(Aug 3rd, 2020) | Stirring the ashes

It's been a bit over 4 years now, and I figure I owe an update to anyone who still decides to poke their head in here.

No, I (falcon) am not quite dead yet. In fact, I'm getting better! My very length list of to-dos is getting whittled down, and I'm finally in a position to make enough money to survive and not burn out my entire day doing so.

The site has, ever since I inherited it (and before, really) needed to be rewritten from the ground up. There are a lot of problems with it that just aren't fixable, and it can't even run on modern versions of PHP without horking up more hairballs than my cats. To that end, I started doing that over 4 years ago, and actually got a good chunk of the core system done, including making it more functional on mobile, easier to navigate, and more uniformly laid out.

However, the biggest thing this site offers is good art. And I am definitely not an artist. Continuing to provide new pets, new monsters, new collectibles, and everything else is going to require a massive amount of resources (read: money). This has always been the problem, and it's part of what discouraged me from continuing to pour more of my time into overhauling everything.

Now, for some of this I can use some packaged assets that I have acquired licenses to for game development. This would apply more to items. But new creatures and alternate morphs of the existing ones will require an artist dedicated to that. And I have a LOT of ideas on how to expand Cruithne and its different morphs.

At the end of the day, I really do want to get this site overhauled and functional again. But a part of me still wonders whether anyone would even still play it, given the massive amount of other games that people can engage in today. Do I dare hope that it could even be moderately successful enough to pay an artist or two to continue making new creatures and other assets? Is it worth it for me to rebuild and extend functionality to provide more in-depth quests, a better battle system, more worldbuilding, and an actual endgame to strive for?

These are my musings.

If people would like to discuss the future of DLP, or just hang out, I have created a Daylight Pets Discord server. You're all invited!

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