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.

Expect at least two games this week from me and the boyz (with a z because I'm extremely hip and up to date with all the youth slang) at Tunaware. We wanted to take a little break from the stressful dev cycle of Croak Crusader, and got a little carried away and ended up making two little arcade games for Halloween!

I'm calling it "The Tunaware Double-Feature". Two 8 bit NES-styled games by the Croak Crusader team will be coming out this week:

Consealed: a social deduction detective-style game about skin-walking aliens disguised as harp seals. Inspired by LA Noire, and the works of John Carpenter. Expect that game by tomorrow (maybe later tonight?)! We wanted it out sooner, but hurricane Milton really threw me for a loop and we had to delay it.

Cucumber Drag Show: a little beauty contest game about dressing up a really cool cucumber, and competing with other cucumbers (although they are not as cool in my opinion). Don't worry: if you loose this game, you'll still get some milk and cookies! Inspired by Pokemon Platinum's contest mode, and the works of Andy Kaufman. Expect it to be out on Wednesday!

As these are extremely small games releasing in a matter of days, I don't think it's necessary to include screenshots: it'll be in your hands soon enough. We hope you enjoy!

!!BEFORE I TALK ABOUT THE SPOOKTACULAR SHIT!!

We just dropped the first teaser trailer for Croak Crusader: Spawn of the Spore Spectre, our little Ed Wood-inspired action-platformer. We've all put in a lot of work to get the game ready for Next Fest, and I felt it'd be appropriate to share since it's got a sort of B-monster movie vibe to it. Please check it out!

Wishlist it here! The game will be available October 14th as part of Steam Next Fest!

Anyhow...

The Tunaware team and I are working on a short and sweet little Halloween game called "Consealed"! It's very John Carpenter-inspired. Should be out sometime either this week or next: very little work is left. I'm pretty happy with the art, it's turned out pretty great.

UPDATE: Hurricane Milton has thrown a wrench into my plans. The game will be out soon, but might not release this week. We'll have to see how things go.

It's sort of an inside joke that got way out of hand, and mechanically paired very well with what we wanted to do: a detective/investigation game where the player feels like a superstitious conspiracist. I won't spoil much else, simply because there's very little to spoil haha!

Look forward to it!

Check it out! :D

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2997890/Beetle_Ninja/

Bird Tapper vs the Krampus Fellowship Clan. Boy am I glad to finally be finished with this one!

Since this game is essentially just new levels for Bird Tapper Purple Platoon Panic, I’ll refer you over to BobbyBurt’s design retrospective for that game if you wanna know how the core gameplay came to be.

Essentially, the whole idea to expand on Purple Platoon Panic started out before the release of that game when I was sending out pre-release builds to some game developer friends, which many of them enjoyed. A few even asked me if they could do levels for it, which led me to think about expanding off the base game with a small collection of new levels.

During development of the original Purple Platoon Panic, we discussed the idea of doing bonus chapters, but we could never quite come up with a satisfying way to do it that’d be visually distinct enough. The original idea was to have a few super tough levels that swapped your sprite with a guy wearing a bird tapper mascot face (the achievement icon for “Jailbroken” is the only remnant of this), but we could never agree on how the tiles or backgrounds would look for these levels. I decided to bring back that core idea, but to give it more purpose.

If you've played Bit.Trip Runner at all, I wanted to go for a similar vibe of significantly changing up the visuals, but our own aesthetic was proving a bit more limiting that I would have liked. In the end, it came down to keeping Bird Tapper's simplistic artstyle or making interesting bonus stages that most players would never encounter. You can probably guess what we went with, but I think it was the right move in the end.

We eventually settled on just doing cameos from other games: it’s admittedly a bit lazy, but since it’s mostly obscure characters by friends, I feel like it isn't as circlejerk-y as it tends to come across as most of the time (the only one I feel kinda delves into more clout chaser-y territory is The Kid, but I feel like we went in a more unique direction with it so I guess it's fine).

I wanted to do something a bit different from how these sorts of things usually work: where they’re either glorified palette swaps of the basic protagonist, or better versions of him, so we decided these new characters would work more as “challenge runs”: Puck is about timing, Gappy is about speed, and The Kid is about precision. I was sort of on a kick of watching a bunch of GBA game challenge runs, so I think that may have influenced the direction of it a lot haha.

There were a few scrapped characters for the game, so allow me to discuss them!

Stardrop from Stardrop Sprint / Indie Pogo: you would have been able to charge up punches, which would influence their speed and length. We eventually decided to cut back to only 3 characters, so he got cut.

Terry from Bat-Terry Assault: since Bat-Terry Assault informed some aspects of Bird Tapper's moveset, I wanted to add him in as sort of a tribute to the roots of this game. Problem was, I couldn't figure out a way to make him feel unique.

Pico from Pico's School: absolutely my most clout-chaser-ish choice, he was eliminated very quickly because I wanted all the characters to have multiple jumps in their source material: that way it wouldn't be too weird to see them hoping around with the same basic properties as Bird Tapper. Pico is unable to jump at all in his own games, plus I wanted to avoid the general stigma of this just being a "Newgrounds Game".

Adaran from Adaran: back when I was thinking about this more ambitiously, I wanted to include projectile-wielding characters. Adaran would have run faster, and could throw out his boomerang shuriken.

Deathninja from Shogun Triad Deathninja: The most aimless of the characters I considered, Deathninja was basically the prototype for Puck: he had a better punch and uppercut, but was slower.

Mumba from Ugby Mumba: This one was another character that got axed when Bobby decided we shouldn't have projectile characters. Mumba had a mechanic which would have allowed him to shoot a gun rather than punch, which would cause recoil. The Kid also used to have this mechanic (minus the recoil).

In the end, we decided to cut down massively because the quantity of levels we got just wasn't enough to do more than 3 characters. When we ended up with 3 characters, I felt like we needed to do something a bit more to make it worth the player's while: leading to the addition of alternate costumes and the new music tracks.

In terms of inspirations for this game, I mentioned a few of the games that directly influenced PPP in the interview we did for Salt n Spam, so check that out if you’re interested!

In terms of Krampus Fellowship Clan specifically, the action platformer Nikujin was a huge influence on the tileset, which I think is kinda obvious when you look at it long enough haha. There's a somewhat subtle LISA: The Painful homage in the tileset too, I think hardcore fans like me will find it pretty quickly though.

Thanks again for all the support over the years, and expect some more teases for my new game Invasion of the Croak Crusader sometime soon!

EDIT: Apparently our interview got taken down, so I’ll summarize the influences of PPP here for everyone:

• Super Meat Boy Forever- I wasn’t a big fan of SMBF, and developed Purple Platoon Panic mainly as my sort of response to what I felt were that games shortcomings.
• LISA: The Painful RPG- The environmental design is inspired in part by the LISA games, namely in the way that they look sort of inhabited and as though they exist independent of the player. The final world in particular was inspired by Rando Land and Buffalo Van Dyke’s area (the interviewer asserted that he thought the piles of corpses were a reference to Super Meat Boy’s Hell chapter, but this isn’t the case: I mainly looked to Super Meat Boy and its sequel for what not to do visually if anything).
• Flappy Fighter- An old mobile fighting game that got taken down in the late 2010s. This is the game that showed me what was really possible on mobile, and the game that motivated me to work on Stepford’s mobile jam which PPP was originally intended to be part of.

At the request of @squidly and a few other people, here it is: a comprehensive list of each and every submission featured in my 2024 Pixel Day wall art! There are about 62 games and movies represented in total, and all but one (Rolus) use pixel art as their primary aesthetic.

ON THE LEFT:

1. Spike: A Love Story
2. Swordface
3. Dino Run
4. Hot Ninja Moon Moon
5. Tower of Heaven
6. Pucamuc
7. Snailiad
8. Shake Art DX
9. Indian Runner Duck
10. Olive’s Artventure
11. Pizzio’s Pizza
12. Pico vs Peter the Ant
13. Cocoa and Their Shotgun
14. Rad-ish
15. Blockade Runner
16. Yin and Yang
17. Yu Jammin
18. The Time I Was Stranded in Some Planet
19. Blood Moon
20. Shrimp OS
21. Mad Princess
22. How to Raise a Dragon
23. Knightin’
24. Deepest Sword
25. Melt
26. Blue Boy
27. MazeWard
28. WIZ
29. Lost in Lampyrid Fog
30. Karrion Killer
31. Chickenshit
32. Patetfiske
33. Slippery Delivery
34. Rolus in the Outskirts

ON THE RIGHT:

1. SNEKMEK
2. Parallelogram Man
3. I Wish I Were the Moon
4. When Pigs Fly
5. Gimmiko
6. Monkey Fcuk
7. Shogun Triad Deathninja
8. Gravity Shift
9. Tricky Keys
10. Fruity Tower
11. Squigly Fish Racer
12. Weird Wally’s Warzone
13. Blaster Hazard
14. Buggy and Snuggy’s Big Dig
15. Clarence’s Big Chance
16. Seedling
17. 400 Years
18. Bad Ice Cream
19. Authentic Octopus Game
20. Pengu Saves Christmas
21. One Chance
22. Bird Tapper
23. Spikeman
24. Time Fcuk
25. Adaran
26. Typ-Horse-Dyssey
27. Pack Your Bags
28. Karoshi: Suicide Salaryman
29. Gappy

Go play some of these awesome games!

Even if it may not seem like it, there were quite a few submissions that didn’t make the cut for one reason or another. My initial goal was to have 100 characters, but I feel like the layout I have now would have gotten super messy if I’d gone in that direction.

I’d love to have the opportunity to make something like this again though (hopefully next time I'll be able to put in 100?)!

Cheers, and thank you again so much Tom! Would love to do this again next year!

-ProsciuttoMan

December is finally here and in keeping with my usual tradition of writing one of these, it's time for another annual recap post!

Overall, this year been all over the place. While online I was able to output a lot of content that I'm very proud of, life outside of that wasn't as good.

I got to meet a lot of talented programmers who I'm hoping to work with much more in the future. I feel like I struggled a lot earlier on with consistently releasing games I thought were actually good, and I feel like this year broke that trend.

To tell the truth, I had almost no passion for any of the games I was a major part of before this year: the obvious exceptions being Karrion Killer and Rat Game. That's not a dig at anybody I was working with on those projects or anything like that, but still I feel like my creative voice isn't really there with most of these earlier projects.

Going into 2024, I think I'll be able to make projects that speak to my own sensibilities, rather than just being a sideshow to other authors.

YEAR SUMMARY

Things started out kinda shitty because my apartment flooded whilst I was working with Tombdude on Bird Tapper & The Great Krampusnacht Cleansing. I've been meaning to reach out and collaborate with him for a few years now, so I was heartbroken when I had to take a step back from the project.

That said, we managed to finish and release the game in time to score second place for pixel day, which was absolutely a highlight of my time here on Newgrounds! All the art (minus some stuff with the puppies) was drawn by me, and I'm very happy with how it all turned out.

It's no Fulpware, but still: I think what we managed to accomplish was special, and I'm very grateful for the love the community has shown to this little game (flawed as it may be).

April 1st saw the release of high-society art: a spam movie Pop-Tart requested I make for this year's "clock day". Fulpware Clicker released the same day, but these were both just small joke submissions made to rile people up.

Dry and a few friends watched the FNAF movie on Peacock, and so I decided to make a quick cartoon to poke fun at it, FNAF: The Movie: The Game (Theory). Honestly, with this one I just wanted to make something fast to practice animating again, since I don't really have the time to make cartoons these days. It was dumb fun, but there wasn't really all that much to it beyond me just really not liking the film lol.

November was definitely some of my most "lucrative" time on Newgrounds so far, with Bird Tapper: Purple Platoon Panic finally releasing after a year or two of work.

Originally intended for the 2022 Mobile Jam, Purple Platoon Panic was sort of my response to the lukewarm reception of Super Meat Boy Forever: while the game is certainly a controversial one, I saw a lot of untapped potential in a lot of ideas the game presented. That, coupled with my love of mobile fighting game Flappy Fighter really inspired me to reach out to BobbyBurt to propose an autorunner focused on combat. I checked Newgrounds the other morning to discover the game had attained a spot on the "Legendary Games" list: getting something up there has been a huge aspiration for me as a creator for years, and I'm beyond overjoyed that it's finally happened! Thank you all so much for making it happen!

There's a few small homages to a few earlier projects sprinkled throughout the game too: like the bear statues from Ruby Heart Matchmakers which appear throughout Ursul City.

Time will tell how well Purple Platoon Panic holds up, but I have high hopes!

A map pack with new levels made by a few hand-picked developers and friends of ours from the community is in development.

And last but not least, Bird Tapper Easy Mode. This one is gonna require a bit of explaining...

I watched GameMaker's Toolkit religiously when I was younger: it's how I discovered the masterful game Downwell, and it gave me a stronger appreciation for the artistry that goes into game development. As I've grown older, however, I've begun to find Mark Brown's takes on accessibility to be downright ludicrous and often times self-contradictory; such as suggesting that Super Meat Boy is a poor game because Meat Boy is "too floaty" or that it's overly-cruel to players to give easy difficulty settings derogatory names like "wuss mode".

To me, accessibility should be about allowing for the player to partake in the challenge: not to eliminate it completely and give everyone a participation trophy. Some experiences, in my opinion, benefit from being inherently inaccessible: if I wanted to just know a game's plot, I'd watch a let's play.

Coupled with a few ridiculous reviews that had cropped up on the first two Bird Tapper games (many of which spoke very highly of the games but claimed to be rating low due to difficulty) I decided it would be fun to make the most barebones and simplistic product imaginable for the sake of pandering to accessibility.

The result was Bird Tapper Easy Mode, many elements of which were a response to reviews that we found to be ridiculous (this is why the music is what it is, you'll know what I mean if you scroll through the reviews on PPP haha).

THE FUTURE

Karrion Killer 2 eluded me once again this year. Hopefully we can eventually get around to it, but at this point I feel like we'd have to approach it very differently.

As seems to be becoming a running theme, two new Bird Tapper projects are currently in the works: Bird Tapper: Retro Challenge and the Purple Platoon Panic Map Pack.

Retro Challenge is a reskin of a Mario 1 browser engine by WaterSilverC that I saw on the portal before it got taken down for using Mario assets. You can actually still play the original here, but I wanted to lend him a hand and get it up on Newgrounds too. Hopefully we'll be working on more projects together in the future, since it's been really fun collaborating with him on new assets for this thing.

As for the Purple Platoon Map Pack, it's just more of the same. There's a slew of new levels with new art and music, but structurally it's identical to the base game of Purple Platoon Panic.

Bird Tapper DX is likely to still happen once Tombdude wraps up production on Gimmiko. I've been messing around with that Rayman 4 prototype that leaked not-too-long-ago and it's given me some ideas for new gameplay that'd fit in with the style we established in GKC.

Even if we don't make DX, we'll probably still make something or other: collabing with Tombdude was really fun!

To be honest though, I feel like I need a little break from Bird Tapper right now. He's a fun character and his world is fun to explore, but I wanna do something else after I wrap up what I'm working on now.

I'm pretty sure I mentioned it in one of these posts before, but ideally I'd like to have at least 3 "series-worthy" submissions at some point. I already have 2: Karrion Killer and Bird Tapper, but a third would be nice.

Super SimLove Tactics came extremely close, but sadly that never panned out. Maybe my luck will turn in 2024 though? Here's to hoping!

New cartoons are coming next year too! I'm working with MKMaffo on something for the LISA Campfire collab, and there's one more animation collab I worked on that I don't think has been announced yet. Look forward to it!

MISC/IRL STUFF

As I eluded to earlier in the post, life's been sort of all over the place this year.

While there was a lot of good, there was also a lot of bad. I never posted about it, but there were some very dark times in late 2022 and early 2023...

It might sound a little pathetic I admit, but for a long time the only thing keeping me going was my art. There was a lot of imagery in my work this year that retrospectively feels a little too revealing of my personal struggles...

Anyhow, micro-rant over! I'm finally done with that, and I'm in a much better place now.

I'm back in school again this year! Honestly, it's just for the degree credentials: I've shown bits and pieces of my portfolio to some industry professionals I've met, and all of them talk about how via my personal work I'm more qualified to work in the industry than most people who apply to work with them, but I just need a proper degree to seal the deal.

I'm enjoying it though: I'm putting in the legwork to really make the best of this opportunity. I actually have a few job offers lined up for after I'm done, but I'm taking the time to make sure I get shit done right. Since I'm anticipating that professional work will eat into the majority of the free time I'm now using do games, I'm also gonna push extra hard to at least make one more series-worthy submission.

MINI-SECTION ABOUT FUTURE PROJECTS

I've been skeptical about talking about this project on Newgrounds much, since I feel like I tend to get caught up too much with the "glamour" of public game development... but...

Pommisc, Topple, Dry, and I have been working in relative secrecy on a little game called "GiggleForce". An adult-oriented parody of the quirky Earthbound-inspired RPG subgenre, the game is one of my proudest in terms of narrative design and I really hope to finish it someday. I don't consider myself a strong writer whatsoever, nor do I consider any of my games to have anything close to a strong narrative, but I am damn proud of what we put together with GiggleForce's plot. It needs to come out some day: I think the themes and core message of the game would age like wine.

Beetle Ninja 2 might also come out of development hiatus late into 2024... maybe?

I have a stronger core idea of what to do with the game: when I started it 2 years ago, my idea was just to do a murder mystery-type game about discovering what happened after the end of the world was prevented, but I've begun thinking about how to structure the game around a New Vegas-styled faction system.

My ideas were basic at the beginning, but I think I know how to connect them a lot better nowadays.

Before I move on to industry work, I want to finally wrap up the long-overdue sequel to Karrion Killer, finish Groove Tapper, and make at least one more Beetle Ninja-esque one-off game that's really good. That doesn't mean any of this will happen of course, but I'm optimistic that I can get at least 2 of these finished.

Here's to hoping 2024 will be a fruitful year! I love you guys!

Beetle Ninja is now three years old! It feels just yesterday when I opened up RPGMaker 2003 to program a fun little time mechanic… time sure flies!

For those of you who haven’t played Beetle Ninja, I describe it as sort of a mix between The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, and LISA: The Painful RPG. It’s probably my largest game in terms of content, and I think there’s a solid case to be made that it’s probably one of my best. I’m still immensely happy with what I managed to accomplish with this one, even though I think there’s still bits and pieces that feel a little off retrospectively.

I just uploaded a Developer Commentary video here: https://youtu.be/pcJ8KSWp8aw?si=4sdFhnWajhSwSB2J. It’s incomplete: a lot of optional stuff is omitted so I think even if you watch this first, you’ll still be able to experience the game fresh.

If you enjoy my games, I urge you to check out Beetle Ninja and the developer commentary!

Anyhow, thank you all for the recent support. Bird Tapper and the Purple Platoon Panic is coming very soon (all that’s left is polish and bug fixing now).

Scrolled through my news posts and remembered that I made a 2021 recap last year, so I figured "why not make another for 2022?"

YEAR SUMMARY

I think I hit the ground running this year: starting with the Newgrounds Winterfest Intro. A portion of the film was based on my animation "Goobee's Lament", and so I was asked to make a contribution (I did the scene where the Uberkids show up and get pelted by snowballs).

Pixel day soon followed, where I made contributions to Adventure of Leek, Shoot Trip Die, and Pixelgrounds. There's not much to say about these games, since on Adventure of Leek, I just made pixel art and I was a guest artist on the others, but it was a fun time.

March and April saw the release of three films: Darnell Goes to Africa, Dickhead: Awesome Friday's School Madness, and Drowned Alive The Killer. Honestly, Drowned Alive and Dickhead are near identical in approach, and are just these huge hyperbolic collages of random references from different corners of the web, although Dickhead did succeed at getting FNF fans hella salty, which was kinda funny to watch unfold. Darnell Goes to Africa was made to be shocking and piss off people, but at the same time the scam call center gag at the end is quite funny still IMO.

Ruby Heart Matchmakers also released around this time, which was a fun little puzzle game about playing matchmaker with a load of crazy little characters, but that's also (hopefully) getting a big update next year, so I'll shut up about it for the moment.

Pico Day soon rolled around: I contributed to Pico-Cross and Fulpware, the latter of which saw massive success. The game might still be happening, but progress has slowed since we're all adults and therefore have much less free time than we'd like to work on video games.

Going back a tad, however, I released a little hobby project called The Startlingly-Impressive Gun Man right before Pico Day. It's one of my proudest films in terms of writing, although the execution was a bit lacking. I've gotta up my game if I ever get around to making the sequel I was working on.

But I'm of course ignoring the elephant in the room, a submission I've consistently seen notifications for whenever I log in: of course, I'm talking about Porb Dressup: a game we worked on in a night, but for whatever reason became something of a hit amongst the community. I don't know why, I don't know how, all I know is everybody thinks they're a comedic genius for making Morbius jokes in the reviews.

I honestly wish I had more to say about Porb, but nothing else really springs to mind... I guess it was the last project NellyFluff worked on before she disappeared without a trace if you want a little trivia.

Which brings us up to my two most recent projects: Clock Baby Paint Adventure, and Porno Sex Hentai. Coming off of Fulpware, there was sort of this sense of pressure to make something fantastical that I didn't think I could realistically live up to... so I decided to do the exact opposite and make some extremely crude and unpolished stuff.

THE FUTURE

The biggest loss for me this year was Karrion Killer 2... hopefully it'll release sometime in 2023 (the basic gameplay is coded in, it just needs a greater sense of direction).

In practice, it ended up being a bit boring to play through, and so Levi and I agreed to postpone the game. I think it'll almost certainly happen someday: I'm very happy with how the art turned out, and Karrion Killer is always a project at the forefront of my mind whenever I work on something new!

Next up are two games starring Bird Tapper. These aren't "cancelled", in fact one is very close to completion, but I wanted to give a little taste of what's in store.

The first game is currently untitled, but the second is Tappy Tappy Boneyard. I've never really wanted to make Bird Tapper a proper "series", but he makes a good and easy placeholder, and has grown on me a lot as we continued development. HUGE shoutout to Chupabara for helping with key art on Tappy Tappy Boneyard: his art informed a huge part of Bird Tapper's aesthetic, which sort of became "dopey-ass bird going toe-to-toe with badass soldiers" as we went on.

As for the first game, it has a loose Christmas theme. That's all I'll say for now lol.

Anyhow, expect at least one new cartoon, and one new game by the year's end (or maybe a little later, IDK). I can't wait for you all to experience some of the stuff I've been working on!

MISC

Well, what else is there to say…

I guess I’ve been reading more comics recently? I bought some Howard the Duck compilation books recently, and they’ve been a good read; my buddy recommend the series to me and I was a little skeptical at first, but it’s quickly become a favorite of mine.

Ive been able to get into art collecting more lately which has been lots of fun!

I don’t really know what else to say, but here’s to hoping for a great 2023!