A study of integrating social networking service into the virtual pet web game system

As the World Wide Web developed and the utilization rate of the mobile device grew up, a lot of computer game companies chose to expand their product platform to the web games or the smart phone apps. These two kinds of game categories can become as popular as nowadays, because these are the ways that users can easily have access to and to play the games with. Based on the above and the fact that social networking service has become a part of our daily life, we decided to merge all social network features into our web game to make our games more compatible. This research is focused on virtual pet game with ability of allowing interaction between friends' pets and sharing messages among friends and the system are accessible through the web browser. In the future, we will combine social network system and the virtual pet game and also make a smart phone app version out of the combination, so that the users can take care of their own virtual pets anytime and anywhere as long as they have access to the Internet.

I. Introduction

As the computer technology evolving, there are more and more computer games in the market and most of them can be separated into different categories like FPS (First Person Shooter), RPG (Role-playing game), and etc. Nowadays, game development teams can't just focus on the context of game itself, they have to consider the mobility, the platform independent, and the possibility of new user interface, which brought by device manufacture as well. Furthermore, the user interaction and innovative ideas are becoming the critical factors for being successful in the market of computer technology. Our team members observed the biggest social network application-Facebook, and find that the users' social activities, all time internet-accessibility, and downloadable apps are the main factors that Facebook became the most popular social network. By using the similar concepts as Facebook, we want to develop a virtual pet game based on community system. We believe our game can be distinct from others with the features of social network system.