Welcome to the very beginning of my (hopefully successful) journey into creating my own virtual pet site.
Let's call me Maker, because that's what I'll hopefully be doing. I'm a 26-year old artist and virtual pet site lover. I've loved virtual pet sites ever since I discovered them! I'm talking about the kind where you can collect creatures, care for them, dress them up, breed them, battle with them, and maybe even evolve them. I love the sites where you can interact with other players as you explore an original world and its lore. If it's filled with passion, if it's imaginative and silly and even kinda weird -- I probably love it!
As much as I love playing them, it's always been a dream of mine to actually create a virtual pet site. I remember when I was a kid, I would make sketches in my notebook of what my site would look like, then get my friends to "hatch" pets and "play" minigames that I drew.
Over the past few years, I've made several attempts to construct my own virtual pet site. I've tinkered with the very few pet site scripts that still exist and dug up so many tutorials that are either unhelpful or so outdated that none of their wrinkly old links work anymore. For something that was essential to so many peoples' childhoods, it's shockingly difficult to find anything on the development of a virtual pet site!
It's become increasingly apparent over time that this is something which demands a lot of knowledge and skills that I don't have. I'm utterly clueless when it comes to scripting and it really, really shows. My ADHD cringes at the thought of actually sitting down and learning how to script but, yesterday, I finally decided to put my foot down and force my unwilling brain do it. I'm GOING to learn how to script. I'm GOING to make a virtual pet site. I swear, I will!
For now, I'm starting off with the basics: HTML, which is short for Hyper Text Markup Language. It's the bare bones of probably every website ever. I've set up an account on W3Schools because it seems like it'll be a good starting point. So far, it's been a lot more fun than I thought it would be. I'm going to absorb the knowledge even if I have to wrestle with my ADHD like it's a wild crocodile. I'll let you know my thoughts once I get further into it!
So uh, yeah...! I guess this marks the beginning of my all my pet site nonsense? I hope you enjoy following along. Let's do this!