This Silence is Boring.

By now, I can happily say that I'm not going to be on hiatus any time soon. I've finally gotten the state of the Creatures install on my new computer close to where it originally was on my old one. I just need to install the map editor and find some way to get the GIMP Plugins and MNG Tools working and I'll be golden as far as development goes.

Only problem: where the heck is the rest of the community?

None of the main blogs have gotten new posts in months, CCaves is dead silent apart from a few newbies and will probably remain so until the revamp goes online, and it doesn't seem CTopia is any closer to getting out of the rut it's been in for the last year or so. One would think summer would be the peak of activity in a community like this, and yet it's the opposite. Either this summer is particularly busy for some reason (I know there's some people who are moving), or everyone's enjoying the break while it lasts. I envy that latter group - not having a social life outside the internet hurts sometimes.

I've heard that the best way to encourage activity is to be active, so I might as well make this blog interesting for the CC members who are just as bored as I am. So, I've decided to take some suggestions.

Is there anything you would like to see happen here? Interested in seeing a wolfling/feral run get documented? A few tidbits about projects such as the Flesheaters? CAOS/Genetics tutorials? Or heck, even a genetic breed/agent (that doesn't require new sprites) you'd like to see made? I'm open to all sorts of ideas.

In case you're wondering about some projects, I'm holding off on doing anything about the Sea Garden until I get the GIMP problem fixed, since trying to use the Sprite Builder for this sort of thing is both tedious and tends to create rainbow spew, and I'm not too convinced about Edos being a worthy substitute. No, it's not cancelled. On the other hand, I've finally come up with some sort of direction for the Sea Monsters V2 beyond "generic amphibious grendel breed" (they absorbed some features of the Merrow Grendels, which I briefly mentioned in a past post). Stay tuned - I'll probably talk more about the sea monsters in future posts.

Metallophagus Update + Potentional Blog Name Change

First off, I've uploaded the updated Metallophagus Pack. The carrot should now be considerably less prolific and creatures now have more ways to interact with the seeds. It's available from the same link as before and therefore can be found on the Downloads page or the initial Metallophagus release post. You can also get it here.

Right, now onto a slightly more pressing issue.

Some of you are probably wondering why this blog is named what it is. Well, the name itself is also the name of a particularly good song made by a Newgrounds user. This song, to be exact. Since I liked the song and the feel of it suited what my blog was about, I decided to name the blog after the song as a homage. "Hole" in this case is referring to "hidey-hole." I suppose the name could be interpreted to mean "My own little world," which is the feel I imagine the author of the aforementioned song was aiming for. I know that was what I was aiming for with the blog's title.

However, it's the name of the blog that leads into a big problem. "Hole" has a bunch of other meanings, one of which is very, VERY inappropriate as far as this blog and the Creatures Community in general. Unfortunately, I recently found that one of the major traffic sources to this blog seem to be reading "Hole" with this alternate meaning in mind - the second biggest, in fact (it's apparently responsible for 12-13 hits a day). So I decided to read the title using that meaning of "Hole"... and suddenly the name doesn't sound quite so family friendly.


So I'm seriously considering changing the blog's name to something else that doesn't carry such an...undesirable alternative meaning and therefore keeping the traffic that has no business being directed here off. Therein lies another problem: I'm somewhat attached to the name since it's intended meaning is really fitting.

What do you guys think? Do you think that enough people are going to take the title as innuendo to make changing the name worth it, or do you think it's a non-issue? I suppose I could just be worrying too much, but the fact that this inappropriate site is the second largest source of traffic here is really, really bothering me.

The Current State of Things + Blog Improvements?

I should be making another post about Ark World, but nothing much has happened since the last time I posted about it. The population is still doing nothing but munching on carrots, no one has moved from the spots where my last post left them, and no one seems to be interested in breeding.

So instead, I want comments about the blog. I recently was told that the current color scheme (specifically, the black text on a dark gray background) was somewhat difficult to read. Is anyone else having problems reading the blog, or is this a one-off?

As well, I'm also wondering what everyone thinks of this blog thus far. If you have any suggestions, comments, etc. about how to make this place look nicer, be more easily accessible, etc. I am treating this place like a bona-fide website, after all - I'd like to make it the best it could possibly be.

Besides that, I also have a few projects planned. The first and biggest of them is yet another collab with Mea - The Sea Garden, which is a pack of aquatic lifeforms that should hopefully help alleviate the lack of standalone aquatic plants and critters (in case you're reading this Mea, it's okay to leave the images for that up at your blog - this isn't supposed to be a secret or anything P=).

Speaking of aquatic plants and critters, I'm also planning on completely revamping the fish + anemone from the Biodome Pack if that's alright with everyone who worked on the pack. The anemones are classified as "critter" and their spores as "animal egg" when they should be classified as "plant" and their spores as "seed" (prevents carnivorous creatures from trying to eat the anemone and getting turned off as a result, and the spores can be a valuable source of starch). Most of the fish are also in dire need of a recode (I have no idea what went wrong with them, considering the cod/mackerel in Devil's Reef use similar coding and they work perfectly fine), and the one fish who isn't also can't be eaten, which is again a bad idea from a design standpoint.

The final future project is yet another breed update - the Sea Monsters V2. For those of you unfamiliar with the breed, V1 was the first breed I ever publicly released (although they didn't receive much fanfare considering they were put up for download at Alien's Norn Adoption Center). They were amphibious grendels who were generally friendly unless slapped, crawled around on all fours, and ate critters instead of food. V1.4 was the result of my thinking the originals were badly done, and updated them to use less third-party sprites and to only lay eggs underwater. Since I was never happy with that version, a proper V2 is in order. I have no idea what I'm going to do for them besides the features in the original versions; however, with any luck they should be released sometime before the Sea Garden is.

Yay, another wall of text without pictures. P=