Create your own ideal virtual petsite!

[sunandshadow]

I wouldn't do a "pet site" per se. I'd want to do either a single player game like Plant Tycoon, or a 3D mmo with tactical combat using pets as units, and breeding them to get new unique units. See my blogs for more full descriptions of the types of pet games I'd love to help design.

[UlyssesBlue]

It's cool to see so many people liking my butterfly sim game idea.
If anyone decides to put something together do get in touch with me. It would be awesome to see it happen.

[sunandshadow]

It's cool to see so many people liking my butterfly sim game idea.
If anyone decides to put something together do get in touch with me. It would be awesome to see it happen.

I don't have the knowledge or resources to do some of the necessary stuff. I could theoretically write a design document and make the art (which would be about $500 worth of art and take all my free time for 2-3 months, not something I'd jump into lightly). But I'm not a programmer, nor do I have any interest in messing around with webhosting, and I wouldn't start investing effort in the art unless I had a guarantee that someone else was going to do the rest of it.

[soulmirror]

Another thing: Butterflies would be relatively easy to do in 3d. They're just wings so you just need one model and a bunch of different textures for the wing colors. Then you could see them fluttering around your little house and stuff. You could do the whole game interface in a mixture of 2 and 3d (isometric pixel houses and scenes, 3d butterflies).

I'd help program, but I have a lot to work on right now.

[sunandshadow]

Another thing: Butterflies would be relatively easy to do in 3d. They're just wings so you just need one model and a bunch of different textures for the wing colors. Then you could see them fluttering around your little house and stuff. You could do the whole game interface in a mixture of 2 and 3d (isometric pixel houses and scenes, 3d butterflies).

I'd help program, but I have a lot to work on right now.

Well, there are different wing shapes, although I've sometimes seen a model where there is just one big polygon for the wing and part of the texture is clear where the wing doesn't extend to the edge of the poly. It would be relatively easy to make a butterfly flap in 2D, but if you wanted more than one perspective (flying left to right and right to left is a common default) you'd have to duplicate all the work for each additional perspective (flying toward the viewer, flying away from the viewer, flying diagonally are the other possibilities.)

[sunandshadow]

Hmm, maybe we should use the butterfly idea as a tutorial of how to make a simple pet game? That could potentially be helpful to the whole community.

Whether as a tutorial or a private project, I made a mockup of the two most different shapes of butterfly/moth I could find (blue is one, red is one), showing how both would fit on a standard body (green) in a 200x200 sprite in two different perspectives.

[soulmirror]

That looks cool. Actually, if you are doing the 3d in Flash (or html 5), you don't actually need a 3d model, you just make the wings into 3d layers (how to do this depends on your html5 javascript library's concept of a 3d layer, but usually you just set positions, rotations and pivot points) That means you can have any wing shape and any body shape. You could even have butterflies with two different wings, if you want. (Since you're already probably breeding different species with each other, why go for realism ) You could even have weird shapes, like a devil wing butterfly, or a flying heart or star-shaped butterfly, that could never exist or fly in real life.

[Alkali Regnant]

But I'm not a programmer, nor do I have any interest in messing around with webhosting, and I wouldn't start investing effort in the art unless I had a guarantee that someone else was going to do the rest of it.

Hmm, maybe we should use the butterfly idea as a tutorial of how to make a simple pet game? That could potentially be helpful to the whole community.

I've actually just contacted @ as I want a small side project to work on and this would be perfect as I'm wanting to try out a breeding script. So I'm up for working on most/all of the programming (I can reuse a few scripts I have from other sites, so that should make things go faster). It may be slow going progress wise as Ekos is my main focus, but when I get stuck on one thing it helps to move to something completely different.

I can take notes of the step-by-step development process and coding. It'll be long even for a little site, but I'd love to offer something like that to the community!

[sunandshadow]

I've actually just contacted @ as I want a small side project to work on and this would be perfect as I'm wanting to try out a breeding script. So I'm up for working on most/all of the programming (I can reuse a few scripts I have from other sites, so that should make things go faster). It may be slow going progress wise as Ekos is my main focus, but when I get stuck on one thing it helps to move to something completely different.

I can take notes of the step-by-step development process and coding. It'll be long even for a little site, but I'd love to offer something like that to the community!

Cool As far as genetics go, for appearance I was thinking wing shape is one gene or group of genes, wing pattern is another, and the rest are all colors (body, wing main, wing accent, pattern main, and pattern accent. Unless we want to have varying antennae, and colors for them. I dunno if you wanted to have any genes or other individual butterfly data not related to appearance, that would depend on the gameplay.

[sunandshadow]

That looks cool. Actually, if you are doing the 3d in Flash (or html 5), you don't actually need a 3d model, you just make the wings into 3d layers (how to do this depends on your html5 javascript library's concept of a 3d layer, but usually you just set positions, rotations and pivot points) That means you can have any wing shape and any body shape. You could even have butterflies with two different wings, if you want. (Since you're already probably breeding different species with each other, why go for realism ) You could even have weird shapes, like a devil wing butterfly, or a flying heart or star-shaped butterfly, that could never exist or fly in real life.

Glad you like it and you're right, that's convenient - the layer or group of layers that makes up a wing could be flexibly used as either a 3D object or a 2D sprite.