*Category: House of Tail

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?

Finished House of Tail’s goal map.

If you assign any leaders, you can set their focus here. Some characters may have leader-only skills, but all characters can set the leader’s focus. It should make choices more interesting: do you set aside a character to lead the house? And if you do, do you want to focus on leveling up at the cost of making money, or make money at the cost of gaining experience? So it’s like six default leader skills all characters will have, but you can only choose one at a time.

Hopefully the rest should make sense. That blank space under ‘upgrades’ will show the icons of upgrades you have purchased.

When is this coming out?!

We have decided to include only the house and town maps for the initial release. This way, the answer will be sooner rather than later!

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! – 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.

A quick update showing the new and improved character info layout.

The old one is very, as we say ‘placeholder’ or ‘programmer graphics’. There probably will be other spots we can touch up after the release, but the goal is to release. And then do minor touch-ups and add more characters, maps, and things afterward, with an ear to what you’d like to see most.

The past few days have been wild, but I have been able to make some progress with the level-up screen and will hopefully have something to show next week~

Did we mention there will be leveling up characters? In the context of this game, it’s a character’s reputation or “Rep”, which in the current design heavily influences a character’s general ability.

A quick run-down of the basic stats:

• Charm – sometimes customers will pay a lot more for more charming characters, and it affects how well they can interact with others
• Sex – should be self explanatory~
• Hustle – affects most every job a little bit, sometimes more
• Smarts – affects stat growth and how effective items are
• Toughness – a general strength stat, how able a character is in combat and building things
• Obedience – determines if a character will do an assigned task, important to house workers

The stats on the right are special skills that vary greatly between characters. You can gain and increase them when you level up. Basic stats on the left increase at random depending on how you use the character.

Finally got around to designing HoT’s logo…

The aim was something simple, classy, and ‘screams porno game’.

I know the easy-out would have been to do something with the “Tail”, like drawing an actual tail underlining the logo, but it’s too expected, right? I think this works better, playing on expectations, being subtle and leaving the graphic details to, well… the graphics.

(click to view full sized image)

Screenshot of the title and main menu, (what I’m working on this week.)

The background and character columns scroll, and buttons float into position, all making it rather lively. I hope you will appreciate the little touches, have been putting my hands all over the code~ In a completely professional way, I assure you.

Two more pony characters added to House of Tail! I couldn’t stop. Still think the game needs more females, so am always open to ideas and/or parodies.

Currently finishing up the last bits of code, and fine-tuning the math. Will need to draw the map backgrounds, items, and a few story characters. And code the main menu / game select screen. Then onto beta-testing and release!

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Concerning offers to help…

You guys and gals are the best! We appreciate the offers to help and don’t want to discourage anyone, but we’re kind of in an odd position because we’re doing this professionally.

Upon spending a lot of time responding to these offers in the past couple of months, and discussing this topic with the team, we’ve decided it’s way past time to write some kind of official page to explain things. We’ll probably put it in the About Us page somewhere.

We do want to grow the team and talk about game ideas, but there are issues involved! Policy forthcoming…

Hiya! How’s it going?!

The user interface is drawn, most every character is in, basic functions are in place like dragging and dropping icons and viewing stats.

What you’re seeing here is the main house map, where you can assign characters to rooms, have them build new ones, and be maids or the master/mistress of the house. We’ll start with 3 maps, and will add more as we go along, with an ear to what you’d like to see.

We’re very happy to have the game running as smooth as lube in a web browser format. It’s very graphical and animated and audible. We’re hoping it will make it very accessible and easy to get into. I think our best innovation is the character icon and slot system.

There are quite a few games in this genre that I’d like to show you in a review format, and they’re very amusing and fun, but they also tend to be confusing and difficult to get into, (the porn helps.)

I hope the lack of constant explicit sex and extreme kinks everywhere won’t hurt House of Tail, would rather it feel more implied and play open-ended. Meaning: you get to use your imagination about sexual details and the game will try to stay out of the way and let it happen! XD

Well… back to work!

Happy Halloween!

We hope you’ll have much fun and candy. (The real party doesn’t start for us until a few days later when all that candy goes on sale–best of times!)

I floated the idea of adding a pony character to House of Tail’s roster, and the reactions were so silly and crazy that I had to draw at least one. I hope you won’t mind. She’s a vampire based off of Rarity, © Hasbro’s My Little Pony.

Since it’s a free game and all, we thought we could get away with a little parody. We are open to suggestions for other female characters, as the game’s lacking a bit there. No promises though, as these things take way too long to draw ;_;

That sneaky raccoon–how did he get into House of Tail?!

Character request update: we have about 8 more to finish and send out for final approval. Almost there! Should have close to THIRTY characters for the initial release.

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Team Fupoco will be away at Anime Weekend Atlanta this weekend, (September 28-30.)

After having experienced two furry conventions, we only thought it honest and true to see an anime one for perspective. I, for one, shall take many pictures and seek out the more ‘interesting’ things and dutifully report my findings. Have already seen events listed as ‘Maid the RPG’ and ‘Yaoi Pajama Party’, which is at like 3 in the morning!