YTV Sitekick
YTV Sitekick was a MMO designed for YTV.com's "YAP" members as a sort of an online loyalty program where members could customize their own robot character with Chips obtained from YTV.com, YTV broadcasting, Woah! Magazine, Big Fun Party Mix albums, and games.
Sitekick was released in late 2003 and shut down in 2015 as browsers started phasing out support for Flash Player.
Gameplay
The Dock
The Dock was the main page for Sitekick on YTV.com. Players would log in, and the dock would display their Sitekick, let them customize their Sitekick, view the chip dump, trade other players, and view the leaderboards.
MAIN
The MAIN tab of the dock displayed your Sitekick, and upon first page load would display a message from your Sitekick. This message would notify players of successful trades, or give a generic message if there were no updates to display. Players could also tap the antenna of their Sitekick to equip transformation chips, or use the menu at the bottom to change their Sitekick's color (a reward from completing the Sitekick SAGA games).
CHIPS
This tab was used as an inventory menu. Players were tranted 8 'equip' slots, 8 'storage' slots, and 4 'trade' slots. Players would be granted extra inventory slots depending on their rank.
| Rank | Additional Slots |
|---|---|
| Bronze Star | +2 |
| Silver Star | +2 |
| Gold Star | +4 |
| Amethyst | +4 |
| Onyx | +4 |
SK-TV
Players could view their ranking on the leaderboards by going to SK-TV. Each page would display 11 players alongside their rank. Selecting a player would display their Sitekick, their currently equipped chips, what chips they have in storage, and any chips they have in their trade slots. Players could also view other player's Sitekick names by pressing the ⓘ button.
TRADE
The TRADE tab, similar to SK-TV, would let players search for other players, but only view their trades. The player would see their own inventory, and could click and drag to send an offer to another player. After sending an offer, an icon was displayed to signify that the chip had a pending offer.
HELP
HELP was displayed as a tab, but rather than changing the tab, it would instead open a popup menu with several options. This would explain in plain English how the game functions.
CHIP DUMP
The Chip Dump (also known as "The Dump") was a separate inventory which was shared between all players. If you didn't have space for a chip, or if you just didn't want a chip, you could dump it. After your chip was dumped, another player would be able to grab it. Unlike in the remaster, chips did not despawn or spawn in the dump.
Boards
All YAP (ytv.com) members were automatically signed up for a forum account. It is unclear if YAP acccounts were just IP.Board accounts, or if YTV had a separate account system for other parts of the website.
An archive.org version of the YAP! Message Boards is available here.
GamePad
YTV.com had a video game portal called "GamePad". Originally GamePad featured playable Flash games, demos and sales, as well as a surprisingly full game review section (which included all available consoles, as well as PC). GamePad had 9 staff members who were identified with a "gp_" prefix on their usernames. After the website rebranding, GamePad was reduced to simply a games section.
Technical
Sitekick Game
- Developed with Macromedia Flash
- Played in-browser with Macromedia Flash Player
- RTMP was used for real-time actions between the Flash client and the server
- ASP.NET handled server-side logic
YAP! Message Boards
- Powered by Invision Power Board v1.3
Server
- Hosted on IIS
Spin-offs
Alongside the development of Sitekick, Nelvana Interactive worked on a spinoff game titled Sitekick: They Came for the Ooze.