If you're here, chances are you are either in the progress of making, or are thinking of creating, a virtual adoptable pet website. Maybe you've got information about an animal you want to share, a fictional world you want to expand on, or you've been playing these games for too long and figured it was time to break in.
If you are, congratulations - I've had a lot of fun over the years making virtual pet websites, and playing them too. That being said, making these types of websites isn't exactly a cakewalk. There isn't a lot of information available for the beginner to use, and virtual pets is a sort of niche community. But today, I'm going to get you started down that road with a general overview of what it takes to create, and furthermore, be successful with your ideas.
It's worth mentioning, since there isn't much information out there, that I will be telling you a lot of stuff. You might want to take more then five minutes to read this article, and I would highly recommend having a working knowledge of coding, website design, good English, a working art program and/or the money to pay for some of these things, but we'll get to that later.
Virtual Pets are split into two categories, static and growable.
STATIC VIRTUAL PETS are any pet which you adopt that doesn't change over time, or because of user interaction. A very popular example of this is Neopets. These pets are adopted as is, won't die if you don't feed them, won't look different over time and only change due to two basic reasons; you've altered their stats, or you've altered their appearance. This is a good example because there are tons of websites like that out there - and they can be both easier and harder to create. These pets are easy to care for and the rest of the website normally focuses on things like games, community, virtual currency and items. Users will be more focused on their side of the deal - how much fun can they have doing other things? How much time can they spend doing other stuff? Static virtual pets are often long term goal websites - they involve collecting tons of items, amassing money or saving up for expensive pets or morphing items. Because users won't stock up on tons of pets, you'll need to create more temporary content - contest-like games, regular item updates or games they'll enjoy playing and coming back to. Keeping your users on your website might be more difficult because their pets may not be interesting for them if nothing happens to them or they can't do anything with them.
GROWABLE VIRTUAL PETS go by a number of names - but growable, clickable and adoptable are the most common. These are pets that are often smaller in image size, larger in variety and change often - either due to time, clicks, views or other user interaction. They almost always have various stages - starting out as babies, going through teen hood and finishing off as adults. These stages are often driven by user interaction - maybe your egg needs 500 views before it'll hatch, and your puppy needs 10 clicks to change to level two and grow into a youngster. Otherwise, it might be over time - maybe your cat will take a week to grow into an adult. Dragon Cave is a popular example for time-based/view-based growing. Your eggs and hatchlings have a certain timeframe to gain a certain number of views and unique views before they die. Mysidia Adoptables, the script I'll be writing about, does a similar thing, in that to change stages, grow or evolve, your adoptable must gain clicks, with each unique user being able to click each adoptable once per day. Growable pet sites often focus more on short-term goals and pet-based interactions, with things like trading, collecting pet varieties, breeding and other such activities. These sorts of websites are difficult because to keep your users active, you must constantly generate new pet content for them. They'll be there to grow their pets - but afterward they're grown, they'll replace it with new pets. Regular updates and plenty of user-friendly pet features are vital for a stable community.
Mysidia Adoptables is the script this blog is about - and many articles will be done specifically for this software, but by no means is the information exclusive. You can adapt this information to whatever website you plan to create. Which brings us to the next point;
To make a virtual pet website, you need either skill, free stuff or money. Preferably, you want to have all, but we can work with any of these. The fact is though, that a Virtual Pet website has a lot of content that needs to be handled, and a lot of code that needs to be maintained - not including games, user communities, help articles you'll need to write, maybe stories or other things to infuse a bit of life into your world. Because when you make a virtual pet website, you do create a world, where your pets make logical sense, there is knowledge for your users to gain and something to go on. Many will have even solid events - you're helping lost animals from failed lab experiments, these are aliens from a crashed spaceship, or you're new to a whole other planet. All this requires things that will integrate into the bare-bones of your website, and you'll either need to create them yourself, have people helping you, use free codes and content, hire someone to do it for you or buy ready-made content. Here's a look at the things you'll need to have, and where they fall on this free/money/skill scale;
- YOUR CODE; Your code is the spinal code of your website. It'll handle your user accounts, the mechanics of the pets, your pages, items, breeding and trading systems, even forums, blogs and other such things. You'll never see it, but it is vitally important - because without it, you don't have a website at all. You do have options however - three of them, to be exact. You can either code it yourself (skill), hire someone to do it for you (money) or use a free code - in this case, we'll be going with Mysidia Adoptables, which is free and easy to use.
- YOUR HOST/DOMAIN; Your code and all its content will be hosted on a server with a domain name to access it with. Unlike most of the things on this list, you've only got two choices - you either use free hosting with a free subdomain (for example - mypetsite.x10.mx) or you go the paid root, where you pay a yearly or monthly fee to have your own hosting, and a yearly fee for a top-level domain (mypetsite.com for example). Some people mix and match - they might use free hosting, but buy a domain.
- YOUR IDEA; Before you even think about making images or writing stories, you need to have a good idea. "Wolves that are in every colour of the rainbow" has been done to death, so you need to come up with a unique idea, or a unique approach to an idea. This idea might include the story behind your website, or just the pets itself. This is basically always free, unless you pay someone to come up with ideas for you - or buy a pre-made one off someone, but they do require some skill.
- YOUR LAYOUT; You're probably scratching your head over why you have to worry about your website layout or template, but the fact of the matter is, that there is a lot involved with making a theme - and furthermore, you'll be staring at it probably every day, for a very long time. If you don't like something about it, you will start to hate it - and your project - very fast. You do have some options, involving making your own theme, buying one or having someone making one for you, or using either a free Mysidia theme, or modifying a free theme to fit your website.
- YOUR FEATURES; Here you need to ask yourself what sort of features you want to include in your website. As an example, Mysidia Adoptables has breeding, trading, promo codes, items and inventory, currency, stores for pets and items, a click page, promo codes, forum integration and user features such as profile comments, private messages, avatars and friends. It doesn't have games you can earn currency from, battles, stats like health or strength, an exploration system or customization, though these are all features either being made for the script currently, planned, or heavily suggested and most likely implanted some time in the future. If you're making your own script, you'll need to think about how much time it'll take you to make those things, and if you're paying someone to make it, you'll need to think about how much each extra thing costs. In the case of adding things to Mysidia, you again have three options - you can pay someone to make a plugin or bonus feature for you, make one yourself or use free ones the community might have made.
- YOUR CONTENT; Mysidia Adoptables comes with some basic text, help and content pages that will make a good backbone for your site, and there for is free and easy. Other options however, will include you either paying someone for copy (meaning they write out what you want to say) or writing it yourself. Your content will include things like a welcome page, some extra articles, maybe blog posts or forum guides. It might include things like your plot, events or puzzles for your users to complete, backstories and descriptions for pets.
- YOUR PETS AND ITEMS; I hate to break it to you, but a vast amount of your time - probably more, even double the figure you've got in your head, will be spent on your images. Why? Because they're difficult, time consuming and you'll need to make a ton of them. I don't mean to discourage, only to inform you of reality. For a growable pet site, you'll need to make separate images for every stage, plus variations of every stage for every different base image you'll be using. You may decided to do different bases every single time, instead of recovering, in which case, you need completely done from the ground up images for every stage every single time you release a new adoptable - which may be once a month, every major holiday, bi-weekly, randomly or even all of the above. For static websites, you'll find yourself most likely recolouring or coming up with new "paint" colours if you hope to offer different types of markings and colours like most do. You need skill to make good graphics that will attract members, you need money to pay someone to do them for you, or you need to do a lot of looking to find free images. It won't be easy - in fact, I think if you aren't coding the script yourself, the pets and items are probably the hardest part of making a website.
- STAFF AND MEMBERS; No website will work or succeed without members - and eventually, staff. You need to think about advertising, about promotions and contests, things like forums and other stuff. How involved will your members be in what new content is released? How involved will you be with them? And after all that is done, what about staff? Are you going to have people moderating forum and user interaction, responding to complaints and mediating issues? A skilled person can do most of this on their own - or know where to find people willing to help. You may have to result to paying people to help you, even if its just a token payment (this is very rare for most small-time websites), and you may have to involve people who will work for free or website benefits (premium accounts, content or pets).
- MAKING A PROFIT; I'll be honest - I don't have the clearest idea of how much money websites like this make. But I can make an educated guess - most of your money will come from ads if you have any, and your secondary income will be any premium pay content. You won't be making a lot of money. There aren't a lot of ways to make money off websites like this, and there is a lot of issues that may crop up - angry parents of younger players for one thing. And that isn't even touching on the fact that most of your players are young people - most will be under eighteen, and those who aren't, are mostly young adults with not a lot of cash to spare. Getting your users to pay for something may best be done when a very loyal user base has been established. Another option is to ask for donations, but that has a very, very low success rate - and mostly, if not completely, relies on a very loyal user base.
If you're still reading by this point, and agreeing that you can probably pull off most of this, then have a cookie, you're probably good to go. We'll go over a few more things and then you can read through our tutorials on how to install the Mysidia Script and some other general things and then have a go.
First off, if you've got a solid idea, some concepts for graphics and maybe an idea for a theme, the first thing you want to do is actually install a script. However, there isn't a lot out there. I only know of two free scripts off the top of my head - Mysidia Adoptables and KittoKittoKitto (a static pet script). There is a website called My Virtual Petsite that allows you to make one on their website, as well as EasyRPG. There are numerous others that have since fallen out of business - MyAdopts, vPetsite and vAdoptables to name a few.
Once you've installed one of these scripts, start customizing it as nicely as possible. Start with a theme, so you know how it will look and can tailor your content to your look. Fill out your pages with unique content and above all - change anything that looks too close to the generic script. In fact, try changing everything if you can, to make it easier for your website to stand apart.
Add a good number of pets and items, but don't add everything you have - try to add maybe 70% of your ready-made content. (But whatever you do - don't fall behind on making new stuff - you don't want to realize the night before a planned release and you don't have any new stuff) Make a schedule - and
stick to it. Decide when you want to add new content, and
stick to it. Print it out and tape it to the side of your computer or something if you have to. Your users will grow more dependant on your content and will return often - furthermore, you will be more likely to have users return on certain dates if they know there is going to be new stuff.
Try to get some regular movement before you release your website - enlist some friends to put offers up for public trades, or fill up your forums a bit. If it makes you feel better, set a release date, close registration until that day and advertise lots beforehand, to get people excited. They may not remember and all sign up on that first day, but within a week or so you should have a bigger flow then. Advertise as much as you can manage, and however you think is best (we will have some guides on this later). Once you have members coming in, focus on keeping them there.
Spice up your website with more then just new pets - try contests, riddles and puzzles, user submissions and suggestions, promotions and freebies. Maybe send out a special item on your yearly anniversary or something like that. Try not to change things up too much though - users don't like it when you're changing their graphics and layouts on them too often. (That being said, if they are complaining about these things, try to listen) Don't overwhelm though, just keep a regular, semi predictable, semi unpredictable flow of content.
Remember that making a website isn't as hard as you think it will be - focus on what you notice as a member of other websites - what are the common complaints? What irks people? What do they like? What do they
really like? When you've got some ideas, start to think about what you're capable of doing. What's within your skill or money range? What can you find? You need to create something
worthwhile, and that doesn't mean something that is necessarily purely unique. If your users have fun - and if you have fun, then you'll succeed. Because virtual pets are a game - sometimes educational, sometimes not - and games are suppose to be fun.
That's all I can say for today, but if you feel you can take it on, try out some of our other articles, take a look at some scripts and get some concepts on the computer screen. You never know how it'll go until you try.
Images made and distributed by pachoofoosh on Mysidia Adoptables; view here.
