*Category: Common Grounds

Kavori sent us an amusing pic (thanks!)

Game List Talk

Uploading some more games to the master game list. Discovered a really neat platformer, “Packed Rat”, not listed in the forum from the maker of Vore Fable, added it.

Thoughts on the list so far…

Genres

Been fine tuning the descriptions and listings. Genres have been especially tricky. Such as where dating sims and visual novels fall into each other. Put ‘hack and slash’ into ‘brawlers’. Didn’t know there was so much overlap between the two until looking into it. I want it to match up with expectations, such as we all have an idea of what kind of game a beat ’em up is, and we expect to see those kind of games if we select the genre. As such, there has been a lot of overlap when tagging games.

Example, Packed Rat is obviously a platformer. But! You run around with a sword and slash enemies. So is it a hack and slash? A beat ’em up? Seeing metroidvania vibes too. Lumping it all into brawler for now.

Not 100% happy with the filters, but getting there. It should work itself out as I go through more games and adjust it to match what’s really out there.

Excluded List

Had to put quite a few games on the excluded list. It gets around the problem of what to do with really short or borderline games. Having to research Japanese titles and go through translated pages sure is an adventure. All for nothing in the case of Secret Lagoon, as I noticed it was tagged as shota, at least the first one. Bummer.

Tagging

Was afraid games like Corruption of Champions would be a tagging nightmare, but really liking the method of only tagging what a game focuses on. Cuts through a lot of clutter and gets to the point.

One of the first tests of this was with Common Grounds, where a character cross-dresses in a scene. Yeah, it’s there, so in say… a picture you’d obviously tag it as cross-dressing. But in a game? A TV series? A many paged comic book? Nah, not if it’s not really a big part of everything. There’s a lot of silly judgment calls, such as We Are Fighters has minor watersports, but it also has gore, so… would someone who’s OK with gore see the peeing and be like “NAH i’m out”?

SFW List??

Started the safe for work list due to some of the games on the waiting list being such. Will add more to it after I get through the waiting list and upload. I know there’s just endless furry games out there so there’s no way it’s going to be an exhaustive list, just more for amusement and needed context to show how rare the porn games are in comparison.

Quick update to let you know that Avast anti-virus should no longer treat Common Grounds like it’s a virus by their next update.

They took a look at it (indeed), and gave us the good news. Hopefully that will be that, and we really appreciate you bringing things like this to our attention 🙂

Common Grounds

Extremely minor update…

In one of Andrew’s bonus content script files, there’s a secret code that requires you to edit the game’s settings, (the ‘ini file’.) The location of the file that the game tells you was only good for Windows XP users, and was incorrect for those of you with newer versions of Windows. The correct folder is “%username%/appdata/local/Common Grounds/”.

The game has been updated and if you’ve purchased it, you are welcome to download it again. If your download has expired or is not working, please let us know and we’ll be happy to fix that 🙂

(House of Tail updates are forthcoming! A threat and a promise!!)

Kit (inkbunny.net/Kitsune18/) has drawn more Common Grounds fanart! You can view them here.

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Also, Len Grey (weasyl.com/profile/lengrey) is offering a special deal on commissions that include a Common Grounds character! You can check out the details here.

Common Grounds found its way into the Ursa Major Awards Recommended List! Many thanks to whomever gave it a nod.

While the game was recommended, it did not get nominated. Sorry we’re a little late on this ^^; For some fun, you can vote on what did make it here. Voting ends May 15.

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And we’re still working on House of Tail~

House of Tail

Rep Up!

The level up screen is more or less coded and drawn. We will definitely need some fanfare music to accompany those trumpets and confetti. Skills are assigned by a character’s class. You can sometimes gain new ones, but each character can only have 6 at most, so you may have to forget one.

Looking at the picture, I should note that the level up screen is the only place the ‘alt’ image of a character is shown currently, besides during the endings. The game is very modular, and we will add content and more story modes after the initial release, so it’s always on our mind about how else to use things.

I think an obvious use would be to add in a tiny story arch for each character that uses a mix of their pose and pinup pictures, but at the same time, we are a bit hesitant to add in too much text or any second person erotic literature “You do this and they moan and sex” kind of thing. While it’s cool for visual novels or text adventures, I don’t think it fits here. Maybe some variant? Who knows!

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Common Grounds

Fan art page updated with another lovely pic by Kit Hawking!

Review page updated as well with some very flattering words. Maybe too flattering! But appreciated all the same 🙂

Fan Art page updated – 3 new pics from Kit Hawking!

Fan art page updated! – Big thanks to our buddies Len and Kit 😀

Common Grounds has been out and about for one whole year.

Wow…

It has been a fun adventure. We are forever grateful to all of you for the support. It is something we never want to take for granted, and I’m always at a loss for words to properly express how we feel about it.

I’ve recently figured out how best to go about expressing it, and that’s a growing excitement about beginning work on Common Grounds 2.

We have taken many notes about your thoughts and what you’d like to see, and are looking forward to making the next one something we can be even more proud of. I can’t wait!

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House of Tail Update

But first we have to finish House of Tail.

Have just about finished the level-up menu and related features. Want to let you know we’re still on top of it and this is going to happen!

(And for the rest of the team not to kill me for taking so long… one whole year without another game! We can’t let this happen again!! Totally my fault though ^^;)

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Oh, and I suppose since it’s been a year, it’s now okay for us to write a post-mortem on making Common Grounds. Just something like “5 things that went right / 5 things that didn’t”. No idea if or when this will happen, but it’s something we’d like to do.

Hi!

Just letting everyone know we addressed some text glitches some users were experiencing. And if you’re missing a XINPUT1_3 dll, the game should supply it so you don’t have to update DirectX.

This soft update has been uploaded, so you just need to download it again if either of those issues have bugged you.

And now that this is finished (we hope), expect much House of Tail progress reports and an impending release…

Common Grounds has been updated to version 1.4!

If you’ve purchased the game, you should have received an email from us, (if not, please let us know!) We hope this will be the last version and everything works for everyone forever. Thanks for your support 🙂

Side note:
We have to manually reactivate download links and send emails, so it might take some time for us to send them.

If you don’t receive download links in a timely fashion, (like in a day or so, no more than a week,) please let us know and we’ll try again!

Updating Common Grounds to version 1.4 (Read More…)