Difference between revisions of "High Tail Hall"

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High Tail Hall, also known as HTH, is a series of adult Flash and Unity Engine games created by Crowchild and his studio HTH Studios.

In it, the player's character can explore an island in an unspecified body of water, exploring the nature, ruins, and the titular "High Tail Hall", all while seeking intercourse with the furry characters on the island. The game currently exists as a public beta and is planned to have a full disk release when it is completed.

For a list of characters introduced in all versions of High Tail Hall, click here

High Tail Hall 1.0

Initial scene of the bar at High Tail Hall

High Tail Hall began its existence as a discussion on the Yiffstar messageboards. Crowchild, the creator of Pendragon Entertainment, announced he would be making a flash game akin to The Tail Underground, seeing as updates to it were sporadic at best. This announcement included a statement that people who wished to be in the animation need only ask.

Some time after the announcement and following a series of prototypes, the finished product, Version 1.5, was released.

It was believed that that High Tail Hall 1.5 was inspired by The Tail Underground, and vice versa. Both Ian R. Soulfox and Crowchild created their animations independently with overlapping development periods, with High Tail Hall being released after Tail Underground. Crowchild later confirmed that he used the idea of torch lighting from Tail Underground and incorporated it into his own game. Ian has mentioned that he doesn't mind HTH, and that he enjoys its existence. Crowchild also encourages similar projects, such as Crowjob in Space and The Penthouse.

Characters in Version 1.5

Fully interactive characters

• Luca Shoal, an androgynous male fox. Luca is a maid for High Tail Hall and wears a French maid outfit. He is owned by the player of the same name.
• Tanya Winters, a female Zebra. Tanya is a barmaid who serves drinks and sexual favors to guests.
• Zoe Mallari, a female cheetah who works as a stripper at High Tail Hall.

'Other characters:

• Maxwell Moore, a black male tomcat. Maxwell is a bartender and the implied owner of High Tail Hall. It is suggested that Maxwell has engaged in sexual relations with the strippers.
• Boris, an old male crow. Boris is from Russia and is one of Maxwell's regular customers.
• A female kangaroo stripper and an avian character. The kangaroo can be seen having sex with the avian character in the basement of the bar.
• An unnamed crow in a second floor room who only reads a book and has no further interactions with the player.

Locations in Version 1.5

High Tail Hall has a bar with an outside balcony on the main floor, private rooms on the second floor, a dance floor and bar downstairs off the ground floor. There is also a hidden entryway on the second floor only accessible by clicking one of the hallway lamps, a hidden envelope containing erotic photographs, and the code E1B2.

Clicking on a specific hanger in the storage room will take the player to a hidden room where they can enter the code on an unidentified electronic device. This triggers a scene that shows three red circles with the numbers 13, 85, and 27 on them, with each number being shown above a different circle.

While outside, clicking on the fourth tree from the right, will trigger a cutscene of a tryst between a male herp and a female faun.

Version 1.7

Version 1.7 gave other users the option to add third-party characters to the game for a fee. Unfortunately, a fire broke out in the Pendragon Entertainment studio, destroying the computer with all the commissions on it, and causing thousands of dollars worth of damage to the building, as well as taking the life of the neighborhood cat.^[1]

All Pendragon Entertainment projects were suspended, but full refunds were given to everyone who commissioned a character. Other changes that were planned for version 1.7 were:

• A redesigned Tanya Winters.
• The ability to venture outside the pub, where one could find a non-functional Stargate, and a hidden location with an orcish character and satyr.
• Jade Felicia Lanely, a female blue fox (incomplete full interaction. Right-clicking "play" on the character shows some of the intended interaction, before the sequence abruptly ends.)

1.7 was dropped, and now only exists in an archived version.

High Tail Hall 2

The logo of High Tail Hall 2

After a period of time in which Crowchild was preoccupied with moving and working, a new game called High Tail Hall 2 was released as the latest installment of the HTH series. This included new characters, a new setting, and an updated art style.

From March 2008 to December 2008, several new characters with numerous new adult character-to-player-to-character interactions had been added to the game's content. According to Crowchild's FurAffinity page, an update was scheduled for October of 2009, but it did not occur. Crowchild resurfaced on February 21st 2010 promising an update within three weeks. However, this deadline was missed as well. The project was considered by much of the community to be dead.^[2]. Tyvara Panther, the voice actress for Rio Davis and Crowchild's girlfriend, commented on Crowchild's FurAffinity page, linking to a blog post made on her page, which answered some questions posed about the status of the project by the community.

It was later revealed that the operating system and computer Crowchild used to develop High Tail Hall 2 and HTH Studios Presents: Rio suffered an irreversible crash, erasing all progress that Crowchild made on both of the projects.

Characters

The Lounge in High Tail Hall 2

Fully interactive characters:

• Bella, a female polar bear (voice acting by Amaracol Canis).
• Rio Davis, a female wolf/fox hybrid (voice acting by Tyvara Panther).
• Ginger, a hermaphrodite cat (temp. inactive).
• Jezzel, a female husky.
• Shelly, a female collie.
• Shemyay, a female jackal (temp. inactive/off game).
• Cindy, a female rabbit.
• Kristy, a female cat.
• Aleta, a female parrot (voice acting).

Other characters:

• Bruce, a male dinosaur (Bartender).
• Drake, Simone, and two unnamed swans, a male duck with three female swans.
• An unnamed non-anthropomorphic parrot on a stand.
• Felicity, a female rat.

High Tail Hall Classic

Beta scene of the bar in High Tail Hall Classic

On October 31st, 2007, Crowchild released an image of the beta of the bar scene and a sound test of Maxwell Moore from a once-planned remake of High Tail Hall 1.5, titled High Tail Hall Classic.

HTHC was intended to be a remake of the High Tail Hall 1.5, and was planned to feature the updated character models from High Tail Hall 2. This was dropped in favor of recreating the original hall on the island while keeping the new locations and characters.

High Tail Hall: Twilight Cavern

It has been suggested that this section be split into a new article. (discuss)

High Tail Hall: Twilight Cavern was a fan created spin-off of the original High Tail Hall created by Jack Salem, which was planned to consist of High Tail Hall's pre-existing characters and locations alongside new ones created by Jack. Twilight Cavern was planned to have 12 female characters, 1 male character, and 6 locations.^{[citation needed]}High Tail Hall: Twilight Cavern was planned to include exclusively heterosexual content. A musical score, consisting of mostly jazz tracks, was composed by Jack himself.

Upon Jack Salem discovering in 2008 that High Tail Hall was relaunched, the Twilight Cavern project became a separate project, dropping "High Tail Hall" from the title and removing Crowchild's characters and any ties to them. Jack stated on YiffStar, the same website the project was first announced on, that he was continuing to work on Twilight Cavern.

Jack Salem later posted on the YiffStar forum that he started a commission service as a fundraiser to support the re-creation of the Twilight Cavern project. He was working on establishing a new website and planned on taking commissions for new characters shortly afterward.

As of 2007, A short interactive animated preview released on December 25, 2006 and several images of the characters are all that has been released of the Twilight Cavern project. The current state of the Twilight Cavern project is unknown.

OpenHTH

OpenHTH was an open sourced community-created project based around High Tail Hall 1.7, whose goal was to vastly improve the game by enhancing existing content and adding new content to it.

The first and only version of OpenHTH was 0.0.2 which contained dialogue enhancements, replaced incorrect spelling and grammar, fixed typographical mistakes in the original HTH 1.7, added ambient music, and included background animation enhancements.

Users were encouraged download the latest version of OpenHTH and assist in adding content or enhancing the game, or download the base version of HTH 1.7 and create their own modifications to the game.

The plan of OpenHTH consisted of the following Phases:

1. Introduction to editing stage: which was to replace all the dialogue while pertaining to a persistent back story and to to give it more of an atmospheric and immersive feel to it. Another part of the first phase was to extend the length of the dialogue and to have much more interactive character conversations, to set it up as more of a game for later stages, then finally after all that is done fix any animation errors, that may get accidentally introduced from the editing.
2. Technical and creative theory stage: which was to review the dialogue, plan where the game was headed, write up design documents for planned areas and characters, write the stories for the main game and the events preceding it, and to determine the character's persona and write dialogue centered around the said persona.
3. Technical backend stage: which was to create an engine for the game from scratch, which was to contain basic RPG elements such as a journal and an inventory.
4. Content creation stage: which was to create new art and animation using what was planned out in phase two to dictate what exactly need to do, as well as adding in sound effects and creating musical scores.
5. Putting it together stage: which was to link the content to the back end and define what the content was supposed to do, what was supposed to happen in each conversation path, put in the correct dialogue for characters, and to get the journal to update on certain events.
6. Testing stage: which was to test the game for seeing what functioned properly and to fix any mistakes or bugs present in the game.

The six-phase plan was designed to be repeated a large number of times by users who wanted to contribute to the OpenHTH project.

The OpenHTH project's webpage was later taken down and was archived on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

High Tail Hall (2011)

On February 26, 2011, HTH Studios launched a completely changed and revamped version of High Tail Hall with a new interface and a new look. This iteration of High Tail Hall dropped version numbering from its title, returning to "High Tail Hall" while the original game became referred to as "HTH Classic" within the community. On October 21st, 2012, Crowchild unveiled a $5 per month Gold Membership plan as a method of keeping the project funded, allowing him to fully dedicate his time to developing High Tail Hall. A High Tail Hall Wiki was later created by the Studio on Wikia to document the game's characters, locations, items, and other important information[1].

Flash

The original Flash version of High Tail Hall (2011) used a combination of animated sprites/scenes created in Adobe Flash and pre-rendered backgrounds created in LightWave 3D while retaining the point-and-click gameplay of its predecessors. Additions to the initial Flash version of HTH (2011) included a real-time day-night cycle, a bird's eye map of the Cyana Archipelago and its numerous locations, and in-game puzzles that have yet to be solved by players.

Crowchild continued to develop the Flash version of the game every year until October 2017, with an average of three scenes per month, and occasional location updates. The game's return was accompanied by a real-time day-night cycle, a bird's eye map of the Cyana Archipelago and its numerous locations, and in-game puzzles that have yet to be solved by players.

The Flash version was available as an in-browser open beta accessible to users who created an account on the HTH Studios website until it was removed on August 30, 2018 as part of HTH Studio's switch to a new website. After the transfer was complete, HTH Studios announced on September 29, 2018 that the Flash version will be re-released as an offline download in response to the continued depreciation of Adobe Flash on most major web browsers ^[3]

Unity Engine

The intital starting point of HTH Unity as of Alpha 0.1e

In October 2017, due to the pending discontinuation of Adobe Flash support and its increasing destabilization, HTH Studios announced that High Tail Hall and Red Light District would be moved over to the Unity Engine, which would be later followed by a new incarnation of the HTH Studios website. The first public Alpha version of HTH was released on February 17, 2018 ^[4], showcasing quality and gameplay improvements not seen in the previous three incarnations of High Tail Hall.

With the launch of the Unity engine version, Crowchild announced that High Tail Hall will be slowly re-branded as New Cyana as the game gets closer to being released.

Controversy

Early versions of High Tail Hall prior to version 1.1 included an uncredited clip of Depeche Mode's song "Personal Jesus." This clip was removed from 1.2 on.

On January 27, 2017, HTH Studios announced the discontinuation of scene updates and limited the number of interactive characters and accessible locations to free members in response to financial difficulties the studio has faced over the years. The announcement provoked backlash among members, with accusations of HTH Studios and Crowchild being greedy as a result of the increasing number of paid content in High Tail Hall over the years.^[5]. On July 13th, 2017, free content updates temporarily returned in the form of a character rotation system in which a single Gold-Exclusive character would be available for one month to free users, decided on by the $10 patrons of HTH Studios' Patreon account.^[6]. This system was later discontinued in favor of a free version of the HTH Unity build that is scheduled to be released in the future.

References

1. ↑ HTH FAQ
2. ↑ Fur Affinity journal by Crowchild, dated 21 February, 2010
3. ↑ HTH Studios Store Relaunch Announcement
4. ↑ HTH Unity Alpha 0.1a announcement
5. ↑ http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/8051153/ Retrieved 2017/01/30
6. ↑ http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/8320342/ Retrieved 2017/09/07

External links

• HTH Studios official website
• High Tail Hall 1.5 at Newgrounds
• High Tail Hall 1.7 archived copy
• High Tail Hall 2 Original (2008) archived copy
• HTH Wikia
• High Tail Hall 2 forum Original High Tail Hall forum
• HTH's FurAffinity page. Displays current art and updates to the game
• OpenHTH Archive Internet Archive backup of OpenHTH's webpage and source code.
• HTH Patreon page
• HTH on Facebook