Holy heck, time for a recap!
2021... It's been a pretty crazy year with lots of ups and lots of downs, but I'm generally feeling pretty good about how things turned out, especially with games and animations!
YEAR SUMMARY
Starting out in April, I teamed up with some old friends to make Rat Game: Roaming of the Wretched Rat, a turn-based RPG. This one was really fun: I got to revisit and refine some old character designs I made in the mid 2010's when I was just a stupid kid working on Pokémon clones.
The result, I think, is something of a hidden gem here on Newgrounds!
In July, I kept very busy with my Pico Vs Peter The Ant film, alongside an egg jam submission I worked on: Swimming Leningrad! The Peter the Ant film became pretty popular, I recon: with it maintaining more longevity than most of the other content I've put out here on Newgrounds, while Swimming Leningrad has stayed as a mostly obscure little gem that explores a lot of the ideas I wanted to use in SimLove Tactics, another project I was working on with plufmot!
Fun fact, for both Pico Vs Peter The Ant, and it's "sequel" Peter The Ant's Revenge, Peter's more realistic facial expressions are modelled off selfies plufmot posted on Twitter lol.
In August, I released Yes B Can and I Wanna B The Clock: both for clock day, and both of which have been a joy to watch grow in popularity and notoriety! I can't take all the credit, of course: I had lots of help on both of these submissions, but I'm still very happy with the result nonetheless!
Goobee's Lament also came out around this time, which seems to be sited as my most influential and wide-reaching animation. I went into it trying to explore new camera and framing techniques in flash while commenting on an (at the time) pretty relevant issue, but the film seems to have quickly spiraled into something that a lot of people enjoyed. It's not really meant as a legitimate attack on DoobusGoobus as I've seen some people claim, although if people choose to ascribe that kind of meaning to it I guess it's sort of out of my control at this point. Interestingly, Yes B Can sort of had the same message to it, but isn't as popular, so maybe people just really hate Doobus lol.
Which brings us to my final three works for the year: Bird Tapper's Biggest Fan, MJ's Halloween, and Peter The Ant's Revenge!
I group these all together because quite honestly, the only one really worth discussing in detail is Bird Tapper's Biggest Fan (the others were done extremely quickly for holidays/site events and are extremely simplistic joke submissions): a film about that time a parodic newspaper claimed a kid killed his brother over a game of Flappy Bird...
It taught me a lot about how to implement sound effects into animations effectively, and I tried to further the "silent film" feel of it; one thing I'm told I do well at is pairing visuals and audio, and I think Bird Tapper's Biggest Fan really helped merge the music element with good sound effects mixing.
THE FUTURE
2022 approaches quickly, and I've got a few plans...
TOFU needs to release. It's getting annoying promising it again and again only for me to fail to deliver. Thankfully, it's in its final stages right now, and should be done soon.
I'm gonna work on a few other games too: I've got two in the pipeline, one with an old friend of mine, larrynachos, and another with a new friend, moeanguish. One's for pixel day, another's a pretty quick holiday-themed beat 'em up. Only time will tell if they're any good or not (lol).
As far as some "dream projects" for 2022, I'd like to finally get around to making some kind of a Karrion Killer sequel, and I wanna get at least a quarter of the way done with Beetle Ninja 2, a side-project I've been working on for quite a while now.
Animation-wise, I have a few ideas for more original comedy animations that I'd like to try out: one's a big parody of all those Simpsons/Family Guy clones that've been cropping up so much lately, the other's sort of a more "quiet" series about spacemen... it's still comedic, just in a different way. I hope I can get at least some of both of these done in 2022!
MISCELLANIOUS HAPPENINGS
Now time to talk about some miscellaneous stuff... let's see...
I'm getting busier with my career, and I'm getting less time to work on Newgrounds content. It's a little sad to see, but I guess that's just the way things go? Anyhow, I'll always be striving to find at least a little time to keep working on cool projects with friends!