Fuzzy Future Technologies

WoW Hunter Pets: A Graphical Encyclopedia for World of Warcraft Gamers. For this project, we needed to create an easy to navigate visual encyclopedia of in game characters for the online role playing game, World of Warcraft. Our main requirement was to make the site very visually compelling allowing visitors to quickly and easily find their item of interest by visualizing graphics rather than large amounts of textual data. Also, as World of Warcraft is a dynamic game and is constantly changing, we had to ensure that the site was easy to maintain so as to stay on top of the games constant patch based updates.

Our Approach

Our first step in working on this project was to analyze the existing solutions that were already available. We quickly determined that existing solutions severely under-served the market, and were poorly accessible (hard to find what you wanted) and hard to maintain with regular updates. We decided to approach the project from the standpoint of an automated system that could be maintained regularly using scripts rather than human intervention. To improve on the accessibility, we decided to base the entire site around images that were distinct and easily recognizable by any regular player of the game.

Our Expertise

To accomplish the project goals, we developed a customized PHP based content management system (dubbed FuzzyCMS) which we powered directly off a custom designed MySQL database architecture. We created a series of Python based scripts that were run on a nightly basis via CRON to poll the game for updates and to automatically create new hunter pet profiles that were previously unavailable in the encyclopedia. Each pet profile page was indexed using graphics to represent each pet. All encyclopedia entries were also partnered with Flash based 3D renderings of each pet. In addition to each image, we also included statistical data on each pet and also relevant information on where to find it in the virtual world and the various benefits to seeking out each pet. The site was highly search engine optimized for Warcraft related keywords to ensure that our site was easily indexed on many distinguishing pet characteristics stored in the encyclopedia.

Our Results

Overall, this project worked out very well. The entire system has operated for more than 3 years without requiring a single update to the way it regularly polls and returns data for pets within the game. The database has substantially grown in size due to two major content patches that have each more than doubled the number of pets available in the game. The entire database currently stores information on more than 1,000 different World of Warcraft pets available within the game. The site itself is entirely automated, and requires virtually no intervention in order to remain relevant to players of the game. Currently, the site serves as a popular major resource for World of Warcraft gamers and has been linked from prominent World of Warcraft related sites such as Thottbot, WoW Wiki, Allakhazam, and WorldOfWarcraft.com.