Sunsetting The Foxington Vault Project

TL;DR - I'll be winding the project down because I've lost interest throughout the years and will be expiring the foxingtonvault.com domain.

Quick backstory

I found Super Lucky's Tale out of the blue when Steam recommended it, and I am in my "opening" furry stage in mid-2018. I didn't care if it was a kids' game, the one thing that drew me playing to was that fox named Lucky. But I was more fixated with Kitty Litter, the group protagonist in the game − Tess, the yellow cat with scar marks, in particular, I kinda find but resonate with her geeky side with her machinery, but I digress.

Luckypedia

During the middle of the pandemic, amidst editing a couple of Fandom wikis, I stumbled on Luckypedia, and how it was lacking any information about the game, characters, etc. By the end of my school semester, I started contributing to the wiki more frequently, until I "adopted" the wiki and was granted full admin access, giving me a Bureaucrat role.

During this time, I have given it my all and provided as much information about the Lucky's Tale franchise; even as going as far as to decompile the game and extract its assets.

There's a picture of Paul Bettner, Playful's CEO, holding hands with Lucky; which was his Twitter profile at the time but couldn't find a full resolution of the picture. Thankfully, Snazzy, one of the server admins, has archived it and I upscaled it with AI using icons8.

On September 17, 2021, I requested the Fandom reps to update the URL from "luckypedia.fandom.com" to "luckys-tale.fandom.com" since the wiki name is ambiguous and needs a name change. And since then, there haven't been any significant changes to the wiki in a long time.

Working on a fansite

After talking to some of the peeps on the Lucky's Tale Discord server, and other Lucky-related servers with it, I've gathered a handful of Lucky info that's potentially lost media. I've thought about making a standalone website since it won't be suitable for a wiki page entry; after all, this is where I was expanding beyond editing wikis and tapping into front-end web development.

So I formed The Foxington Vault, which was a fansite and a non-profit digital archive project for archiving the entire Lucky's Tale franchise created by Playful Studios in 2014. My goal is to gather as much substantial and public information about its game, mechanics, guides, and coverage — including the inner workings of the game, decompiled assets, models and sounds from its games.

It was initially called "The Lucky Treehouse," a nod from one of the Discord moderators joking about how Lucky lives in the Treehouse. Still, knowing Nintendo about their petty lawsuits in the past, I renamed the project "The Foxington Vault," taken from one of the chapters of the game, one of them being "Foxington."

So, what was my intention for the project? Not a lot of people know about the games or vaguely remember seeing it somewhere else, and I believe that any kind of media preservation is vital for any work out there, if it goes unnoticed for a long time, then it’s considered lost media.

This is the sole reason I created this project; to provide a brim of Lucky information from various sources and keep this platform game to retain longer relevance and interest supplemented with community-curated content. Playful puts the amount of dedication, love, and work they put into this franchise and I’m one of the lucky ones (pun intended) who care about the effort they put in and decide to document and preserve for the token of their hard work.

I haven't had the slightest clue about what the website will look like. I based it off this Balto fansite from 2003 but have a modern approach to it. But I began work on the fansite by the end of 2021. Even while getting a COVID vaccine, I was working on the website to prove my dedication to this project.

After a year or so, I've planned out the sitemap, which will include walkthroughs complementing the fansite. Throughout the development of the project, I was overthinking about copyright laws even though I'm highly confident that the project is protected under Fair Use.

For reference, I decided to look at other fansites, such as Taylor Swift and a particular now-defunct BTS fansite: All For ARMY; I noticed that they have a clause at the site footer, something along the lines of "hey, we don't own claim the things we use on this website, we use it for informational purposes, kay, thanks~"

Winding down

A few years that followed after, with all the different projects and videos I've been working on, my interest in the project started to fade away. I've amassed a lot of photos, some lost media, one of which was a proposed "Super Duper Lucky's Tale" from a discord server from Lucky's VA, Caitlyn Bairstow; and some contacts for the winning prizes back in 2021 on Lucky-related Discord servers.

It made me realize that it's not worth the bandwidth to continue anymore because of the lack of updates from Playful's end, after three years of the project being in an unfinished state, it's safe to say that I'll be indefinitely canning this project.

When I bought the domain foxingtonvault.com in December 2022, I thought, "I needed to get it working by the middle of 2023. " Again, that never came to fruition. So, with all that being said, I've disabled auto-renewal on the domain and let it expire until the end of this year. I archived the GitHub organization on July 21 this year.