Posted by
IcePets Day 357, Year 9 (11th Oct 19)
@ 10:25:07
IST
Hey All,
First and foremost, I want to say thank you for the last 5 years! Your continued support and friendship has meant a lot to me. Unfortunately, I come to you today to inform you that IcePets.Com is now going up for sale.
Although the website is up for sale, the team is continuing to add new Items and run events. The only thing on pause will be any new features and the progress of our alpha website. All I.C.E. purchases will continue to go back into the site as it always has been, but we understand if the site for sale gives you reason to pause in purchasing. Our goal is to continue to give you a fun place to play as well as events to keep you busy. You have given us many great years, and we hope with a new owner IcePets can give you many more as well.
Why is it up for sale?
Since purchasing IcePets.Com in 2014, the amount of time that I am able to devote to IcePets has dropped to the point that it is no longer fair to the most important part of the site. You, the users.
I (and the rest of the team) have put countless hours into IcePets and definitely do not want to see it fail. That is why I'm looking to sell IcePets to find a new owner who has the passion that I once had and drive the layout updates past the finish line.
What Are the Layout Updates? The original code for IcePets was written back in 2009 back when PHP was a much different language. There was no "composer" to install third-party libraries into your code, or anything. It was also coded with a bunch of back doors by the original developer. Because of this, the goal was to give the whole site a fresh coat of paint. The problem was to do this, we needed to change how the pages were built. They moved from being dynamically created in a PHP script (as a string) and being emitted with "echo", to use a full templating engine (twig) to handle them. In the meanwhile, we also improved some of the functionality (i.e. galleries were made nicer, and quick stock now works with every location instead of just your shop). These changes are all available here:
icepets.dev. The majority of this is complete, including the biggest thing which were the items, just a few kinks need to be worked through, and enhancements made.
So although this was branded as layout updates, after going through the first round, I quickly realized that it was going to be bigger than I had anticipated.
What you get: - A highly motivated and flexible team to work with
- Ownership of all of the art assets
- Pets - 17 Species with up to 37 different colours
- Trophies - 600 different
- Items - 4,500
- World Maps
- Avatars - 770
Features: - Adoptable pets
- Forums
- Messaging
- Multiple Flash games (most rebuilt using Construct 3)
- Weekly Raffle
- Trivia
- Trophies
- User Profiles
- Wishlists (layout updates)
- NPC + User Shops
- Trades
- Quick Stock (way better version in the layout updates)
Technology Stack: The technology stack is currently in flux between the live site, and the layout updates. All of the code is stored on Gitlab for the purposes of source control.
Live Site:
- PHP 5.6
- Mysql Database
- jQuery
- VueJS
- Must use Apache
Support Site:
- Laravel 5.2
- VueJS
- PHP 7.1
- Slack Integration
Staff Site:
- Laravel 6.2
- PHP 7.3
- VueJS
- Slack Integration
Slack Bot:
Discord Bot:
API Site:
Job Site:
Layout Updates (in the main repository):
- PHP 7.3
- VueJS
- Twig Templating Engine
- MySql
- Must use Apache
HTML 5 Games:
Please Note: The API and Job Sites could be merged into one application, this was originally split up so that we could scale up the API infrastructure if needed without running the risk of having scheduled jobs run multiple times. There are tools out there now (i.e. Laravel Vapor) which would automatically handle this for you instead of having it split out this way.
Additional: I recently purchased a 6-month subscription for Laravel Shift (
Shift CI Plan) which allows for the automatic dependency upgrade of any number of Laravel applications, as long as they are currently on running Laravel 6.0 or above. As long as I have that subscription active, if you do not have any issues with me having access to the code, I am more than willing to have it set up as one of my projects to automatically receive the upgrades (PRs will be submitted from time to time). Also, if you upgrade the other applications to Laravel 6.0, I can enable it for those repositories too.
