Haven't had a ton of time to write one of these things, nor hang out on here (newgrounds is blocked at work). I've been working at home this week because our floor got flooded, so im able to use newgrounds on my own network. Writing posts is cumbersome on the phone, i find.

Speaking of newgrounds, i was at the office a few weekends ago, for the Once Upon the Internet Newgrounds Documentary that littlbox is putting together. They are quite professional about what they are doing and I hope I was able to provide some insight on my experiences over the years on this website. I've heard they will be heading up to London in a few weeks to gather some footage over there.

Creative work wise, my reliable team of @bomtoons and @pyragmus and i threw together Chess Force, which was a hit at the Flash Forward 2025 . I think as veteran indie devs, its good to still throw a nod to preserving flash's soul and inspiring those that maybe werent around during that golden age of Flash. So i love that yearly initiative and hope it continues to thrive.

Other projects, I'm doing something for Larry nachos' 30th anniversary NG Arcade releasing early July. It's just a mini-game but I had fun working on it.

I'm also working on an animation, probably will be done by September. I think Teravex is doin the music again.

Outside of projects, I went to an oyster festival last weekend. Basically, you get to try oysters from different oyster farms and learn more about their positive impact on cleaning the ocean and stuff.

I love oysters but i got kind of sick from eating so many of them. I guess there really is a limit. I feel fine now tho.

fotos below:

I managed to finish my animation in time for Pico Day.

I started it a few months ago and worked on it while i worked on the game i released earlier in the month. It's been a productive Q1.

Here's an early render of my animation, i just kept adding stuff to it. Tweening doesnt really exist in Flash pixel art (well it does but it blurs pixels since pixels dont exist as decimal values). So everything in the animation that moves is a keyframe and is tedious but all animations are i feel so it's par.

I'm happy pico day continues to be a thing (prizes or not). I hope you enjoy the company of ginger people today!

Hullo,

i think I’m finally back up and running again. I was out of town the last week and missed the launch of my own game lol. I shipped out the last piece of art last Tuesday and hopped on a plane and left the country not knowing what the final product would actually look like.

so it was quite refreshing to play Chess Force finally with all the bells and whistles this morning. Everyone did a really awesome job. The music is great, the sounds and little touches that Nick adds to spice it up all came together well.

i found the concept kind of fun when Nick originally pitched it. I don’t play or even like chess but the concept of taking a well known game and taking concepts but making a different game out of it was intruiging and almost game jam like. Anyways two months of work later we managed to make a solid lil game and my first shmup of my ng career.

Other news, I’m working on a pico Day thing. I haven’t decided if I want to make it a art portal or a portal portal submission yet. I’m kind of interested in making a really long art portal animation. I like the idea of treating the art portal like my personal movie theater even tho there’s a perfectly good working portal for it that I can use instead. I dunno I’ll see.

i was in Czechia last week. It was fun. It’s rare my mum tags along but I felt like it was about time I showed her that side of my lifestyle (without as much drinking tho). My original plan was to ship her back after Czechia and continue on to Romania but the travel scene under the current administration is kind of hairy right now and I didn’t want to test my luck so I shelved romania until a later point and just flew back. Here’s some fotos from my trip.

never seen this in any other part of the world I’ve been to but you can order beer in 3 styles: kinda foamy, mostly foamy, and all foamy. I didn’t think it was for real, so I ordered the mliko version (all foam). Probably will never do that again but I was able to fulfill my curiosity. 🤷‍♀️

the statue of St Wenceslas sitting on his horse the proper way is in the town main square. This version of him sitting on his hanging horse is inside a weird indoor mall thing and is way funner to look at. Some people think it’s insulting so I guess that’s why it’s kind of hidden.

all my trips have some sort of pico family member sighting. This one was in a small town outside of Prague.

this was a hipster cafe / afternoon cocktail joint that’s on the side wall of the pier along the river. It’s got a massive round glass door. It’s called (a)void. I had a gin & tonic.

Charles bridge is pretty slammed with tourists, so i had to get up at sunrise to get a foto of barbarian without people around.

That’s it. That’s the post. @phantomarcade !

I was away from my compu for a bit, but i wanted to swap out my last blog post so:

Pretty good 2024 in general. Got to knock out a few more countries on my european travels and released 11 pieces this year, which seems pretty standard. I didnt do any games however, so i'm looking forward to carving out time in 2025 to make a game of some sort.

My favorite piece from this year was Pico Day at the NG Office. Had fun making it, and there's alot of nuance and character interplay. Something I want to continue to do next year.

In my travels this year, i flew to Vilnius, where i was able to re-unite pico with his Lithuanian cousin, who's kind of a big deal in the recycling scene.

A few months later, Brandy hosted the Pico Day event in NJ, probably the most ng people i've ever seen in one place:

Later later in the year we did the TooManyGames thingie, got to hang out with the staff some and drink stuff.

After my NG fix, i flew out to the Azores to relax. I've been there before, but hadn't explored the north east part of the island which was purdy.

Near the end of the year, I flew to Croatia for xmas stuff and country 27 in EU. I also got to catch up with my longtime NG friend Luka, who's made a bunch of stuff on here, I also met him in past London meets, pico days, etc.

And that's it really. Have some more travels arranged for next year. Hopefully I can visit Greenland, its a bit more difficult to get to than I was expecting, but I'm stubborn so...

I managed to squeak through and finish my Halloween short.

It was originally going to just be a little gif, but then i kept adding stuff to it, and then i was like this would be cool with sound, and so i tapped Teravex and Magibauble to help a brotha out.

Kind of a tedious animation in hindsight. All keyframed and all luv. Here's some preliminary work below:

This was my initial rough, when it was just gonna be a gif. I start all my animations at 12 fps. I ended up changing how BF interacts with getting hit in the balls by the cork. But the idea is still there.

Now its comin together. In this version, the frame rate is 24fps now. I thought itd be fun to incorpate GF spilling booze on the server, much like she does when the site goes down. Thought the ng office would be fun. I eventually got rid of the beanbag chair and the beer can became a pumpkin in the foreground.

Now we're getting somewhere! GF almost done, at this point i am starting to change how bf reacts to the cork, still not sure what, but i didnt want him flying across, i wanted to play off the blue balls moment of the game.

After that, i just went all in and just went nuts to get it done, I would say from the version above till yesterday, i worked on it nonstop. It reminded me of the old time trial days, where i knew i had to get it done.

Teravex and Magibauble came in clutch with very little direction, im kinda awful at that but i'm lucky that people are able to take my vague direction and come up with something perfect.

Enjoi

Happy Madness Day!

I managed to finish a madness thingie that i woke up at 3am to submit for some reason. Its in an art portal near you.

I had stopped working on it for awhile and then when i got back from vacation i was like ok lets go and knocked it out.

I might start a new gif next week, i'm gonna just take the day off today and consume all the content coming in.

Other stuff:

I was in the Azores two weeks ago. It's like a series of Portuguese islands in the middle of the atlantic ocean. Kind of like a tropical Iceland... It was my second time there, I was back there in 2018 and its kind of a weird place because not much ever changes. They still don't have uber / lyft, the venues i went to back then were still around etc. I explored a different part of the island this time (the northern coast). We also took a boat out to an islet, which i didnt know was a thing. Its uninhabited nowadays. They tried to grow wine grapes there years ago and it failed so they turned the only building into locker rooms now. It looks kind of like cgi from an aerial view, its like an island with a giant hole in the middle with really shallow water. The water was actually cold so nope on swimming there although some people did.

I've been working a way to work on my gifs at work... i havent gotten in trouble yet so itll continue...

I'll be in Croatia later this year, never been there yet and that will wrap it up for this year i think.

Hello Autumn!

I had to read through my last news post to figure out what I can post about.

busy summer so far! This past weekend we had some ng folks from TooManyGames con in town. I am a bit bummed I wasn’t able to go to the office visit on Sunday but it is what it is. Photo dump below of that and the pico Day in NJ which was awesome.

I managed to finish a game with BoMToons we had been working through for ages. The ax throwing one I mentioned on and off at different podcasts etc. While you’ll need to fly over to Lisbon to play it, I’m quite excited to see people interact with my art in that way. Kudos to him for including me in such an unusual application.

One reason I was on a mad dash to finish it. We are heading back to work 5 days a week soon (later this month, although we are suing the city so who knows). Previously I’ve been going back to office two times a week. But I wanted to clear through any projects that would seriously hurt from not being able to be worked on during home office so.

i have some small projects coming out throughout the summer so stay tuned.

Pico Day NJ : some of my favorite people ninjamuffin, magibauble - he had a recent animation come out if ur into Zelda.

caught up with ZJ and Krinkels. Didn’t know anyone even owned an Anusboy t shirt anymore. Huh.

there’s been so much new fan ng merch lately it’s been a lot of fun to see after the long shutting of the ng store when I worked there. Fun pins by Mindchamber.

kind of a regular thing now at meets where people provide swag. Some custom for the event like the pico Day sticker in there. Also nightmare cops bust was impressive (not swag)

mindchamber had a working mindchamber mask which was really cool.

I didn’t take much fotos at TMG but got some swag. The stickers are from Tyler

there was Crazy Taxi outside of the convention center. I didn’t know he was giving people free rides. I was heading out anyways but still cool.

newgrounds spot was lively. We got shooed out pretty fast after our block was over so I got separated from the group and I got a offered a free ride closer to home so I took it and missed out on night shenanigans. Probably the most annoying thing of this convention is how far away it is.

on Saturday we skipped TMG to hang out with my old coworkers + Connor Grail. This was at the Barcade in center city.

Couple more people joined us later for an ol fashioned bar crawl (squidly & mech mantis)

that’s about it!

First and foremost, I released my Pico Day thing yesterday. I didn’t feel right holding it hostage for another two weeks. So f-it. I am pleased with the feedback and reception it’s gotten so thank u 🙏

I was interested in exploring multiple moments happening simultaneously in that animation. I wanted to feature newish characters in the ng universe. I think the piece works better with music but the 50x50s don’t have a ng account. Maybe when they do and upload that clip I can attach it to the bottom of my gif. If you’re curious, the mp4 version is on my Twitter. Which I often unplug depending on how burned out I feel. But this account is a constant atleast.

I have a summer gif I’m going to start working on soon.

If you are going to that giant NJ Pico Day event, I’ll see you there. I’ll send my luv to the Dublin Event the next day. It wasn’t in the cards to fly out to it but it’s in good hands i think. All the meets have been lately. It’s a giant weight off my back that the community itself is taking the helm at doing what it does best. Collaborating. I consider these events collabs in a way. Because I’ve seen people come home from them with fresh ideas and new people to collaborate with.

Ok bye ✌️

Spring is upon us. Time to refresh my news page.

Brandy recently announced the Pico Day Meet, you can find details in the link.

It's open to everyone and they will be showing some of the work on this website on a giant screen which was a highlight in Toronto meet last year.

If you are able to make it to New Jersey (gross) I do highly recommend it. Plus you can meet some of the creators of the animations, which is kind of cool. I'll probably be there, I currently have my passport in renewal mode, so I cant commit to the Ireland meet happening the next day, but if my passport shows up and it's not outrageous, i might take a red eye flight from the pico day event and wake up in Ireland the next day. Kind of insane but it's tempting...

As far as art stuff goes, I've been kicking around a new loop, still have a ways to go, but I'm happy with it so far.