Observations of the Fox

I recently discovered gifcities.org , while building the new neocities website for vulpinoid studios (if you're interested, look here ). I've been interested in the concept of the underground resurgence of the free web as a backlash against Web3.0 which is awesomely punk in its aesthetic. Neocities feels like the way the web used to be before the rise of Facebook and other social media platforms, a bit of a wild west where people can lay claim to an address and just do whatever cool stuff they want.  As a part of this, there has been a reclaiming of the 88x31 gif button, which is how I got led to GifCities. There's argument about how this standardised size was developed, with folks pointing to an early Netscape Navigator button as the prototype.    But it moved beyond there to other programs, and other links between sites back in GeoCities and MySpace days.   It's not hard to make something like this, and the file format is pretty small, so I figured I'd make my own...

 Vulpinoid Studios hasn't had a website for a while. It got to a point where the domain name had been adopted by a random advertiser, and then it seems that even they gave up paying for a domain name that wasn't generating a worthwhile amount of traffic.  Redeveloping a website is something that's been sitting in the back of my mind for a couple of years, along with so many other projects... but, in the last couple of days I've found a site hosting hub called Neocities . It kind of feels like a return to the pre-social media days of mySpace, or even further back to those days of Geocities (whoich is probably where the name derives from). I've even seen people developing webrings on this platform, and that brings back memories. If you're interested with where I've started on this new website, the address for the experimental site is... vulpinoid.neocities.org    

...basically. Still a lot more work to do on the Can of Beans website, but it's first encounters with people other than myself have generally proven successful. Give me a few more days (maybe a week or two while my attention is currently focused on EttinCon), and I'll be ready for a beta release of the site via this blog.

This is one of those images that I look at every couple of weeks just to see if people are actually looking at the blog, and to see how much interest there is in the various topics I've covered over the years. The other chart I look at shows which particular posts are getting the most views. In the top 10 posts, seven are from my Map drawing tutorials. What's probably more surprising is the degree to which that number 1 post is ahead of the others, while the differences between posts 2 to 9 only steadily decrease.  When I look at sources of traffic, recent months have seen a lot of Pinterest links, but a few other people's blogs have linked to me. So I'd like to offer a special thankyou to them, in no particular order. Tabletop Diversions - John Yorio's blog which covers a range of topics across the gaming spectrum.  Rab's Geekly Digest - which seems to foctus on miniatures and the warhammer range of games (rpg and otherwise) among other par...

I found that I had set up a tumblr a few years ago, I haven't really done anything with it. http://vulpinoid-blog.tumblr.com/ I revisited it tonight because I was looking for social media platforms that were a bit more video and image friendly... Especially after drawing up some images today and generating time-lapse footage of my work in progress. If anyone has some good tumblrs that they'd like to recommend me, I'd love to see what people think is worth following.

One of the things I loved about playing Bard's Tale 3 back in the very late 80s and early 90s was the fact that I could use my crude disc copying software of the time to read the byte clusters that made up the software. This meant I could cheat by modifying attributes, adding levels of hit points, activating certain character classes (such as the Geomancer) which normally required quests to be fulfilled, acquiring bonus equipment, or playing with the character image, even applying a monster image where my character's portrait should have been. That was high school and while it wasn't my first exposure to computer programming, it was my first real attempt at "modding" a game. It was enough of an obsession that my best friend at the time became the best man at my wedding over a decade later and used it as a part of his speech at my wedding. It was also the time when I really thought computers could be used for roleplaying in far better ways than they had so f...

Favorite RPG website/blog Probably G+. I'm a part of a few awesome game design communities there, as well as RPG artist communities, cartography communities, communities dedicated to specific games, communities for (reasonably) local gamers. Every time I wake up (and often three or for more times through the day), I can log onto G+ and see a new range of inspirations, see people excited for new gaming products, find new artists and new art from artists I already knew. It may not be a dedicated RPG social network, but I've tailored my streams and circles in such a way that it is for me. Once I would have said 1km1kt, the regulars over there are a great bunch of guys. But they've been pretty quiet lately. The only other RPG site that I regularly visit is my online store profile on RPGNow/DrivethruRPG , which gets checked maybe twice a week.

This might be a useful tool for quick character portraits Face Your Manga I've used it to create a few alternate face illustrations for the Walkabout explanatory comic. They don't quite match the characters as currently drawn, but I might be able to poke fun at this as a part of the comic (Ed says "Hey that doesn't look like me"...Alice reponds "I could only find a picture of your old haircut, I had to do the same for myself"). Alice Ben Carl Diana Ed ...and because I was in the mood for playing around, I developed an avatar for one of my LARP characters from a few years back....Yukiko (she was fun to play).

In redesigning the Vulpinoid Studios website, I started working on the page for RPGs that I've produced. At this stage there are nine full RPGs that I've written, plus almost two dozen supplements and a few works in progress. That's a lot of games that are hardly being played by anyone. http://vulpinoid.com/rpgs.html I've narrowed the assortment down to six games, two of which are works in progress. These are the games that I think have the most potential for expansion in the future. The games that I'd like to see played by a wider variety of people.

The first stages of the new Vulpinoid Studios website are online. Finally. Now to connect up all the pretty bits to my various online stores, and maybe build a central online store for the Studio. Have a look, tell me what you think.

Now I remember why I haven't bothered to update the website for a while. Firstly, I haven't looked at the site for a while, and that means certain parts of the free hosting service have gone into stasis on me (theoretically, taking 24 hours to awaken). It's now been more than 24 hours and they haven't been activated. I've looked at a couple of other places to host the website and they just seem to lead round in circles without providing the necessary details for actually getting a site online (being evasive about where to redirect DNS paths and other annoyances). But enough of my rant, I'll get back to game related stuff shortly.

It's been a while but I'm finally getting the change to work on the website again...We might actually have a nice looking site in a couple of days rather than just a placeholder with a funky gimmick. There's a web store in the background which is basically ready to go, but I've created quite a few new products since the online store was populated with products. So that will need reworking as well before I hook it up.

Time to get back to some things that I've been putting off for too long before the rush starts again. I'll be sending off the Free RPGs for those people who got in contact with me last week, and I'll be starting some work on the long overdue redesign of the company website. It's so tempting to start designing another game, but the last thing I need is yet another unfinished project.

Apparently, the Vulpinoid Studios website went down a few weeks ago. So one of my side projects has been a rebuild and redesign of the site. At the moment we just have a front page, but this should be indicative of the layout for the remainder of the website. http://www.vulpinoid.com Go over there, have a look. Tell me what you think.

I just decided to do some work to update the Vulpinoid Studios website...only to find that it isn't there. I don't know how long this has been an issue, but I might be holding off on game design work for a while until I get the new and improved website up and running (with new a Vulpinoid Studios web store where Goblin Tarot decks, physical books and downloadable pdfs will be available).

For the past 12 months I've been working on a number of projects, some of which I've publicised, others of which I've kept very quiet about. There have been stints in hospital, moving of house, looking for work...but on the more creative side, I've probably been generating more artwork than I have in over a decade. Some of this can be found on my deviantart profile , a great deal more is found on scraps of paper, cardboard and scattered computer files. A lot of this work has been an attempt to get my head straight about future projects, I've built up a catalogue of inspiration images, atmospheric photography, sketches and diagrams. ...which means I've basically put the Game Mechanism of the week project on sabbatical. At this stage I'd have fifteen weeks or so to catch up on, and I'd rather be designing than theorising about design. Over the next few weeks I'd like to reveal some of the design ideas I've been working on, to see if there is any in...

It cam as some surprise that half of the Walkabout page was missing. There must have been some issues during the last update. Maybe the server got disconnected halfway through the process. As a result of this, the Walkabout Page on the Vulpinoid Studios Website has now been updated. It can be found here.

I've finally gotten the page up for Come One Come All. It's a weird game, it didn't get a great response from Little Game Chef, but it's out there now. Anyone is free to have a look at it, manipulate it, modify it, and generally play with it in whatever way they feel improves the experience. I might go back to it once I've finished working on my Quincunx graphic novel, or my new series of children's books "The Adventures of Butterball and Skitz". (Yes..that's right, I'm starting yet another project. You can blame my wife for this one.)

After encountering a mysterious glitch that stopped most of my pages from rendering on any web-browser other than Firefox 2, it now seem that new updated version of the Vulpinoid Studios website now works. As for some of the questions about why the website is currently designated version 2.2.0, that's pretty simple, but it goes back a while. To cut a long story short, I had a previous website in the late 1990's and early 2000's, I even had a domain name registered for it. The various iterations of that website fall under the category of the 1.X.X series of version numbers. You can probably still find copies of it on the wayback machine , or by googling Ukiyo Zoshi, which was one of my earlier game concepts that was run by a few German groups in the early 2000's and still seems to be used as a object of modification by some game designers. The 2.X.X series of version numbers represents my second serious web presence. Where versions 2.1.0 through to 2.1.6 were different i...