What inspired you to create your own pet game?

[cpvr]

What inspired you to create your own pet game? Were you inspired based upon the success of the wide variety of virtual pet sites that are currently out there or did Pokémon and/or digimon inspire you to create your own pet site?

 

[Misomie]

A combo of Neopets and Pokemon. Some of the pets were from when I was a kid and made up a thing called Horse Land. Pretty sure this was vaguely inspired from My Little Pony but was an art thing my siblings and I would spend hours on. It later evolved into Dangermon and included evolutions and Pokemon crossovers. Then more time went on and it turned into ShadowOfDawn and got a decently active, but small, community (this one actually was online for awhile).

As it is now it has still retained the original Pokemon and Neopets inspiration but now also includes inspiration from Persona and Fire Emblem as well as genetics and the beauty of nature. I've also pulled inspiration from many indie games and their aesthetic/playstyle.

I'm currently working on making everything mesh nicely but I think I found my niche fit.

 

[PetsiteGamer]

Growing up with Pokémon yellow and so on, then Neopets and others later, started with trying to make an rpg game 15 years ago, then onto petsites.

 

[cpvr]

A combo of Neopets and Pokemon. Some of the pets were from when I was a kid and made up a thing called Horse Land. Pretty sure this was vaguely inspired from My Little Pony but was an art thing my siblings and I would spend hours on. It later evolved into Dangermon and included evolutions and Pokemon crossovers. Then more time went on and it turned into ShadowOfDawn and got a decently active, but small, community (this one actually was online for awhile).

As it is now it has still retained the original Pokemon and Neopets inspiration but now also includes inspiration from Persona and Fire Emblem as well as genetics and the beauty of nature. I've also pulled inspiration from many indie games and their aesthetic/playstyle.

I'm currently working on making everything mesh nicely but I think I found my niche fit.

Thank you for posting your story! What made you decide to mesh pokemon and Neopets features? How many members did ShadowofDawn have? How far along are you with the development of your game?

Growing up with Pokémon yellow and so on, then Neopets and others later, started with trying to make an rpg game 15 years ago, then onto petsites.

Nice! Whatever happened to your rpg game?

 

[PetsiteGamer]

Nice! Whatever happened to your rpg game?

Some of the code and art made, not as far a playable site, someone randomly made an offer and I sold what I had. It was far lower than it was worth, but I was a kid and didn't know better.

 

[cpvr]

Some of the code and art made, not as far a playable site, someone randomly made an offer and I sold what I had. It was far lower than it was worth, but I was a kid and didn't know better.

I totally understand! If you don’t mind me asking, how much did you end up selling your rpg game for? 🤔

 

[oakhearted]

Games like Chicken Smoothie, Wajas, Mweor, Flight Rising etc etc and the urge to wanting to make a unique game!

 

[Boltgreywing]

The biggest contributors would have to be Amazing Island where you can create your own monsters, and Neopets. A couple other games would have to be Mobile Beast Telefang and Pokemon, both games are pretty cool. Telefang's battle mechanic is different than Pokemon in that your mons always switch every now and then without you telling them to. This makes it feel like the mons have their own set of intelligence. Sometimes the mons would get lost on the way to battle so that made the game a bit more dynamic, plus you could run without having a bike.

 

[SunnyRats]

The monster collecting genre in general as well as Chicken Smoothie, early Neopets, and early Subeta.

Monster collecting games, mostly Digimon and Pokemon, got me into species design as a kid. I still have elementary school designs and concepts. From there I found Neopets, CS, Wajas, and Subeta. I was big into in the adoptables scene on CS, but am ultimately glad I didn't release any official adoptables of my species concepts.

I enjoyed the simplistic and cartoony art of older Subeta, and loved the small compact cartoony images of older Neopets art. I grew up on Scooby Doo and other HB ips. I know a lot of people prefer super detailed and realistic vp sites anymore, but I long for cartoony and more "broken" art that focuses on an extreme personality and character idea instead of anatomy or even lighting. I can only pinpoint this feeling to old Subeta pets, and the golden days of Neopets. There's a ton of old, gone, and utterly lost vp sites from the mid to early 2000s that had this same groove that I enjoyed, if anything to look at how creative others could be with what limited tools they had.

When things started focusing on human avatars, and Neopets decided to compete with dressup pets and gave most same pose and same face, I decided I wanted to be serious about game development.

It's been a long time, but I finally have the means to do so with my husband. No coding has been started, as we don't have too much free time due to finances. But in the mean time I'm doing it all wrong and working on art and storyboards first.