July 20, 2020 by Earl Grey
Changed to Alpha

[Earl Grey]

It's been three days since my last update. Since then I've worked on improving creature image creation and downloads.

With this new code, players can create an image of their 'dream pet' and use that as a basis to start breeding and working towards getting those colors, markings, eyes etc..

Here's and example for you to play with!

 

We have taken elements of the ARPG community and will be allowing for users to upload artwork to complete pet activities!

I have began working on the code and criteria. Here's what we have so far;

 

Players can choose their activity, upload a file, link to the pet they wish to apply it to and comment any collaboration details, links to other players/pets and anything they need to share with the admin team.

 

From there, admin will look over the submission and mark it against out criteria. We will never mark on skill level but instead the effort level put into an image. - I am not an artist by a long shot but I am able to hit the Complex shading and depth criteria (For the background at least. This example would be rejected as there are no pets in the image! - Doh!)

The admin team can approve the design or send it back for corrections. They have a handy little text box to notify the user of any changes needed.

 

Finally the user can review any changes in their submissions dashboard and claim any rewards due to them!

 

There's so much more we can do with this and I look forward to working on it further.

In order for this process to be marked as ready we now need to create a list of rewards, assign their rarity and create artwork. This is going to take some time but I have faith we can make it happen! ^^

[Earl Grey]

In addition to my prior post. I have completed the setup for the official domain and name

Going forward the game will be known as Wayau ("Way-Yu") https://wayaupets.com

(If you visit the site please be aware it is very much an unfinished game!!!)

 

New players are greeted with the Adoption Centre

 

The eggs each represent their respective pet species. Here are a few designs!

 

Above designed by @bat 

YureiiKun on DeviantArt

 

Much more development to come!

[Earl Grey]

Today saw a series of minor updates for functionality, design and a few lengthier coding sessions.

First off, while coins and gems were already set up in the database, there was no front end view of them, so now they appear in the menu

It's simple and easy to see yet it doesn't feel like it gets in the way.

 

Next I worked on inventory. Adding items into a players inventory, calculating quantity etc.

This was also reversed for selling. Now players can access their inventory for items they have gained and sell them directly back to the site (For lower than market value).

 

The Player 'Dashboard' is something I've been developing throughout. This is an area for players to manage anything attached to their account.

This little side-menu when accessed from the players nav-dropdown in the top right of the website, really helps to reduce the amount of space needed in the main navigation. These pages relate only to the player so they are tucked away nice and neatly in a player-only section of the website.

There are many plans to expand the dashboard and eventually the dashboard's home page will show player stats so that you can quickly see interesting information about your play time (Pets owned / submissions made / overall fame and reputation etc..) For now, until we start expanding more systems and determine what player data might be interesting for someone to look at, we'll leave it as is.

 

At this stage basically an entire 'ARPG' aspect of the site is ready to go. We have 3 pets types, different markings and breeding capabilities. I guess I just need to spend some time writing up guides which I have to admit, is one aspect I'm not looking forward to -sigh- Oh well. No rest for the wicked!

[Earl Grey]

Today just some light coding. I've cleaned up some of the scripts. Improved performance on several pages and had fun making a theme system for players to choose how the game looks to them!

The 'Kawaii' theme is very popular with our team

[Earl Grey]

It's been a few days since my last update. For now updates may slow down for a while, simply because there is a lot of code now implemented and a bunch of different systems interacting with each other. It's great to speed ahead with feature development, but that's how you end up with a backlog of bugs and issues. To that end a lot of this week has been identifying and squishing bugs!

We have been looking for more people to help test the site so if you're interested, head on over and register and account. All you need to do to help is play! If you come across a bug or issue then report it!

 

I have now written a script to run the store page so players can now buy items!

 

We also have two new pets since the last post

Helios and Zuros

[Earl Grey]

Oh boy!

This has been a long week. Work has been very busy but I've made sure I have at least an hour or two each day to just work on bits and pieces.

A lot of what I've done is code clean up and removing a couple of bugs. Most notably I've added in a daily reward system.

Every day you log in you can claim that day's reward. Miss a day and you will unfortunately lose out on that reward. (I even added in a little teaser to see what you missed :P)

 

The above image also shows how I imagine 'loot crates' should work. They are not obtainable by cash, but by in game events and in game currency. These are great ways to boost your chances of finding rarer items/rewards!

 

There's so much still left to do yet the site has already progressed so far!

Part of the next phase will be working a lot on game design. Refining reward types, conditions for breeding and lots more text heavy planning. This means development of features will yet again slow down somewhat as the game documentation is revisited and updated.