The Neocolours Virtual Pet Project (Lots of words)

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Huggles
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The Neocolours Virtual Pet Project (Lots of words)

Post by Huggles »

Neopets, Subeta (Pets?), Mistic Pets, Marapets, Lunapets, Whateverpets, Pokemon, Digimon—If there are cute, scary, or just plain bizzare creatures involved, we've played it. We've poured countless hours into imagining every last detail of our nonexistent creature's lives. We've obsessed over the finer points of what does and doesn't suck when it comes to running a pet site. Fellow Neocolourers, I ask you, who knows what we want to waste our time on better than us? If you're trying to use your lifelines, you fail! The answer is no one. So here's our chance to come up with ideas and designs for our version of the perfect virtual pet/monster/critter site. There are no expectations to actually produce a working site. We're here to brainstorm and have fun. However, for our decrepit stolen lawyerbot's spark, you acknowledge that any contributions you make to this thread are part of a greater collaborative work and belong to Neocolours. Me. Us. Everyone. So, don't share original character designs and concepts you want only for yourself and don't steal someone else's crap. Or so help me, in the name of the interweb, I will punish you. Got it? Good. Let's begin, shall we?

For ease of reading, please label each part of your post with the appropriate section title.
MY POST IS ABOUT PET COLORS. MY POST IS ABOUT QUESTS.Etc.

Name—Obviously Neopets is taken, but what should our site be called? Neocolours Pets? Sounds kinda lame. I'd rather we not use pets at all. Perhaps Neocolours could be the generic starting city/world? I dunno. I think I'd like something that doesn't instantly make people think of us as just another cookie cutter pet site. So maybe there'd be lots of in jokes and flavor text alluding to Neocolours, but we won't actually call it that. Like, The Kingdom of Loathing, Maplestory, World of Warcraft, The Wrath of Bob. You get the idea. I'd like to call the pets and petpets/minions something else. Like how in the Golden Compass you have your own daemon? Or familiars? Someone out there go look up: archaic synonyms for minions, myths and legends about monsters and magical creatures, and report back.

Pets, petpets/minions— First things first. NO BOOBIES. If you ask me to explain why, you will be forcefully removed from the island. No voting. No immunity. Go crazy nuts on anything else. Except koalas. I claim the koala pet. However, there are a few other things to consider.

How many pet species should we start out with? I like the idea of 35-45. I think that would be enough to leave space open for new species, while not losing others in the multitude, and to keep redundancy at bay. If you like the Neopets' pets days, and I do, then once you hit 52 you'll have more than one each week. When Neo has several pet days crowded together, there's aways something that gets overlooked.

How many pets per person? Do you want one account with lots of pets, or an account tied to various aliases that have a few pets each? Or both? I liked being able to house groups of pets on Neo, but is it simpler to just have them altogether like Subeta?

Randomness. Only your active pet would get hungry since the others are sleeping or watching Lost. Maybe once every 45 minutes you'd have to feed them and their hunger status would affect other aspects of the site. It wouldn't be much, and since you'd only have to feed one and not worry about the others, it wouldn't be too much of a bother. Food wouldn't be quite so useless like it is on every other site. It'd be the same for toys. Kaotika says: I will not play that game unless you give me a sammich.

Pet and petpet/minion colors— I like Subeta's idea of having one common color. But I also like Neo's basic color options. You'd start out with a common pet, then be given the option to turn it into one of the basic colors without the use of paint brushes, potions, elixirs, or magic boxes. Well, maybe you could use them, but they'd be super easy to obtain like newbie brushes or visiting a particularly colorful wizard and rubbing his feet...
One thing that's always irked me about Subeta is that, for the most part, you can't have a pet that's one color. If you want pink, you'll have to put up with orange. If you want white, there might be a load of magenta and black thrown in, etc. So outside of common, the basic free* colors would be: white, black, brown, green, blue, red, yellow, purple, orange, and pink.

I'll leave the color fills and redraws up to you. Oh, and I prefer Subeta's pet size and Neopets item size. The bigges they can be without being eye sores.

Fighting and Battling— I'm skipping wars for now and including them in site wide events. Instead, I'll focus on day-to-day battling and training. I'm pretty sure we've got what makes a good war down, but what makes a good battle system? I mean, how many of you actually find the act of battling on Neo or Subeta fun? After a bit of thought, I'd like see to see a battle system similar to that found in NeoQuest. You could potentially fight alone, though that obviously wouldn't be the best choice in most battles, or with your pets. Maybe there could be instances in plots/events where you're alone and need to fight your way back to your pets/group. Anyway, you could fill up your active battle team with the pets you choose instead of Mipsy, Talinia, and Velm. You'd still requiring training of some sort and upgraded equipment, but there'd be more strategy and luck involved instead of just brute force. Perhaps someone else can more thoroughly explain how battles work in NeoQuest?

In the same vein, you could train your pets in certain skill sets or classes. Perhaps you want a pet that's really good at healing, another is great at defending, another attacking, etc. It would add variety without forcing you to choose one species over another. There could be some basic attributes, spells, or abilities each species innately has that can later be obtained or mimicked by other species. Maybe squirrels can spit acorns at an opponent and wolves can obtain this ability by completing the One With Your Nuts quest. Whatever.

Oh, and you could also team up with other player(s) for certain big baddies. Like how you needed a team to dig graves in the Haunted Woods plot? Everyone has guilds, but this would help make them something more than just cliques.

Games and Moneymaking—How the heck do you make money without being forced to complete some mind numbing repetitive task?

Games are neat. I like games. Regardless of my personal bias, I think Neopets does games pretty well. I like games that help immerse you into the fiction of the site. Like the way Puzzle Pirates rewards you for completing logical piractical tasks: swabbing the deck, hoisting the main sails, err...stuff like that. I'd also want to see real time competitions against other players instead of, or in addition to, Neo's style of who can send the highest score.
Item quests can be fun, but Subeta has taught us that they can also be a huge pain in the ass. What can we do to include a few, and not make them suck?

Restocking sucks. I don't like it at all, but every pet site sees it as a necessity because Neopets does it. I personally would do away with it altogether. I like the idea of shopkeepers/vendors stocking infinite supplies of X like the Hidden Tower or Millionaire Center in exchange for money or other items, and being able to sell random crap you find back to them. I like the idea of gathering things a la Animal crossing. You'd pick fruit, harvest vegetables, fish, hunt, battle, dig for fossils or rare minerals required for making certain items. Basically, anything but spending hours staring at a blank screen hoping for items to appear. There would still be user shops, auctions, and trades.

Life, the Universe, and Everything— Neopets and even Misticpets beat Subeta on this. I like having a world map with different lands and regions that have the own culture and theme. Each world has its own common peoples, heroes, villains, way of dress, native plants and animals, and architecture. I'd like there to be animals that aren't pets or minions and peoples who aren't human. Neopets has faeries. Subeta has fairies, demons, gods and goddesses. I'd personally rather not see any races that closely resemble humans with funny ears, wings, or tails. I'm sick of faeries and elves. Certainly we can come up with something else? A race of sentient plants? Robots? Robots are cool. I like robots... They can be pets or people or a pet color. I don't care. There must be robots somewhere. I call dibs on the futuristic high tech world, robots, and koalas.

Houses. I want houses to decorate and make pretty. Yes. There could be different housing styles according to which world you make your home. For example, a Mystery Island home would be cheaper to build on Mystery Island than in Faerieland and vice versa. Islanders would pay less for Island furniture, food, clothing, weapons, etc. because they'd be native and common. But, if you wanted to build a dark and foreboding castle in the heart of Lollipop Land decorated with the corpses of your slain foes, you could.

You'd also earn special bonuses for staying put, doing local quests, and other things. Say you lived on Mystery Island. Each day you lived there you'd earn a token. At the end of the month you'd be rewarded with your tokens and granted access to a world specific shop. You'd be able to be unique items from this shop that might not sell for much in your own world, but would sell for more in others to encourage trade. During site events like sports or gaming tournaments and wars, you could earn extra tokens for remaining loyal to your home world. You could still move to different worlds and support different factions, but you'd get a little extra for remaining a loyal supporter.

Oh, and I like the idea of having to explore the world, at least in the beginning. The front page would have the requisite stuff about how awesome our site is, but registering and creating an account would be like a mini adventure.

You awake in the blackness of the void. You try and remember who you are.
What is your name? This would be your user name. <Insert witty narrative for your password and email here>

You are formless. Shapeless. Your physical body is gone. You're not sure if it was destroyed by falling into a black hole or eaten by ravenous poodlesharks. You're even less sure of why you feel the need to pee without having the necessary parts to do so. Suddenly three doors appear in front of you. One is labled Men, one Women, and the other Bob.
Which door do you choose? Upon choosing you are presented with a human male or female avatar. I won't tell you what happens when you pick Bob.

Blah blah blah, you pick out the details of your avatar and find some tattered clothes to cover your nakeyness. Then you're spit out into the main city of Neocolours and taken on a guided tour. However, the world map only shows areas that you've discovered and is shown in full only when you've explored the entire world. The entire account creation and tour shouldn't take long, maybe an hour which includes picking your first pets? Completing the world map could be done in a day, but maybe take a couple hours? I'm hoping this will add more depth to the world along with frustrating n00bs so that they won't bother to play. Devious, I know.

And now I'm pooped. Discuss.
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Re: The Neocolours Virtual Pet Project (Lots of words)

Post by Twofold Black »

MY POST IS ABOUT NAMES, GAMES AND OTHER THINGS THAT RHYME WITH 'AIMS'. DAMES. FRAMES. I COULD GO ON.
Huggles wrote:Name—Obviously Neopets is taken, but what should our site be called? Neocolours Pets? Sounds kinda lame. I'd rather we not use pets at all.
Likewise. Failing that, what is Neocolours' primary defining characteristic? It's not the database or ratings or forum or any of that crap -- it's that it's got a U in it. Upets. Bingo!


(I'm horrible.)
Huggles wrote:Games and Moneymaking—How the heck do you make money without being forced to complete some mind numbing repetitive task?

Games are neat. I like games. Regardless of my personal bias, I think Neopets does games pretty well. I like games that help immerse you into the fiction of the site. Like the way Puzzle Pirates rewards you for completing logical piractical tasks: swabbing the deck, hoisting the main sails, err...stuff like that. I'd also want to see real time competitions against other players instead of, or in addition to, Neo's style of who can send the highest score.
I'm inclined to say: screw earning caps on games. On Neopets I can spend literally all day restocking (a joyless, gruelling activity) and make a basically unlimited quantity of NP this way, but if I spend all day playing Freaky Factory (something fun, and theoretically made moreso by the reward at the end) I won't make more than 3k. On the other hand, restocking doesn't add money to the economy, it merely moves it around (and in fact removes some, though in the long run the amount it removes is trivial), and economies with an infinite money button in them anywhere (and for the purposes of the right sort of ... friendless insomniac, a game with no earning cap is an infinite money button) are nonsensical. This is tricky and I don't have an easy solution. I do however think gaming should be as potentially profitable as any other primary income source.
Last edited by Twofold Black on 01 Feb 2008 11:11 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Neocolours Virtual Pet Project (Lots of words)

Post by Helmcargh »

Life, the Universe, and Everything
I love the idea of having to discover the world and picking an avatar. It sounds great. I think you should only be able to one or two pets in this first time. Otherwise too many noobs will choose a bazillion pets and never come back and names of pets will be lost. Or maybe just two pets for people under a certain account age? Or maybe have the pet picking as the last thing possible after the hour exploration? That should put some people off.

I love the idea of having a house to decorate and the whole country/area/island loyalty thing is great too. The house should start off with just a few rooms, say: two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen and a communal area and if you want to add more rooms you have to live in that area for a certain amount of time? Or save up enough area tokens to purchase extra rooms (called building materials or something) from the area's special shop.

What about ghosts as npc's? Ancestors giving back knowledge and accomplishments to worthy players.

Pet and petpet/minion colors
I don't like how the common colour on Subeta is wholly one colour; like the pink of the charlie or the red of the cadogre. I do like the idea of easily being able to get the basic colours easily, maybe through quests or collecting like that for galactic on Subeta. Maybe to overcome this the first colour of your pets is a choice of say, three of the basic colours. So I choose that I want a koala pet, and can pick blue, purple or white. After I pick I am then informed that I can easily change the basic colour of my pet by fulfilling the quests of the colour sprites/robots/clowns.

There should not be a bazillion type of dog/dragon pets. It should be much more even then that. If we say 35 pets, the maybe:
-2 x canine species
-2 x feline species
-2 x dragon species
-3 - 4 x bird species (there is so much more variation in birds then in cats or dogs)
-turtle
-unicorn
-horse?? maybe just a unicorn is enough
-frog
-lizard
-spider
-butterfly
-elephant
-shark/dolphin
-fish
-2 x robots
-koala
that's just over 20 species. But I'm drawing a blank.
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nanabobo567
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Re: The Neocolours Virtual Pet Project (Lots of words)

Post by nanabobo567 »

Battling
Perhaps it's just me, but the battling on sites like this irks me. They're all based off Neopets, and how many of them actually use the battling? I say that if there's battling, it should wait until we're done with other things.
Pet and petpet colours
Okay, so here's an idea: To change your pets colour, you need to dye them, using a special item called a Pestle and Mortar, which you could get upon completion of some needlessly hard quest. Then, each item would have a different colour to it. A Snowball would be White Imbued, a Fall Leaf would be Orange Imbued, a Grass Blade would be Green Imbued, and so on and so forth. If you could gather, say, twenty items of one colour, you could use them with the Pestle and Mortar to create Chalky Dye (colour name). Apply it to some watery place and you could create the colour dye of your choice. Then various redraws could be presented by a Personality Wizard, who would need you to complete a quest. For instance, to make a pet into a Merpet (Maraquan, Hydrus) you would need to do a quest involving collecting twenty aqua items, such as Glass of Water, Dew-Leaf, and so forth. Then the PW would change your pet into a cool new type.
Name ideas
Monster Land
World of Monstopia
Mist World
Breeder Diaries
...
Life and stuff
We'd need some form of mascot. For instance, the Tamagotchi pet is Tamatchi. The Neopet pet is the Kacheek. Just a thought.
Sorry I'm not much help tonight, but I could be later. I'm a little tired right now.
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Sagrei
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Re: The Neocolours Virtual Pet Project (Lots of words)

Post by Sagrei »

Huggles wrote:Oh, and I like the idea of having to explore the world, at least in the beginning. The front page would have the requisite stuff about how awesome our site is, but registering and creating an account would be like a mini adventure.

You awake in the blackness of the void. You try and remember who you are.
What is your name? This would be your user name. <Insert witty narrative for your password and email here>
Made me think of this:
Zork wrote:You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
How much would I love it if, occasionally, there were text-based games you needed to do to complete quests and gain access to bits of the world? SO VERY MUCH.
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Re: The Neocolours Virtual Pet Project (Lots of words)

Post by Huggles »

Name Breeder Diaries makes me think either of bestiality or the life story of a tiny fidgety dog in the AKC. I'm not fond of either. I'd also like pets to be main characters and figureheads, without being anthro (NO YOU'LL NEVER CHANGE ME), and having talking animals that you breed is too weird. As are pets with mommy's and daddy's. I'd rather have some magical cabbage patch or spontaneous manefestation of your spirit animal origins for the pets themselves. I dunno. Petpet/minion breeding could be a possibilty though.

Fighting and Battling We're here to make it awesome, so there's no putting aside features for later in brainstorming. The act of battling on other pets sites suck because they don't try and make the battles themselves fun. I think a NeoQuest style battle system has to potential to actually be fun.

Pet and petpet/minion colors Oh. Maybe the wizard/alchemist/sorcerer you complete quests for could be called the Neocolourer. The order of Neocolours. Neocolourists? I feel we're getting warmer.
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Re: The Neocolours Virtual Pet Project (Lots of words)

Post by Arviragus »

Pets and Petpet, Miniony...Things

After much consulting (and by much consulting, I mean about 3 seconds' worth of searching), my friends at Thesaurus.com have come up with these possible alternatives for naming the small critters that attach themselves to our pets, er, friends, er, whatever we end up calling them. Bolded are the ones I particularly enjoy, for whatever reason.

Bootlicker, Dependent, Flunky, Groupie, Lackey, Stooge, Peon, Grunt, Scrub, Henchman, Satellite, Zealot, Barnacle, Sponge
Pet and petpet/minion colors Oh. Maybe the wizard/alchemist/sorcerer you complete quests for could be called the Neocolourer. The order of Neocolours. Neocolourists? I feel we're getting warmer.
The Neocolourator?
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Re: The Neocolours Virtual Pet Project (Lots of words)

Post by Madge »

Games and Moneymaking
I think something in between the Hidden Tower system and the current Neopets system would be a better idea than using one or the other; otherwise people will not have any incentive to have a usershop, really. Something like shops being stocked with, say, 30 items, with 25 common, 3 uncommon, 1 rare and 1 ultra rare item (or, perhaps, only have an ultra rare item show up for one hour per day, and instead have 2 rares - the 1 hour per day would be semi-random, random enough to be unpredictable but non-random enough to ensure it's not in the same 4 hour period for a week running). These items would be in infinite quantities for the hour or however long, but would change. Or, instead of having 5 items restock, have 5 minutes restock - the items are infinite for the 5 minutes they're available.

The idea someone had that if you get over 1,000np from games you should get a random item of a rarity preportional to your score in the game - top 1% of players gets you a R99 item, for example, would mean there's no infinite money button.

Pet and petpet/minion colors
I myself vote for Peon. It makes me think of Warcraft, and this can only be a good thing. Barnacle also sounds delightfully interesting as a word.

And I do like the idea of getting 20 red/blue/green/watery items and mushing them up. Perhaps to increase the difficulty level have it quest like, i.e. you need these 20 items, but it would mean sometimes people would get unreasonably rare/expensive items.
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Re: The Neocolours Virtual Pet Project (Lots of words)

Post by AngharadTy »

Games and Moneymaking
I agree with Mr. Black--if a game is fun, don't make it pointless to play more than a pittance of it.

Pet and petpet/minion colors
Peon! I love that.

And the mortar and pestle/alchemy idea sounds great to me. I can just imagine people enthusiastically posting things like "I just found a mortar omg!!!"
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Re: The Neocolours Virtual Pet Project (Lots of words)

Post by oogabooga »

Life, the Universe, and Everything: Do we want this to be primarily tongue-in-cheek (like Kingdom of Loathing), or primarily somewhat serious with jokes here and there (like Neopets, I guess)? I think I'd vote for more serious, because there is a danger of just putting stuff in because it seems funny, and then later it gets boring or annoying. But obviously we have to be able to laugh at ourselves.

Pets, petpets/minions: We definitely need a safe way to transfer pets between accounts, and I also think accounts should be able to have lots of pets on them - there still probably has to be some limit, but let's make it high - 30 at least. But to keep a bit of control over it, each new pet costs a bit more to get, or requires having been playing for some amount of time (obviously we would all be grandfathered in ;)). Speaking of grandfathering... ideally, pets would be so fantastic to begin with that they'd never need a revamp, but if they did, we should be able to choose either version. No more having our favorite pet's personality completely stripped away at the drop of a hat.
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Re: The Neocolours Virtual Pet Project (Lots of words)

Post by Huggles »

Life, the Universe, and Everything: I vote for a bit more serious than KoL if only because it's extremely difficult to go so over-the-top and do it right.

Pets, petpets/minions: After I also consulted the good folks at Thesaurus.com, I thought eidolon sounded like a good replacement for pets. Then I remembered that summons in Final Fantasy were once called eidolons. But then I looked it up and discovered that there were also called, espers, aeons, avatars, and gaurdian forces. And then I was back to liking eidolons again. So there!

I also like daevas. It flows nicely with avatar and its origins.

Familiar would be appropriate for petpets/minions. It's not special enough the be the name of the pets, but it doesn't make me think of serfdom the way peon does. Sorry.

Totems? Fitting, but I think of either the carved wooden pillars or magic rocks in a sack.

Figments? Hee. Figments and familiars. Hee again!
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Re: The Neocolours Virtual Pet Project (Lots of words)

Post by Madge »

Pets, petpets/minions:
Daeva just makes me think of vampires, but it's a very pretty word, I will agree.
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Re: The Neocolours Virtual Pet Project (Lots of words)

Post by Huggles »

RANDOM: List of Monsters I don't know why this took me so long to find. There's lots of pretty monster names in there, I'm sure. You're welcome.

And what's the vampire association?
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Re: The Neocolours Virtual Pet Project (Lots of words)

Post by Madge »

Daeva's a clan you can choose from in the Vampire:The Requiem roleplaying game, which is a d10 system and we play it more or less as freeform with dice rolling added in as necessary - it's great fun. The Daeva vampires are the pretty boys, they're all pretty and sexy and stuff. They're probably my favourite. One of my favourite PCs was a member of that particular clan. It's a very pretty word to say, as I'm sure anyone will agree.
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Re: The Neocolours Virtual Pet Project (Lots of words)

Post by Kari »

Pets, petpets/minions: I also like eidolon, and that's not just because Final Fantasy 9 is my second favorite FF game. I like the sound of the word. And familiar goes well with that for a petpet/minion thing. Also I like the idea of breeding petpet/minions.

Fighting and Battling: Also agreeing on the NeoQuest-like system with speciality training (a fighter, a mage, a healer, etc). Makes you have to train all of your pets instead of having that ONE battle pet like I do on every other petsite. There should also be an equipment system like...an armor, a weapon, a couple accessories. I think that's what Subeta was going to do in their battle revamp? But I like that, more customization.
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