Game Play Overhaul
 

Adopting is great and all but I think there needs to be a little more than just buy leveling and adopting so here are some cool new features I came up with that should be considered for future releases.

Conditions or States:

Adopts could acquire different states of being, such as sick or dirty. It is then up to the adopter to care for them. Buy the right medicine or soap to remove such a condition. Every time an adopt is viewed and given a point a test should be run to see if said adopt gets sick, dirty, hurt etc... When this happens penalty could include no more money obtained and no more points when adopt is viewed. Another Example: pokemon could get burned, paralyzed or poisoned and would need right medicine to heal. the admin panel could have section for adding conditions their probabilities and healing items.

Degrading Features:

Kind of the same concept as above but rather than true of false it would be degraded each time the pet is viewed. Examples include happiness, hunger, energy, etc... and again should be set in admin panel how full the bar can be and how much it decreases each time it is viewed. This opens up new items like food that will replenish the bar at different amounts. Again a penalty could be said pet dies (maybe not) but it won't gain points or money from clicks.

Advanced Leveling:

I kinda touched on this before but what do you do when your adopt evolved three times? or an adopt doesn't evolve? Levels should go on for ever. You set a base say 10 and then for each level you increment it by another chosen value. so say base 10 increments of 2. to get to lvl 1 you need 10 clicks. to get to lvl 2 you need 12, to get to 3 you need 14. formula would be 10 + 2 * lvl. This can go on forever or have a set end and will add never ending gameplay for each adopt and the higher their level the more money or rarer breeds they could bring. or just be bragging rights.

Share the Wealth:

It can be hard for members to get clicks for their adopts from outside the site. they may have to bug others that don't care to click the adopts. its much easier to get people to click your since they have adopts too and understand. So why not share the wealth? each time a logged in user clicks another users adopt they should get points too. I wouldn't acctually make it that easier tho but an option. I would make it so there was a chance of getting an item or money like a lottery. to give it story you could say oh while visiting so and so's adopt it has somethign in its mouth and hands it to you. You have obtained a parcel! so new way to distribute items, rare items maybe?

I am working on few other ideas. So that's all for now. I kinda right these out in psudo code and i tried to explain them that way. I cannot program php at this time sadly or i'll be all over this. I am getting their though as i just finnished java 260 and i have to take java 360 before web programming 380. But I have taken a sql database class :)

Anyways sorry for the long read but tell me what you think and ask if anything isn't clear. I am still working on my site and I hope to bring more play value to members then constantly adding new adopts. but rather value the adopts they have.

no comments? these features arn't desirable?

I will reply to this later today - I have a whole thing planned out, just no time to write it up, sorry. xD

Well you wrote quite a lot and it would take me a while to reply to all of the points you made. Regarding the leveling formula, yes I do believe it is doable and desirable. I have it planned for Mys v1.4.0 following ACP overhaul, but chances are I will release it as a Mod for Mys v1.3.2 or v1.3.3 in summer. The stats system is a main feature planned for Mys v1.4.0 too, and I will make it highly customizable. Keep in mind that time-dependent features are not possible in recent future, at least not until we figure out an efficient way to integrate cronjobs.

I don't think we would need cron jobs. Though that would be cool. But I thought it'd be easier to add a line of code to the page that adds points to the adopt. when that page loads after it gives one point to the adopt it can also subtract a point from another cell in the table. IDK I haven't studied the script yet and I plan too. Just don't have the free time to so waiting for my school to cover the topics first before I try.

But really my goal here is to try and add more things to engage users. I think that is common in successful sites. If members have to go "oh i need to log in and feed my pets today" your giving them reasons to come back and play rather than just checking on levels or clicks obtained.

Well it is still possible that we make Addons/Mods that require crons though, but in this case only those who are able to set up cronjobs in their cpanel or with setcronjob.com can use them properly. I am thinking about a pseudo-cron system in which the scheduled tasks check and run whenever a visitor browse a page on your site. This can be quite resource-intensive though, and I will need to be careful.

Still haven't replied to everything yet, but I want to touch on this here because I had an idea yesterday.

What if we break up leveling into two things - stages and levels. Stages would be the image changes, and Levels would be based on clicks. So people could set it that at level ten, their stage changes to 1 from 0. People could also do the stage-per-level, but they could also do it to increase every five or ten levels or however many they choose.

People also have the chance then to do a "level up, make the pet better", and change the image to make it more awesome at certain levels.

What do you think?

Well regarding advanced leveling, I am also thinking about this idea called level inheritance. When an admin creates a new adoptable without any new levels, he/she can choose an existing sets of levels from another adoptables as 'template'. This way the default required clicks for each level of this very new adoptable will be the same as the other adoptable used as its 'template'. Of course it only applies to properties such as maximum levels and required clicks, the adoptables primary/alternate images will differ and must be set manually by the admin.

Darn, I like that idea too. xD Can we combine all of these?

yes combine all of it lol. Inheritance is a great idea. I wanted it to be implied but I realize it wasn't and i didn't mention that at all. I so wish I had the time to dive into php and start trying some things but don't have time. unifinished post brb lol