For the past couple years, I’ve tended to blur the line when it comes to my sincerity here on Newgrounds, but these annual recaps are meant to be a lot more transparent: I guess there is more of a filter than usual, but I try to be a lot more honest with these things and allow anyone who reads a much more in-depth look into what I’ve been up.

On that note, this year, I wanted to write my annual recap as it happens: time will tell if this approach works or not (I’m expecting that this’ll make for a much longer read at the very least), but I’m hoping it’ll allow a more transparent look into the creative process which I’m hoping people will like. So many times in the past few years of doing this, I had to pause for a second to reflect on my work, and oftentimes I end up needing to kind of fictionalize some of it around what little I could remember. Like I said though, hopefully this “write it as it happens” approach fixes that!

Up until recently, I had a job I absolutely loathed, so I felt like I truly needed to make art in order to kind of express what I was going through... but I really don’t think a website where I make joke movies and games is the right place to delve into that sort of thing much deeper hahaha.

This is all to say that I think I made very different content this year as compared to my output before. It’s exciting stuff for sure: I wouldn’t call it “bold”, but I think it is certainly a new direction for me, and it’s going to be interesting seeing how my new stuff stacks up against the old!

YEAR SUMMARY

I was finally able to accept Tom Fulp’s offer to make the site wall art for pixel day! Definitely another highlight of my time on Newgrounds.

I still sorta feel like it’s slightly incomplete: I wanted to include 100 games total (sort of as an homage to my first really big piece 100 Flash Games) but I only got around to about 60.

Like I said before, it seems like most of the wall artists either don’t know what the community is actually doing or deliberately choose to only highlight already popular submissions: they treat it more like a Mount Rushmore than a Salon of the Champs Elysees.

Shoutout to my boy Slimygoo, he did a pretty kickass one. If you’re interested, the list of every single character included in the wall art can be seen here!

Games

To be honest, I never expected Gate To Hades would ever get a sequel: objectively it’s one of the worst games I’ve ever made (I’ve been involved with far worse though), but Paytonio wanted to do an arcade shooter for pixel day, and for whatever reason he found the original game inspiring.

As any good sequel should be, Gates Of Hades is substantially different from the original: the only things we reused were two enemy types (Malphas Jrs and Invisiboos), the protagonist, and the general premise. I still really like a lot of the designs we did for it: harkening back to dark age paintings where demons are depicted as horrifying chimeras with deformed faces.

The response to the game ended up being a little more mixed than usual, but in this case I think it stemmed from a fundamental misunderstanding of how the game works: it seemed that when most players went into GOH, they expected the characters to move smoothly and precisely like in a modern 2D platformer (Pizza Tower and the like), but Payton and I both really like that slightly clunky feel of old school arcade game controls: where the characters are weighty and the jumps are extremely committal.

I finally finished up what I’ve been calling the « Bird Tapper Map Pack » or Bird Tapper vs the Krampus Fellowship Clan early this year, but I’ve already written a retrospective blogpost about that game. The game came about because friends kept asking to make levels for the original, but I wanted to do more than just slap a couple extra levels on and call it done, so we decided to throw in the alternate characters and a unique tileset too.

The whole process was a lot more of a pain than I figured it’d be honestly. It’s exhausting managing so many people, and the whole process soured my mood when it comes to hosting large-scale collabs. I doubt I’ll do something like that again, but I’ve always been of the opinion that it’s good to do new things and get outside your comfort zone like this.

The last game I made this year was Consealed, a sort of detective game based on the works of John Carpenter. This game, alongside Cucumber Drag Show formed the « Tunaware Double-Feature », which was quite fun to see through!

I was pretty surprised with just how dynamic the entire creation process for the game was: it evolved very quickly, and was a breeze to develop (aside from hurricane Milton fucking me over lol). Honestly, I think we just needed a pace breaker from Croak Crusader’s stressful development and this was a perfect, low-stakes way of letting off some steam.

The whole thing was sort of an elaborate joke based on some anecdotes from Roverkibb and BobbyBurt about Canadian harp seals, which I found quite funny (especially Roverkibb's).

It’s probably set in the same world as Karrion Killer, but I never really consider the story all that important when I’m making these kinds of games. Maybe whenever we get around to Karrion 2, The Sealer could be a boss?

I should also shout out Cucumber Drag Show. I have nothing more to really say about the game other than it was a really fun time.

As alluded to earlier, we began working with 2 Left Thumbs in May to re-release Beetle Ninja, and to make a new game: « Croak Crusader: the Champion of Canada ».

I wrote a retrospective article about Beetle Ninja about 2 years ago, but it’s now been 4 years since the game was first released (which makes me feel extremely old lmao), so it’s tough to really get back in the headspace of what I was thinking while developing it. I’m happy with most of Beetle Ninja, although there were a lot of flaws that slipped through the cracks: if I were to redo the game today, I would do a lot of stuff very differently. I think undeniably I dropped the ball hard after I finished the development part, but we’re finally course-correcting for that now with the Steam re-release, and hopefully more people will check it out!

Croak Crusader though I think will be fun: I doubt it’ll set the world on fire or anything like that, but I think people like me will enjoy it. In execution it sort of plays like a mix of DOOM, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Sexy Hiking. Hopefully that’s vague enough a recommendation for you to want to learn more by checking out the demo!

Animations

I also released a couple of brand new flash cartoons this year: « The Other Guy 4 Prez 2024! », « Norm Macdonald Explains Clock Day », and « Action Prometheus »!

I was basically just trying to practice lip syncing with « The Other Guy 4 Prez 2024! » (hence the talking heads interview style), and it was a pretty fun time putting it all together. The whole thing was kinda based around all those obnoxious presidential campaign ads from the 2020 and 2024 election cycle where random celebrities just rant about how much they hate Donald Trump. Dry voiced Jimmy Kimmel and Kim Jong Un, and Roverkibb voiced Ryan Reynolds (the Canadian border guard).

At the risk of getting political, I did not expect Trump would win the election and was making the film with that in mind. Is that something you need to know going in? No, not really, but it just means this one might age like milk, haha!

With « Norm Macdonald Explains Clock Day », I did the whole thing in about half an hour, so very little thought went into any of it. The aesthetic is really fun in my opinion: when you’re making something fast you’ve gotta lean into stylized visuals and a unique sense of design to make something cool! Somebody told me it looks like a newspaper cartoon, and I kinda like that… I think it’d be cool to lean into that look more for future animations.

Finally « Action Prometheus » was done as part of a presentation I had to give for a class, but I got carried away and ended up making it a minute-long cartoon. The prompt was « turn a greek god into a toy for children ». I cranked it out in an afternoon, and it was quite fun!

I’ve had those designs for the mom, dad, and little baby laying around for I think two years now, so it was nice to finally use them for something. « Coolman Junior » is also a reused design: I did a bunch of background props for a LISA collab entry I was gonna do with MKMaffo, and one of them was sort of a jab at the censorship in the definitive edition, where cigarettes got replaced by « cigarette candy ». I ended up drawing a funny little cigarette man holding a white candy bar in an orange wrapper saying « Eat up, you fat fucks! » for a little billboard prop, and I thought it was way funnier than it probably actually was. It was fun getting to do some voice acting, I finally got to bust out my impressions of both my dad and Billy Mays, which was pretty cool.

THE FUTURE

As I write this, I’ve been involved with about 30 games, a little over half of which are basically my own, and I think I’ve made a total of about… 300 dollars from sales? Maybe? It’s more if you factor contests into it, but sales-wise I’ve always kinda struggled to « break even ».

TunawareDevs is sort of a « Hail Mary » for me: I’m quadrupling down on game development for at least the next couple years with a kickass team. We’re all university students, and so for all of us the worst possible outcome is having some extra things to put onto our portfolios.

If Tunaware turns out to be a bust though, that’s fine too: Beetle Ninja’s release 4 years ago really reinforced to me that expecting a game to do well enough to even pay rent is absurd. Game development has always been a fun hobby, and I still get at least some joy from it, so if things turn out poorly, I can probably use it as a stepping stone to work elsewhere in the industry.

I’m still chugging along with GiggleForce as well. It’s basically a passion project in the same vein as my other RPGMaker games, but it's rather unique from those other games in that GiggleForce is meant to be a more cinematic comedy (in the same vein as Conker’s Bad Fur Day).

There is sort of a throughline: everything added needs to be related to the game’s core themes in some way shape or form, but I’ll generally include anything that makes me laugh. Writing it has been fun, since it gives me the opportunity to sort of contextualize a lot of inside jokes. There is an intended storyline, but sometimes I have fun and veer off to add new stuff that isn't in the original script (oftentimes, I think these turn out to be some of the best moments in the game).

I think of it sort of like that American pop-culture satire Earthbound is so often (incorrectly) labeled as turned up to 11. There are allusions to everything from the Oliver North scandal to classic Universal Monsters and everything in between. Adding in these pop-culture homages sort of became the glue that holds together a lot of the game, and made a lot of things flow better, though part of me wonders if it would come across as absurd to someone who doesn’t know much about America…

My influences for the game fluctuate, but it has mostly remained Conker’s Bad Fur Day and Earthbound. As I write this, about a third of the game is done, and I’m eager to start sending out this little slice of the game to playtesters! No public demos this time, but I’m quite happy with what we’ve got now. I sent it to another member of the Croak Crusader team, and we were all howling with laughter at certain parts of it, so hopefully that’s a good sign.

As far as « big promises » from the past few years…

Karrion Killer 2 has not been worked on, but I was working on an unrelated spinoff / sequel which was sort of what I’d imagined Karrion Killer 3 or 4 would be. It was more of a sci-fi thing in the same vein as Jason X, and you played as two humans rather than as the Karrion Killer itself. We’ll probably drop it around Halloween of 2025: it was mostly complete, and just needed new levels.

As far as the whole « series 3 » project, I’m still not sure what that looks like. I’m quite happy with a lot of these one-off games I’ve been pumping out recently, but I don’t think any of them would really need a sequel or expansion.

I was actually chatting with Payton about bundling some of my NES-styled Halloween games into a compilation, throwing in an interactive menu, maybe adding a bonus game or two, and selling them on Steam with 2 Left Thumbs once Croak Crusader development wraps up. Some would probably need to be remade, and others would probably need a handful of little touch ups. I’m thinking of calling it « Haunted Pumpkin Mega-Cart » or something like that.

Payton wants to go uber-ambitious with this: he’s talking about implementing ideas that I feel would sort of work more like sequels, which is always nice. It makes me feel less guilty about essentially just porting a handful of old games to Steam, haha!

Let me know what you think about that if you’re reading this part, I know it's a bit of a cash grab, but I think it could be sort of a fun way to experience some of my older work in a more concise way.

There is one game I’m really excited to be working on in 2025, and that’s « Penis Cool » or « Penisukuru FROM TOM FULP ». The name might sound like a joke (and that's because it is), but I’m very excited to see how people respond to it once it's out! The game is filled with puzzles that use Newgrounds as a site in a way I haven’t really seen another web game do. For some people, I’m sure they’ll be happy to just have a little aimless town exploration game, but there will be a definitive goal and ending.

I guess inadvertently, this will make the game completely incomprehensible when sites like gamaverse inevitably mirror it, but they’ve never once contacted me to ask permission to host my work, so I can’t feel too bad about screwing them over.

MISC/IRL STUFF

As seems to happen every year now, life got in the way of going to one of those meetup things. Part of me is glad I didn’t go, I feel like I’m starting to drift away from what Newgrounds is starting to turn into lately: it’s still fun to post sometimes, but it’s definitely become more of a fandom than a creative space. That may change (and it probably will), but until that day comes, I’m mostly fine doing things the way I do them now: dropping a couple of little experimental games a few times a year, and mostly keeping community stuff at arm's length.

I’ve been getting into drawing caricatures a lot more this year too. Most of that’s been just a personal thing that I just haven't felt the need to post much of, but I might slap a couple of them into Flash and try to make something cool with them at some point. It’ll probably make its way into some of my games stylistically, but it's fun to just make something sometimes that you don't ever really intend to have anyone else see, you know?

Since this is so brief, I guess I’ll write down some goals for 2025:

* Finish Croak Crusader

* Read through 5 books by Hunter S Thompson

* Get started on the second Steam game with the Tunaware crew

* Loose 15 pounds

I’ll see you all next year for another one of these.