CCSF 2015 Finalized

The CCSF 2015 planning process is now over. Thanks to all who contributed!

CCSF 2015 Survey #3 Results

The final festival will look something like this:

• CCSF 2015 starts Sunday, November 1st.
• It will last for One Week unless enough submissions are sent in to justify making it longer.
• It will be hosted on its own website. 
• The themes are Community Endurance/Longevity, Ecology, and Seasons.
• The coordinator-hosted events are:
• Community Wolfling Run
• Creature Adoption Sampler
• CC Chat Flashmob

Further information about those events will be here in due time. For now, I hope this gives people some idea about what to expect. 

As for me, my workload just increased by a lot. Wish me luck.

Finalizing the CCSF 2015

I haven't been using this blog for much other than announcing CCSF news lately; didn't even bother to announce my birthday this year. I've just been completely uninterested in playing Creatures lately, and certain events around the community have been hurting my interest even more.

But ignore all that. There's a CCSF that needs planning, and the latest poll just closed. Let's get on with that, shall we?

CCSF 2015 Survey #2 Results

And here's the next survey. This one will finalize the theme and events of the CCSF 2015.

CCSF 2015 Survey #3

I've decided not to put the date, length, and location in this survey and just decide on those myself based on personal judgment and the results to Survey #2. 

Sunday, November 1st will be the start date of the Festival. I've decided on this mostly because of tradition and because it'd give people the maximum amount of time to prepare. 

The festival will last for one week, unless enough submissions are sent in to justify a longer festival. Pretty self explanatory here. Given how sparse the last two CCSFs were in terms of submissions, I felt a shorter festival would be best in this case. 

CCSF 2015 will have its own website. My reasoning for this is because Creatures Caves has been attracting quite a bit of negative publicity lately and the atmosphere just wouldn't be able to support a CCSF. Coupled with my previous misgivings about Creatures Caves, I've decided an independent CCSF website would make the greatest amount of people feel comfortable about the CCSF 2015 and therefore actually contribute to it. 

Because of that last one, I'm looking for graphics designers and website coders to help me prepare the CCSF 2015 website. My own HTML skills have kind of degraded since I stopped adjusting this blog's design, and while I can make graphics the CCSF deserves better than what I can make. If interested, contact me at ccsf(dot)2015(at)yahoo(dot)com.

For everyone else, submissions are still open! Send those to ccsf(dot)2015(at)yahoo(dot)com as well. Feel free to use the following form to do so, though you don't need to adhere to it as long as your submission is adequately described. 

Author(s):
Name of submission:
Game (C1, C2, C3, DS):
Type (Agent/Cob, breed, drawing, fan-fiction, etc.):
Description:
Any special requirements?:

CCSF 2015 Survey #2

It's been long enough since I first posted CCSF 2015 Survey #1 that I feel it's time to move on to the next stages of planning for CCSF 2015.

Here are the initial results for CCSF 2015 Survey #1. As a reminder, you can still submit responses to Survey #1 if you wish; it'll remain open throughout the planning process.

CCSF 2015 Survey #2 is now ready to go! This is the more standard one that asks about themes and whatnot.

Furthermore, I've decided to officially open submissions for the CCSF 2015. Please send those to ccsf(dot)2015(at)yahoo(dot)com.

I have my own set of thoughts about the themes and other things about the CCSF 2015, and I'll post those here (copied from the Creatures Caves topic):

"I'm in favor of the traditional November date. It's worked out well enough for the past however many CCSFs, and it'll offer a decent amount of time for people to work on contributions from now until the festival's start. However, I am open to the idea of changing the festival's length; in the past, the distribution of the submissions throughout the festival sometimes got pretty thin. Having a bunch of more tightly packed releases over, say, one week could possibly make for a better CCSF than a bunch of sparsely distributed releases over two.

For the place for hosting it...I would rather not host the CCSF 2015 on Creatures Caves if I have a better option. Although 2014 at least tried to stand out more, the two CCaves CCSFs had massive trouble differentiating themselves from the rest of the site and they suffered for it as a result. Furthermore, one of the replies to Survey #1 made a very good point: hosting it here made the CCSF look like a feature of Creatures Caves when in reality it should be an event that spans the entire community. It's the sort of event that absolutely needs its own website.

Where would I put it instead? I'd love to have it be at www.creatures.org.uk, the traditional hosting place of the CCSF, but sadly I'm not sure how feasible that is. Worst come to worst I can put it on Blogger ala CCSF 2012, since that festival was, at least to me, one of the best, but if anyone has a better idea then say so in the survey.

Finally, the theme. I have an idea of my own I've been pondering ever since I chose to take the task of coordinating: the will to survive.

No, this isn't Darwinism or any other scientific related thing. I'm talking about the community's will to survive. The will that, long after the demise of Creatures Labs, keeps us playing this series, finding new things about it years after its release, and forging new addons for it when it could have died so long ago. We're still talking about it, sharing our findings and the fruits of our labors, and showing off all that we've done with and for it. Years after we've practically been abandoned, we're still alive and refuse to die.

This is the will that the CCSF is a testament to, and ultimately celebrating."

Artemia Sea Update #2

It's only been one post since the last Artemia Sea update, and here I am with another. Okay, in reality it's actually been a while since the last Artemia Sea update, but given how infrequently I've been posting it certainly looks recent. 

This update is considerably more substantial than the last one:

• All the flora and fauna will now fall down slightly after being picked up and dropped. This is because they stop functioning completely when picked up, and when one put them in the inventory or some other vehicle they'd unrealistically keep floating.
• Dead organisms will now adjust their falling speed depending on if they're in water or not. Previously, their floating speed depended on where they died; they'd drop like rocks if they died due to drowning in air or slowly fall down if they died of natural causes underwater, regardless of their current room type. 
• The adult jellyfish are considerably less toxic, making them slightly less dangerous to creatures.
• If for some reason a shark dies (normally they can only die when the hand manually changes their attributes and drags them above water), it won't "revive" if pushed or pulled. 
• The seahorses will move a little faster when trying to get to a plant or a mate, and are also less likely to go above the water's surface. 

As always it's available from the Metarooms page of the C3/DS Downloads section, or you can save yourself some clicking and just get it here.

I'm also working on updating the Deep Abyss, but it's not quite ready yet. I'm actually planning on trying to have it completely finished by the time CCSF 2015 rolls around. Whether or not I manage to release anything else then is still up in the air (on top of my usual laziness, I've also got the task of coordinating it to worry about).

Until the next one, folks.

CCSF 2015 Survey #1

So...funny story. Given the massive lack of talk about the CCSF 2015, I considered just hosting a "Creatures Appreciation Week" here instead. However, when I got the idea to have other people send stuff in for said week, I started wondering how it'd be different from a traditional CCSF apart from the length.

At that point, despite my "grumpy old man" philosophy towards the past couple of CCSFs, I decided that it'd be best if I just tried coordinating the CCSF. And so here I am!

I've created the first of several surveys for the CCSF 2015. Unlike the first surveys of past CCSFs, this one is mostly looking for thoughts on the tradition as a whole, what it's doing right, and what it could try to do better. The standard questions are being saved for future polls.

CCSF 2015 Survey #1

Let's see what we can do with this thing.