15 Jan
- Added health, energy, trust bars. They'll replenish daily, the first time owner visits their griff's perch. Not much use for them yet, except that battling takes some energy and losing battles has a chance to take health too. Later there'll be more to do with these stats.
- Also added natural aging. If a griff is not yet adult, they'll gain a growth point every day until 7 points, then they move to next stage. You can see the time on the perch page: 'incubating for X weeks' or 'growing for X weeks'.
If griff is adult, they gain an age point instead. This will later be used for retirement (lifespans).
All of these can be ignored (griff effectively frozen) if owner doesn't visit their page. Young griffs can still be aged 'elsewhere' with EXP items and other people clicking them from profile.
- Thinking about the freezing feature. It lets users pause their griffs so they don't accept any clicks (EXP) from others. But I plan to add extra actions to do with young griffs (playing etc) to boost skills a little. It wouldn't be fair if some users could keep them in this stage forever, for huge stat boosts before eventual adulthood. So the natural aging will still apply to frozen griffs. Every user has up to 7 days to do bonus things.
... alternatively, if someone REALLY wants to keep their chick all tiny and cute-looking forever, frozen status could mean extra actions are blocked, along with natural ages/healing being disabled.
- Worked on battle system a bit more. Tidied up some things. Added basic status effects and attack modifiers. To be continued...
Also from looking at others' mods, it seems AJAX may actually be useable here (and in explore, other systems) after all... but I don't have a clue about it yet, lol. Gonna think about it later.
- Noticed some nasty weirdness in flock pagination. Griffs not showing up at all, or showing up on every page, etc. x_x Same issue with breeding too.
I assume (hope!) this is purely due to the deleted griffs earlier, screwing up the DB table. They do show up in bizarre orders there. Hopefully when I wipe that, the new flocks will work normally.
- Thinking about maybe adding randomly-generated names to the adoption, buying and breeding processes. It would add a little flavour, and help users to differentiate between heaps of eggs. Breed names are boring anyway!
The new names could be based on genetic traits; dark-element chicks are called Shadow, Midnight, Umbre etc... air-elements are Breeze, Storm, Gale, Whirlwind... and if they have a special mutation like albinism (even one allele, so not expressed) the name would be Snowy, Light etc. That would be a cool hint.
17 Jan:
- done some fiddly stuff with background and wearable items. Now the item names and their values can be different. For example the "Blue and Gold Collar" (names can have spaces now, yay!) is actually stored as "BGCollar" in griff table, and Imagick uses that short version, as it can't handle spaces.
- finally got user-changing item function working! Now this can be used to change user's own background, wearables, craft licence, reputation, faction, stats, battle skills... the sky is the limit.
Need to set up a page for all their customisation, which will include the functions to remove bg/items. Just like the griffins' perch pages. First, will need to actually draw some basic bodies and wearables...
- started a Surprise item function, that will give user a random amount of money and some other items. There should be ranges, so a lucky bag gives small prizes while an ancient treasure chest gives massive prizes. Will finish this tomorrow.
- also been thinking about adding companion creatures (familiars? pets? whatever you call them). Shouldn't be too hard... they could give stat boosts in battle, or unlock unique spells. Or... all sorts of effects and bonuses, really! Not to mention unlocking avatars and achievements by collecting lots of types.
Problem is that I'd like to treat these differently to other items. Ideally they'll not appear in normal inventory, but listed on own page somewhere. And they can be 'bred' to get new companions - just like the normal crafting system, but again, on a page exclusively listing them. Not sure how many scripts will need to be changed or duplicated for this.
- Added health, energy, trust bars. They'll replenish daily, the first time owner visits their griff's perch. Not much use for them yet, except that battling takes some energy and losing battles has a chance to take health too. Later there'll be more to do with these stats.
- Also added natural aging. If a griff is not yet adult, they'll gain a growth point every day until 7 points, then they move to next stage. You can see the time on the perch page: 'incubating for X weeks' or 'growing for X weeks'.
If griff is adult, they gain an age point instead. This will later be used for retirement (lifespans).
All of these can be ignored (griff effectively frozen) if owner doesn't visit their page. Young griffs can still be aged 'elsewhere' with EXP items and other people clicking them from profile.
- Thinking about the freezing feature. It lets users pause their griffs so they don't accept any clicks (EXP) from others. But I plan to add extra actions to do with young griffs (playing etc) to boost skills a little. It wouldn't be fair if some users could keep them in this stage forever, for huge stat boosts before eventual adulthood. So the natural aging will still apply to frozen griffs. Every user has up to 7 days to do bonus things.
... alternatively, if someone REALLY wants to keep their chick all tiny and cute-looking forever, frozen status could mean extra actions are blocked, along with natural ages/healing being disabled.
- Worked on battle system a bit more. Tidied up some things. Added basic status effects and attack modifiers. To be continued...
Also from looking at others' mods, it seems AJAX may actually be useable here (and in explore, other systems) after all... but I don't have a clue about it yet, lol. Gonna think about it later.
- Noticed some nasty weirdness in flock pagination. Griffs not showing up at all, or showing up on every page, etc. x_x Same issue with breeding too.
I assume (hope!) this is purely due to the deleted griffs earlier, screwing up the DB table. They do show up in bizarre orders there. Hopefully when I wipe that, the new flocks will work normally.
- Thinking about maybe adding randomly-generated names to the adoption, buying and breeding processes. It would add a little flavour, and help users to differentiate between heaps of eggs. Breed names are boring anyway!
The new names could be based on genetic traits; dark-element chicks are called Shadow, Midnight, Umbre etc... air-elements are Breeze, Storm, Gale, Whirlwind... and if they have a special mutation like albinism (even one allele, so not expressed) the name would be Snowy, Light etc. That would be a cool hint.
17 Jan:
- done some fiddly stuff with background and wearable items. Now the item names and their values can be different. For example the "Blue and Gold Collar" (names can have spaces now, yay!) is actually stored as "BGCollar" in griff table, and Imagick uses that short version, as it can't handle spaces.
- finally got user-changing item function working! Now this can be used to change user's own background, wearables, craft licence, reputation, faction, stats, battle skills... the sky is the limit.
Need to set up a page for all their customisation, which will include the functions to remove bg/items. Just like the griffins' perch pages. First, will need to actually draw some basic bodies and wearables...- started a Surprise item function, that will give user a random amount of money and some other items. There should be ranges, so a lucky bag gives small prizes while an ancient treasure chest gives massive prizes. Will finish this tomorrow.
- also been thinking about adding companion creatures (familiars? pets? whatever you call them). Shouldn't be too hard... they could give stat boosts in battle, or unlock unique spells. Or... all sorts of effects and bonuses, really! Not to mention unlocking avatars and achievements by collecting lots of types.
Problem is that I'd like to treat these differently to other items. Ideally they'll not appear in normal inventory, but listed on own page somewhere. And they can be 'bred' to get new companions - just like the normal crafting system, but again, on a page exclusively listing them. Not sure how many scripts will need to be changed or duplicated for this.