Gaming Engine

About Me

Hi, I'm Andrew, also known as "judda".

I've been around the Virtual Pet/Browser Based Games community for a very long time now. The fun started back when I was in high school, back when Neopets was the only really big site out there. After that, I was hooked!

I started working on Virtual Pet games back when I was in University, starting with Cyopets (co-owner), and Misticpets (freelance developer), and a few other sites. Then I continued freelancing for a bunch of different after graduating because I was having fun, and doing my best to make sure they were built as securely as possible. I also am the primary developer for IcePets.com.

Now, I help to run TheGamingList.com with a bunch of other fans of the genre, and it has spread out to more than just Virtual Pet sites, but also things like Pet Sims. This is where I started to notice a very wasteful trend going on. People spend hundreds of dollars to start building their site, and then just abandon it because either another programmer comes along and says "the code is garbage, I have to start again", or the developer continues and then disappears partway through the development. And because of this, the owner is left with a barely functional site (if even), and out a lot of money. If the site is partially functional it probably only has very simple things completed for it, like: login, registration, and user profiles. All things that are really not special to the site.

Inspirations

KittoKittoKitto was always an inspiration for me. It was one of the first truly open source gaming frameworks, which then spawned Modular Gaming. Unfortunately these both ended up following a similar pattern, stuff got started then stopped. And, over time they have started to show their age most importantly being they haven't been upgraded past PHP 5.6, and so much has changed in the language, and ecosystem since then!

Goal

My goal is to make a framework, similar to something like Modular Gaming, where you can pick and choose what you would like to include.

Yes, there are other frameworks for sale out there, normally a one time purchase, but what makes this so special? My plan is to build it as a series of packages for Laravel which work together. This will help to push for better security, better testing practices and ideally no developers "taking shortcuts" in your code overwriting library files.

Why should we trust you (Andrew) with this?

I've been around the block a few times with sites, so I know what they typically look like, and I've been a professional developer for 10+ years now learning best practices as I go. With this in mind, I plan to make sure that the entire suite of packages has test coverage from the beginning. The reason being, it allows for us to clean up the code as new/better patterns are raised with less fear of regressions/issues. But it will also allow us to make sure that updates to the framework won't break your site (to some extent depending on the overall modifications that were done to it).

Ever since the VirtualPetList.com days, I was known as a bit of a hard@$$ when it came to security and writing good code. At the time, my code was also not so great, but PHP 5.4 was a thing and we were all learning back then.

Why should I Sponsor You?

As much as I would love to build tons of stuff open source in this sphere, open source doesn't pay bills. Also, there is the saying "put your money where your mouth is". A lot of people say, "oh I would pay for something like this", "I love the idea", but no one forks out. So it's the developer who has spent countless hours devoted to it who suffers because their work goes un-noticed. A sponsorship by you would mean that you trust in me, you trust in the product and want to see it come to life as much as I do!

• more sponsors = more trust
• more trust = more usage
• more usage = more sites that are able to be made by people who do not have a technical background

My plan is to continue to evolve these packages to make it better and better, while still maintaining the older packages, adding in new features, applying bug fixes etc.

Thank you for reading, and helping to make my dream a reality!