*Category: House of Tail

Various levels of insanity are often required to make video games.

Status Report

Wanted to drop by to say hi!

We’re still alive and hard at work on House of tail. The story has been drafted – a tentative 12 chapters plus tutorial. I’m currently drawing story characters and implementing the chapters. It might take a while for the next update.

This also means we’re getting closer to ending the early bird discount. We’ll give you a month’s heads-up before we do.

Things are getting very exciting behind the scenes, can’t wait to show you more characters!

A minor update today, probably the last one where it’s only built around demoing casual play. While it doesn’t seem like much, there were a number of behind the scenes things worked on. So it’s okay to skip this update, really. Good news is it’s time to get into the story. We’re looking at about 4 acts, 3 chapters a piece. Maybe more, maybe less.

And we appreciate the comments! Don’t want to keep you waiting too long. Thanks for sticking with us so far~
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HoT v 8.16.13

• changed – various things
• can select individual characters on feedback banner
• stat and cost balancing (will be on-going, by no means finished…)
• hiring limited

New layout for the feedback banner.

House of Tail Status

No game update today, but expect one in the near future, (perhaps this week!) 🙂

Above you can see part of the reworking of the daily feedback banner. It still shows an overview, but now you can view individual characters and see what they’ve been up to. This way, it will be easier to see how well everyone’s doing, instead of trying to read through that jumbled mess that it is now.

Spent some time looking into animation, getting the story ready, and making lots of little adjustments. While we’re not there yet, we are much closer to a balanced game. Character prices are now more pronounced, meaning weaker characters are much more affordable and useful. There’s a cap on how many characters you can have that increases while you play, which gives a good build up feeling and will come in handy for the story sections.

It’s been an adventure in coding that I hope is mostly behind us. Things got real goofy with the feedback banner’s string parsing this past week. While we’ve tested to make sure it works, it’s still rough around the edges. Which leads us into…

Major Construction Ahead

Game updates will be kind of wild for a while. Please bare with us–it’s for the best!

The plan is to focus on putting in the story sections, and then adjust casual play around all the maps and things that are added from that. We still have sound, extra goodies for the download version, lots of graphics, an instruction manual, and other things to do that I’m forgetting ^^;

Am pretty excited about it and hope to surprise a lot of you (in a good way) with how this will shape up~

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)

Update time!

This one introduces character skills and items.

Hover over skill names to see their description, and you can find the items at the item shop on the town map. This is only a start, so expect to see a lot more skills and items coming up!

Also fixed a lot of bugs/glitches. Should have the rest taken care of by the next update.

We appreciate all the feedback. You guys are the best! I feel like we don’t thank you enough. (And special secret thanks to everyone who has already picked up a copy!)

Next up: will probably focus on cleaning up what’s already there, balancing the game (sorely needs another pass,) and posting some kind of help guide.

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v 6.21.13

• NEW – items introduced!
• basic healing items
• NEW – character skills introduced!
• basic stat adjustment skills
• fixed – various glitches…
• sell a character, make a ton of money
• upgrade shop – generates right arrow button when not needed
• items need to show up on character info display
• house condition bar color mismatching
• when character becomes tired or worse, update map to reflect new price
• when leader tired, does not add customers to house pool, even though shows it
• when leader tired or worse, icon on goal map does not reflect their condition
• character icons…
• sidebar health color does not match icon’s health color
• icons do not show anything but basic sprite when changing maps
• item map – character icons not displaying colors/status correctly
• feedback banner resets to ‘day 0’ when loading a game

It has been a busy time outside of fupoco related stuff for us. Expect more interesting updates next week, but until then…

Saving and loading should be bug-free!

You can also use the right mouse button on a character’s icon to send them to your reserve.

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v 6.11.13

• NEW – right mouse button: instantly send a character icon to the reserve
• fixed – (web) save a game, refresh the web page, then load: game unplayable
• fixed – various load-game bugs…
• icon layering (customers / coins appear underneath)
• character health appears full when it isn’t
• double characters & characters already purchsed appear in hire menu
• runaway characters – place icons on invalid spots
• icon on other map will appear in wrong place briefly when changing maps, one time only
• fixed – (web) leader icon incorrectly showing up on goal-to-map transitions

A quick update on some early bugs…

The versions will be the build dates – we don’t see any reason to make up some arcane numbering scheme… unless you really want “v2.111.42.999” shenanigans 😎

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v 6.2.13

• fixed – press item button twice with no items (stalled web version)
• fixed – save/load errors (you will need to create a new save)
• possibly fixed – portraits shaking then becoming stuck (movement code rewritten)

And thanks for the feedback and excitement! Can’t thank you enough.

There is no sound, yet. Please bear with us as we work it in.

A how-to-play section is in the works. If you have any questions before then, it would be our pleasure to answer.

Initial release! Visit the website

This marks Fupoco’s first venture into online gaming. Hurray!

I’m probably going to take a day or two off to freshen up. There’s a lot left to do, and we really want to add a ton of more content. Not to mention keeping track of your suggestions and ideas. Most questions should be answered once we flesh out the game’s website some more.

You can play the game here: House of Tail – Play

Enjoy~

House of Tail’s initial release is still scheduled for the end of the month, May 31st. Just a friendly reminder.

Currently working on the basic structure of ‘casual play’, so you’ll have at least one mode to play.

Whether or not we finish this, we’ll release it regardless. The idea has always been to release it first, then update and add content afterward. While we usually prefer to only release when the game’s more or less finished, please understand House of Tail will be very rough at first~

And who knows how big it will get~~

The game will be free to play online, but there will be a download version available for purchase. It will be the same game, plus some features that we can’t quite fit into the online version, such as multiple save slots and a higher frame rate.

I hope you’ll enjoy what’s there and thanks for waiting 🙂