*Category: General

It’s taken a while to settle back into things after Anthrocon, but we’re super excited to get back to work! It was a great experience, and incredibly motivating to see all the talent and cool people in the fandom.

Presently, we’re going through House of Tail’s design document to map out everything that needs doing, so we can have an end in sight. While it may not seem like it now, it’s going to be a fairly large and beefy game. We’re aware of and working on one nasty bug that makes the online version unplayable. Besides fixing that, we want to focus on adding new content rather than all these bug fix updates.

We’ve also been testing animation options, and I don’t mean to tease, but it’s looking like it may just happen! Not exactly easy, but not outside the realm of possibility.

A big shout out to MadCatMax, who has officially joined the team as “Music Guy” (name pending), and Firewolfe for the dedicated playtesting of HoT! You guys are awesome.

And thanks again to everyone buying copies of House of Tail! We’re all kinds of excited to begin adding the really juicy stuff :3

Howdy y’all!

Was a busy week so I wasn’t able to update as much as I would have liked. But we have more or less taken care of the bug/glitch list. Still balancing the game, but making good progress there. I’d like to see the play a lot more tight, and clearer choices to make.

I’ve also been looking into ‘special’ character animation options. Nothing so far, but it would be cool if we can figure something out here.

We’ll be away from Wednesday to Monday (July 3 – 8) for Anthrocon. No official Fupoco appearance or selling stuff, just hanging out. Am happy to say hi and talk if anyone spots me, as I’m sure the rest of the crew would be.

Chances are very good we’ll return refreshed and ready to add lots of new content to House of Tail, and get this project going hardcore~

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HoT v 7.01.13

• added – show number of hires available
• added – show charm percent under room price (will need graphical upgrade later)
• added – graphical polish on title characters and transition (download version)
• changed – customer and room math, % skills changed
• fixed – various bugs/glitches…
• item duping – not handling item data properly
• entering something before it finishes moving won’t trigger its mouse hover event
• releasing left mouse button on any button triggers it – should only trigger if pressed first
• levelup notice needs to appear over both characters in double room if levelup at same time
• gui needs to smoothly reappear on end of day
• sometimes character reserve banner doesn’t appear when a character is sent there
• rep up background darkens again if more than one rep up??? (also adjust background)

Town map complete!

Here you will be able to buy items and upgrades, train, heal, and hire characters. It will be a busy place. The house map is more or less finished as well, but we still need to add in some detail graphics.

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Califur 2013

They were kind enough to seek us out a while ago about advertising in their convention book, so if you’re in Southern California around May 31st – June 2nd, be sure to check it out. You can visit their website here.

By the way, House of Tail is in the ad.

It would be kind of silly if we didn’t have it ready by then, don’t you think?

We had fun at Furry Weekend Atlanta and it’s really nice to be back!

Took a lot of pictures for whenever we’re ready to begin filling out our ‘bonus’ section. Not sure what we’ll do with them besides something silly. Also heard talk about quite a few furry card games in development. They’re supposed to be hush-hush, so that’s all I can say, but it’s interesting in so far as I didn’t hear any talk about making video games beyond Furoticon Online, which is a video game of a card game.

We also had a chance to really sit down and plan out what we need to focus on, taking a break and thinking about ‘the big picture’. Which mostly meant putting to the side many ideas and focusing on just a few. I don’t want to talk about what we plan to do, as it’s better to talk about what we’re actually doing, but the big takeaway was needing to focus on building up our game library, and fleshing out this website.

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Trials in Tainted Space – Offbeatr

In other news, Fenoxo (developer of Corruption of Champions) has started a crowd-funding drive on Offbeatr for their next game: Trials in Tainted Space. It’s described as an “erotic, ultimately customizable, textual adventure game”. They’ve already surpassed their goal by quite a lot with many days still to go!

You can find the offbeatr page here.

Out of Town

Just a quick courtesy call to let you know that we will be away at Furry Weekend Atlanta between March 14 – 18, and won’t be able to respond to anything fupoco related until afterward.

Minor Site Updates

Removed obsolete questions and added some new ones to the faq:

• Can I offer my services or help out?
• Will there be a Mac or Ubuntu version?
• Can I transfer my demo save files into the full game?
• Avast! Antivirus Auto Sandbox does not recognize the .exe as safe!
• The graphics are not loading in Windows XP!

And updated Common Grounds’ manual:

• Note to Windows XP users
• New default install directories for v1.4

Video game manuals are a curious thing, as nowadays most games have a tutorial/manual built into them. It has us thinking if we even need to bother with one for House of Tail. I think they’re cool and a nice novelty, so we probably will. But who knows!

Forums…

A couple of users have told us that they have triggered our spam protection while either trying to register or log in recently, and we’re curious exactly how bad it has been. It’s a tricky thing to check. We have had to set up fairly extreme countermeasures against spam. While spammers have yet to make it past our protection, we are upset that some legit users have been blocked. We’re trying to figure something out, and are very sorry about any inconvenience.

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…

It’s an interesting time for small studio furry gaming. We’ve recently been told about several projects trying the crowd-funded angle and thought we’d pass it along.

Just a note, but none of these are adult-oriented. None! Not a single one ;_;

“Inherit the Earth 2” — “*un*Lukcy 7” — “Beasts Fury”

Wonderful Common Grounds fanart by Len Grey~

Hope you had a great year, and can’t wait to show you everything we have planned for the next one!

We finished writing a rather lengthy page about offers to help! You can find it here:

fupoco.com/team/

At first we tried to write something shorter and more concise, but felt it’s better for both you and us if we simply spelled things out. Like it says, we’re not actively hiring, but we are interested in teaming up and working with fellow creative-types. We’ll update it as things come up.

GO TEAM!!