hello i loved drawing those petstuck trolls! they were a combination of 'dog' and 'olive baboon', if i recall, plus goat ears. i wanted them sleek and fast-looking, hence a doglike back end, but also reasonably humanoid around the front, hence baboons. i'd love to continue drawing that kind of critter, if you're looking for artists, or any other kind of critter actually. i always wanted to work for a digital pet site.
The only site I ever really got into was Neopets, and what I particularly liked about it was the feeling of creating a home. I loved when NeoHomes came out, and that was where my NP went. I also really liked playing the games (NeoQuest, Ice Cream [Mania? the one with the Chia...]). I didn't get into the wider community aspect of it much, nor did I get into the customization aspects much. I liked the stories, too, and the different environments/areas. I loved the hints at darker stories (the space station, the murder mystery with the staff). alas I have long since been locked out of my best account, because I set its birthday to make me 18 so that I could use the message system to talk to a friend, and I can't remember what I set it to so I can't reset the password. :( EDIT: they changed the system. i reset the password. i logic-ed out what i would have set the birthday to. oh. my. lord. Zaemranta baby mom's home EDIT2: LOL like half my inventory's retired. XD
@roach working with you would be a dream but I am poor and I wouldn't dream of asking for your work without payment. I fucking love those designs though, like wow. Also noted re: games and pet homes kaylotta!
Breeding and genetics are basically a must for me. As is a fair amount of color diversity. Mutations would be awesome too! One thing that might be neat to consider is going really indepth into genetics and basing them off existing genetics, like dog genetics.. things like merling, brindling, ticking, and roaning could either be considered mutations that randomly happen or just recessive genes that the owner won't even know about until the parents have a baby with those genes showing. Though I think a color wheel approach would be better than color via genetics, because being able to have a lot of color diversity can only be a good thing. One thing pet sites don't tend to do is mixed breeds of whatever creature which would be cool I think. Obviously this requires more art resources though, and could get incredibly difficult depending on limitations. But it'd be nice to, idk.. have dog species + deer species = dog-deer baby. But then dog-deer + cat = either dog-cat or deer-cat or another dog-deer. So you don't have to have dog-deer-cat art and other really diluted mixes or something, lol. But that'd be a neat touch. One interesting way of handling the problem FR has (too many babies, too many established pairs that make people have 0 need to buy new dragons) is the way Clanheart seems to be handling it.. adults have increasingly higher breeding cool downs depending on how often that they've been bred. So after a few breeding times a pair becomes impractical to keep around for certain looks, and getting babies to breed in the future is a better thing to do. You might even want to implement that after a certain amount of breedings the pair can no longer be bred, but then those parents would technically be useless unless there is a feature similar to Exalting (which I think is a good idea anyway), and you also run into having space clogged because people might be sentimental about certain pets and not want to get rid of them even if they can't do anything other than exist. So you could just have the breeding timer max out at a certain thing (like a few months) or have it so pets can be retired to an area and not drain food resources or whatever but still be interacted with in whatever ways. Another neat thing I think is something like Furrypaws did.. the first litter a pair produces has the best possible stats for the babies. If something like battling is part of the site then it'd make first time breeders and thus hatchlings more valuable as well.
also pet sites are hella my jam and it's My Big Dream (tm) to be able to somehow make a remake of those old Petz games with better genetics and more interaction. so what i'm sayin is if you are serious about all this and want somebody to just bounce ideas off the face of i am all here for it.
Man. So many cool ideas. Ffffff. I am but a poor dog and I would fucking love to have a site I can implement all these features on. I will keep track though. Also yes, I am serious. I have wanted to work on one for years. Hit me up bruh. Ideas out the wazoo and people who have better ideas of how genetics and economies work would be sweet.
ok here's a dump of all the notes and ideas i jotted down while reading this thread! i am super into a sci-fi themed petsite. space! planets! colonization! terraforming could/should be used as a money sink, because a huge problem with pet and money sites is runaway inflation. the games and fights generate way more money than site items compel players to spend, and being able to buy site money with real money fucks the economy up too. but if you were always being encouraged to dump your money into terraforming the latest planet, which paid out bonuses to everyone, that could be a good way of keeping things stable. when you wanted to encourage more terraforming, you could release ‘reports’ of ‘sightings’ or ‘expeditions’, talking about the next planet to be settled. you’d need to figure out mechanics of interplanet travel. perhaps the nicer and older the planet, the cheaper it is to visit. perhaps you need a ticket for each pet, so your pet roster is also sorted by who is on what planet? i don’t know how hard that would be to implement. travel tickets would also be a good money sink, as tickets to frontier planets would be a lot, and tickets to ‘new’ planets would be— haha— astronomical. so only the richest and most dedicated players, each time, would be able to join the first colonizing push, and their pets would gain a really significant stat boost. but eventually the first colonists would have the planet terraformed enough— through fighting local monsters and cash dumping— that more and more players could join in. perhaps terraforming could involve a few minigames, like— reparing robots and ships, mining, irrigation, seeding. blaster games, point-and-click, memory games. these could pay out in pet stats and/or push the terraforming a little further a little faster if you want to help but don’t have the cash. non-tradable, non-sellable service awards could be cool too, so someone can show off that they’re a robot-fixing champion, and it’s not just fighters that get cool trophies and perks. hm, maybe the pets would be more— companions, working dogs. they need to be taken care of by players, but the players need the pets to help them settle planets. cultivated planets result in higher clutch rates but low-stat pets? while pets get sick/injured (and unable to breed until healthy) more on rough planets but level up faster new pet-pets and items should obviously be released for each planet. perhaps even new mutations? this would give people a good reason to dump all their cash in order to bring a breeding pair over to a new planet. they could have a shot at making the money back in selling first-generation rare-type hatchlings. one of the big things in FR i remember was that the price went down fast on hatchlings of new breeds and patterns as the market got glutted. might as well make that into a game mechanic. inevitable retirement, where the pet can no longer breed or fight, and can only carry cosmetic items and toys. won fights contribute a little stress, lost fights contribute more, clutches contribute a lot. probably the environment of a planet contributes to stress too. so after enough stress the pet’s got to be retired. perhaps the further into retirement ‘age’, the more likely it is that a clutch or fight will kill it. so you CAN run your pets into the ground, if you’re into that. but dead pets become a simple grave marker. retired pets are still there and can be painted and dressed up and given toys. perhaps a certain amount of retired pets gives hatchlings a boost. perhaps it shortens their maturation time. also i think you should also be able to ‘release’ pets, perhaps by sending ‘free’ on an eden-like homeworld planet. neopet’s overcrowded adoption/pound system was garbage.
Those are all excellent mechanics and I love them. Also yeah neopets had a garbage way of dealing with unwanted pets. I like that idea re: running pets into the ground. Fffff. Man roach is killing it. Terraforming and travel tickets is an excellent idea for money sinks. I hate how bad inflation nd other stuff got on other sites. Just. Ah! So many ideas you guys wow
Also reminds me of a thing my boyfriend said re: stats He suggested stats be something like Srength/Speed Stamina/Constitution/Pace Dexterity/Intelligence/Perception Srength, Speed, and Constitution are good for fights. Stamina, Constitution, Pace, and Perception are good exploring traits. Dexterity, Intelligence, and Perception are good for minigames. /drops and goes back to finishing lunch and thinking
Pet-pets/familiars should be a must, I think. They add a more collectable element which can be fun. It'd be nice if they did change a bit also though, like once they hit a certain point or two from daily interaction they level up/rank up/mutate and get new art and a new name or something. Though I'd say that since some people would get attached to an earlier look there should either be a way to opt out of the pets mutating/leveling/ranking up, whether it's just a box in the settings somewhere or an item that would have to be bought/crafted (which might make for an okay currency sink.) I do think that things killing off pets wouldn't be fun for many people and should be avoided. Though a point where a pet needs to be retired is a good end goal, I think. The important thing with that though is that the retired pets should be easily accessed through your clan/tribe/whatever it ends up being called pages somewhere, and that those pets can still be interacted with, even if it's a minimal amount of interaction (like they can be dressed up and given toys/familiars). I think a feature like FR's ability to level and then Exalt dragons is a good thing to have to to reduce pet numbers, and shouldn't be too hard to think of a way to work into the theme of the site. If it's a spacey-planetary exploration theme it could be as simple as saying you're sending that pet off to work for whatever leaders or fight in the military or whatever the lore ends up being. Things like terraforming and even house building/space ship building would make pretty good money sinks. Also something like lair expansion would be good too, basically just having to pay site-currency in order to be able to have more pets at a time, and maybe also having to pay site-currency in order to have more clutches at a time. Both of those should be capped at a certain point though. Also I think that having a certain amount of games available at launch is fairly important. Like with FR there just hits a point really quickly where doing the games for treasure feels like a massive chore and spoon drain because only 1 or 2 games are even worth doing, and there aren't even that many games to begin with. I think the games in general giving about equal reward is good, or even just having it so each game is capped at a certain amount of plays and you can only get site-currency from x amount of games per day might work better than somebody playing the same game for an hour and a half every day to get the max treasure from games and just burning out on playing the games all together.
* terraformingggg * my soul for robot-fixing minigames ilu roach (and your petstuck critters are incredibly adorable) * and for spaceship customization, even if only cosmetical * and some sort of craft system maybe? being able to make stuff from other stuff I know genetics (all self-taught, I'm sure you can find someone better, but it's something) and am very much into space and robots and evolution and conceptualizing alien lifeforms, and also nature-drawing so I can help with drawing backgrounds and conception art of planets and the nature and spaceships and, well, stuff, if you wish?
I havn't read the other replies yet so sorry if I am just repeating things but- I wonder how much work it would be do do some kind of toggled "hard mode" where hard mode allowed the pets to die, and not-hard mode just did the neopets thing and made them "dying" of hunger until you feed hem next. So the people who want more realistic play can use that mode. Or even people who want to use that mode, but are going on vacation or something and don't want them to die before they get back. edited to add that I am a biology major and took some art classes so I might be able to help with pet designs that make sense lol. I can also do some writing if you need help with that. Still learning programming stuff so I won't be able to help with that for awhile :P
I agree with the game thing. I had issues as well with FR's games because my hands have issues and I coukdnt play as well. So having options is a must in my opinion. And pretty much I will maybe look for some concept/team members once I get some concept sketches done later today. I know someone suggested a way to "pause" your game so your pets stats don't change while you are gone away from the computer or something. Because guilting players kinda sucks and is annoying.
If pets being able to die was just a staple of the site it'd be incredibly important to have a feature like a kennel or a hotel or whatever you'd want to call it. Which could also be another potential currency sink, though having a free option that just does the minimum of now-your-pets-won't-die would be important. Though you could add a currency sink feature to it like Neopets' Pet Hotel had, where paying for better room and services made pets happier. It could be something that gives pets a stat boost or something.
Yeah! I'm really not into killing them off. Retiring them though works. -yells about how medical science can keep your pet alive for a very long time-
I like the idea of having a free modes you can switch back and forth between, but something you pay for giving you some kind of boost. Maybe you can build up points like frequent flyer miles when you use the hotels/kennels/whatever and those can be redeemed in a special item store.
Not a bad idea. I also know I hate microtransactions, but to keep the site running I know it would need to make some money. Ideas I had for real monies items are "custom pets you pick the genes on", "breed your retired pet one time", and idk stat boosters or special items of some kind
subeta has a couple of things I liked and thought worked well: Premium membership [x] month membership premium tokens you can sell seasonal items that come out/change every month
Yeah microtransactions are tricky. I kind of like FR's model of being able to sell the real money currency for site-currency, I think that'd be nice to keep around. Though I would make it so that the real money currency isn't earned through ways other than buying it.. so no getting it daily just for logging in every day or something. I suppose you could do it in the way a lot of phone apps do it, like 'watch this ad video and you get 1 premium currency!' sort of deal since you would get money from the ad view. But that might turn people away, in which case I think it's better to just only have the premium currency available from purchasing it. But being able to buy it with site currency from other players would give people an incentive to buy the premium currency if they can in order to trade it off for site currency, and then people who don't have a lot of spending money or minors who don't have the ability to buy this kind of stuff won't be entirely locked out of premium currency only options. Generally what you see for premium currency options are just exclusive items, clothing, boosts, familiars, breeds of pet, genetics, and familiars. Genetics have the effect of like.. they sort of become irrelevant to buy after a point because you can just buy other peoples hatchlings. The main appeal of them on FR is getting the genes when they are new to make money off the hatchlings, and of course if you have a pet of the right colors and want to regene them. So I think it might be better to actually avoid premium currency only genetics because they would end up not that appealing to buy.. but your idea of 'you can buy a pet and customize it to your preferences' is a good one that's sort of related to that I think and would likely never get old or worthless to people. I think a lot of people would pay to be able to do an entirely custom pet, I mean even on a site like FR that has a ton of players it can be pretty hard to find your 'dream' dragon with the right color and right genetics and right eye color, and if the game stressed that younger pets are better to breed and breed more frequently a brand new hatchling in the perfect colors you want would be really sought after. It should be a more expensive option though maybe.
