My goals for TLoR is to have a game where there are many different “levels” for people to play. I want a beginner, intermediate, and advanced player goals. But also, I want the casual player to be able to come on maybe once or twice a week to play and still have fun with it and not get bored or feel like they will never “win” at the game. However, I also want to entertain more active players with things that happen by hour and keep them coming back day after day.

I have yet decided if I want to immediately classify accounts as specific “types” of players or just let the players decide themselves. I am going with the latter because I feel the “pick your own adventure” is just much more exciting for people, it is at least for me if I were playing the game.

I have also decided that my game is going to be free. It really ticks me off when these sites out there that make it impossible to do anything in the game unless you pay for it. Some sites do “pay to play” better than others but some make you pay exorbanent amounts of money for “customs” that really aren’t “customs” you’re just paying for the code of the site to make you a generation 1 animal with a few of your own chosen colors. To me, that’s worth $5 because the actual artist hasn’t made anything “custom” about it.

I have been toying with the idea of doing actual custom art for people if they want it and then loading those custom sprites into the game. But would I have the time? Probably not. Meh, maybe I could only offer very limited custom slots.

Anyway, the original point of this post was to list my favorite websites that do something that I would like to do, why the do it good, or why they do it “bad,” (all in my humble opinion.)

Dragon Adopters

Pros:

• Excellent graphics, both pixel (animated and non-animated) and vector.
• “Dragon Game” on each dragon page. Makes users want to visit other people’s pages and help their dragons grow by winning items.
• Very nice marketplace to sell items.
• Overall a very nice way to create items, use and sell them.
• I like how the dragon “produces” stuff. I wanted to implement something like this however was thinking more along the lines of the dragon going out and fetching it. (Like gold, jewels, etc, how classical dragons liked to “horde” things.)

Cons:

• Takes a long time to level your dragons unless your a post whore. Not exactly what I am going for in my game.

Furry Paws

Pros:

• Love how people submit art for the different breeds.
• Like that you have to have some level of care in order for the dogs to perform better in competitions.
• I believe there was a “newbie” tutorial for this site but I can’t remember because it has been a while.

Cons:

• For some reason I stopped playing this game after a few weeks. I think generally, the layout for the site is too difficult to keep people to stay within the site and drill down and discover everything. Instead, when I log in I am not sure where to start first because there isn’t really a launching point. I get bored and navigate away from the site even though I know there is a lot to do in the game.

Dragon Cave

Pros:

• Nice art.
• Good community
• Very simple interface, know exactly what you’re getting into and what you need to do.

Cons:

• Again, you have to spam message boards or join “fan sites” in order to get the needed amount of views to grow your dragon. I don’t think I want that to be a main focus of my game (maybe a small part of it though, might be fun)

Aramii

Pros:

• Lovely artwork.
• Includes “quests” for the aramii to do.
• Meeps!
• Theme contests for people to enter in.
• Breeding rounds that you earn.
• “Guilds” of players – helps the community
• Things like the treasure chest and game machine for “guilds” for guild members to get free stuff.
• Very good with updates, they update the main page and have a Twitter account.

Cons:

• This may have changed since the last time I was playing this game, but like Wajas and Tagas (see below) there isn’t as much desire for high generation pups/cubs/babies/whatever. So if you’re a newbie, it’s hard to sell and gain money if you were only able to get high level generations. I think Aramii does a better job at helping this though by having the adoption center and being able to do quests no matter what the level. They also have aforementioned theme contests which demands people to breed for the right theme.
• It costs $20 to get a custom and donate other monies for special items. I don’t want money to be a factor on how well someone does at a game. You have to deal with that in real life, you shouldn’t have to deal with it in fantasy.

Howrse

Pros:

• Wonderful artwork
• You keep track of your horses and your equestrian center
• Nice “Black Market” items but, see Cons.
• The list is pretty long, I’ve been playing this game for more than a year and a half now, so I like it a lot!

Cons:

• Like Aramii, has a way to pay money and the ones with the most money do best in the game (that’s just the way it is!)
• The creators aren’t English speakers.
• Have a suggestions board but still don’t seem to listen to real concerns.

Majestica Online

Pros:

• You are able to move around in the land and fight monsters and get “drops”
• Again… art is wonderful…
• Nice storyline

Cons:

• No updates for a while. They were planning a version 2 and kinda forgot about version 1. If I make a site and work on a “version 2″ I have to make sure people don’t think the site is dead because updates aren’t happening in “version 1.”
• I got bored playing this game because it was mostly just leveling and quests about getting dropped items off of monsters I hadn’t got to yet. Not having regular updates may have affected my perception of this.

Tygras

Pros:

• Art! (I must only like sites with wonderful art XD)
• Have shops that you can work in to earn money
• Have “Activity Tokens” for chances at quests in the forest.

Cons:

• Also $20 for basic customs, however unlike Aramii no incentives for high generations of babies.
• Not sure where this game is going. Are they basically just trying to be like Wajas, but with large Cat breeds? (see below)

Wajas

Pros:

• Nice art
• Nice breeding program (old one was okay but the newest one actually makes me interested in breeding my Wajas again)

Cons:

• I think they have too many breeds… Makes it hard to get items to all look right when there are so many breeds to consider.
• This has tapered off a bit but the admin team were pretty rude and mean for a while. Very ungrateful for their users.
• Also, need to donate to do any of the “fun” stuff on the site. I donated once when I first joined but after that I never saw where my money was being put into. I think the site has gotten better about this but it’s important to understand that if you’re offering a service for money you need to keep your players up-to-date with what you’re doing with that money. I think the site gets away with this because they call it “donations.” It’s probably also a scheme so they don’t have to post taxes on the money they make from “donations” but of course I am only speculating.

Anyway, I haven’t really found anything I liked better so a while ago (I’m talking years) I installed it on my DreamHost server and tried to use their one click install robot to maintain it for me to try and keep what little sanity I have left.

Short story, that robot suck balls because after a few updates the actual site was unreachable because the database and code got unsynced and the shit just hit the fan and I was graduating last year and I just didn’t feel like dealing with that mess.

Actual photo of scene

Today I finally spent a little time while eating lunch and was able to recover some of the data from the RhulWiki. Thankfully, I found an old version of MediaWiki, installed it, and loaded it with the old database and it seems everything is intact or semi intact. (Good news for me.) I have a bunch of information up about individual species and that’s kind of the primary source of information for a bunch of stories and stuff.

Whew. I hate MediaWiki but it’s kind of a necessary evil for what I want to do, I really needed a decent wiki to draft information on stuff I was writing. Now I gotta move the old pages to the new database I set up with the most recent software. I don’t know if I’ll ever update the software again after this mess.

http://rachelober.com/2009/07/09/females-in-tech-part-1/

I’m currently interviewing for full time jobs, and one interviewer admitted that he Googled my name. I actually do this every fews months just to make sure “nothing bad” is out there attached to my name, you know, like some kind of “Rachel sux” web site, perhaps. I haven’t actually Googled my name in quite a while, and it probably would have been a good idea to do it before I started interviewing, hmm? Anyway, I started doing this when I entered college, but I try to tag a lot of the things I do with “Rachel A Ober.” No period, just my middle initial. That way, it distinguishes me from other Rachel Obers out there.

I first started with “Rachel Ober”, found a few things I had forgotten about that were tagged, then tried “Rachel A Ober,” a few more, then tried “Bright Promise,” a nick I’ve used on and off since high school, and then for kicks searched for things like “The Land of Rhul” and “Mardesos.” Any one familiar with past sites I did, oh say, 5-6 years ago will know what Mardesos is. For those new, perhaps you missed out. Anyway, I noticed for “Mardesos” it only really returned a few, unique hits. Maybe only a year ago it was retrieving more than a hundred unique web sites for the different people linking to the site, “top site” contests I was involved in, and forums I may have posted to. Where in God’s name did these links disappear to? Is there some kind of “sell by” date on web sites? I don’t think these sites “suddenly” have disappeared, just are probably well beyond their expiration date.

It’s kind of depressing that only 5 years ago certain “large” projects I did, such as with my art and story telling are slowly eluding the radar like a past life/personality that will be forgotten.  Am I past my prime? I sure hope not! I just graduated college! It just feels like that last bit of child hood, one where I spent dreaming of fuzzy, mystical creatures is evaporating from my conscience before it ever came to true completion. I hope that through the programming of this web site I can continue to keep that little, day-dreaming child alive forever!

1. The MySQL.prefPane for OS X 10.5 is wrong.
2. MySQLCOM is in the wrong directory.

To fix this:

1. First download the appropriate version of OS X you need: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/
2. Install it.
3. You will then need to download the fix here: ftp://ftp.mysql.com/pub/mysql/download/gui-tools/MySQL.prefPane-leopardfix.zip
4. Install the new pane. It won’t work yet!
5. Execute this command in terminal: sudo mv /usr/local/MySQLCOM /Library/StartupItems/MySQLCOM
6. Go back to the MySQL preference pane and start the MySQL server. Voila!

This bug is documented here: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=25008

After my spring semester, it took me at least two months to recover from the lack of sleep and apparent case of shell shock experience from the whole ordeal. I may seem like I am over exaggerating a bit, but a friend of mine who took the same class told me a few days ago that back after the class had ended, every time he flipped the switch in his apartment as the sun was going down he got an overwhelming sense of dread that only a long walk outside for a few hours cured. Why did he have this reaction? He and his partners apparently spent so much time in his apartment coding day after day, night after night, that as the sun was setting, he would stand up from his desk and flip the lights on in his apartment. This then led to long nights with very little sleep. I can only imagine that this trigger of flipping the light switch was ingrained in his memory as an imminent sign of pain.

I digress… The past couple of months I worked my third and final co-op designing an oracle database with a Ruby on Rails front end. While not at work, I used what I did learn of the rails framework to begin initial plans for how I was going to write this monstrosity I had envisioned. I set up a subversion repository on my web host and for most of that time it sat there with a crappy rails skeleton and an image I had drawn almost a year and a half earlier. Today, I went back and actually formatted the directories into the suggested repository layout. Before I kind of just threw the skeleton application code into the top level, now I’ll work from the “trunk” level and make releases to “tags”. Maybe at some point there will be a need for using branches but right now I don’t foresee this.

I also realized that rails just recently made a new release to version 2.0, and now I’ll have to figure out what has changed since this past semester so I can use the new stuff going forward. I have concerns that the initial application is going to be clunky and do horrible on stress test once more users are accessing the site. It was bad enough when I threw together a small application over the spring for a class I was enrolled in that was hosted on the dreamhost server I am using. I was yet not aware of how to use fastcgi, which apparently is very important. Lesson learned. I am also used to the high speed oracle and unix servers at my previous job. I don’t have the money or capacity for oracle, so MySQL will have to do as well as any hosting I can currently afford. I don’t plan to even make money on this project, so we will have to see how popular it gets and whether or not I can handle that load.

People won’t be able to see anything I am constructing until at least the alpha stage. Maybe I’ll let a select few see the development server I’ll have running with the current release of the code, but just for display purposes.

I’m going to start at the most logical place, designing my database! Rails has a nice way of constructing databases through migrations. However, at my previous job, I found this was only good for creating the different tables and associations you would need. In no way are migrations useful for loading large amounts of data. In my job I was storing over half a million rows in a lot of tables and migrations, especially with fixtures, were a disaster.

I am hoping I can get an alpha out before this semester is over. Let’s get going!

I’m making a game. Whoohoo. It’s going to be a PBBG based around… duh… the Land of Rhul concept I’ve been toying with for almost a decade. If you’re not at all familiar with the Land of Rhul, have no fear, because it doesn’t really matter. In short, think of someone being overly fantasized with the Chronicles of Narnia, but asked questions about the “darker” sides of creation, leadership, and destruction. Where Narnia was structured for younger minds, I think my story will have more layers for different levels of readers. We’ll see though. I’ve tried many times to start and finish this project, each revision being much more complicated and even more difficult to complete. Will this be the time I complete the project in a presentable format? I hope so, and with luck this blog will help keep me on track and accountable for making releases.

In closing, thank you for visiting.