I'm really good at distracting myself from projects with other projects 🤣 but I come with progress on multiple fronts!
Habitarium is proving to be as complicated as I thought it might be. That being said, I'm very optimistic! I successfully completed the goals I laid out in my last post, and I haven't come across anything that I think will be impossible for me. There are aspects that I think I will certainly need help with. I obtain the necessary art assets for habi from the decompiled flash files of the original game. Unfortunately, the way that many of the assets are stored here is inconsistent at best and headache-inducing at worst. For example, the absence of Pinchits in the above GIF isn't from me not thinking they are cute - all of the Pinchit models are just stored in a very annoying way.
Even more frustrating is that some of the art assets seem to be missing altogether (i.e., ground tiles involving water, some buildings, etc). I (currently) lack the strength with Adobe Animate to generate / standardize all the spritesheets, and I (definitely) lack the art skill to recreate the missing art assets. But neither of those impact coding the mechanics of the game, so there's still plenty of progress to make! If someone is reading this and feels comfy with either of the aforementioned things though... don't hesitate to reach out!
As I've been working on these games over the past year or so, I've had a sense that if there is one thing missing, it's the "pet-site" component. Playing these nostalgic games is very fun, but I've personally been feeling like a "purpose" for them is somewhat missing. Game avatars, NP rewards, trophies, etc. A certain classic Neopets recreation site (thank you Felix! Your work is awesome) has been very gracious in adding my games which has been truly awesome to see. But I have some thoughts and ideas on what my own Neopets recreation could look like that has me wanting to give it a shot 👀
In the past two weeks, I've made a lot of progress on the beginnings of an actual pet-site. Account creation, log-in support, and pet creation are all functional when I run the site on my local environment. Next steps loosely include item handling and inventory management, a handful of essential site features (shops, SDB, pound, etc.), and hosting the pet-site / handing out a few sign-up links in a pre-Alpha phase.
When I'm not working on that, I'll be adding the level/experience system to habi, as well as the nesters and fighters for each P3 species.
So yeah - lots of exciting stuff on the horizon! If you've made it this far, thanks for reading :)