Ritz fans eatin good tonite

@MKMAFFO MADE THEM LOVE THAT MAFFO

i am the new king of newgrounds

i lov every single person on Newgrounds no exceptions. Even you. You know exactly who you are. You. Because you use Newgrounds and I love Newgrounds.

next stop 100K

just kidding, i will never smoke weed.

IT'S FREAKIN PICO DAY!

POST AWESOME BABES

DRAW LIL PICO

MAKE GAME

NEWGROUNDS FOREVER

Shoutouts tomfulp

shoutouts newgrounds

#FreeEgoraptor

AYO, been a smidge since last newspost, figured I’d write up another thing, since a LOT has changed.

January was probably one of the most stressful months of my life, and when I say stressful I moreso mean very overwhelming. There’s a few reasons for that, which are all sorta connected but also separated. Main thing is of course, Friday Night Funkin. And that’s divided into a few different things. Most obvious being that it was a lot of work through January, as we were pushing the Christmas update that slipped past Christmas, but then IMMEDIATELY after that, we were trying to get out an update for Pixel Day, so with all of that it ended up being about close to a full month of work on my mind. Maybe that’s not so bad, but also there’s something about the fact that the game just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger, so that was weighing on me in a weird way, not exactly negative way, just weird. And then in January I also got CANCELLED. I do have a lot more thoughts about that situation, but for now I’ll say it did NOT help productivity or my mental state having to go through that lolol.

And then to top it all off, I was going through a lot of different things in my personal life. Hard to explain, but the situation was pretty dire, to the point where if anything good would happen, whether it the crew getting notoriety, or something cool happening, or some interaction, it all sorta felt sucked away whenever this personal thing came into my mind. So even with any and all success the game may have been having, it was VERY hard to enjoy it most of the time, at least through January. 

I remember in Indie Game The Movie, one of the things that Edmund and Tommy quote to each other is “the hardest part of success is finding people who can be happy for you”, and it was partly that situation I think. At the beginning of January in my other post I mentioned how it was a bit hard for me to find myself talking to my friends or anyone about Friday Night Funkin’, where it felt like that’s all I talk about and feels like I’m only talking about my problems and all that. I could share things that made me feel good about myself with a few of my friends, which is fine and all that, but as soon as there’s even just a single person who you WANT to share something with, but you can’t because it feels like you’re bragging, or feels like you’ve been disconnected from them and you’re only talking to them to talk about yourself, or you feel like it’s been the only thing that you’ve been talking to them about, then once you DON’T have that, it’s as if you don’t even have the success at all. It's hard to describe exactly how much it really weighed on me through January. There were moments where I would wake up and have it on my mind, and then obsess over it for the rest of the day. Or I would see one little thing and then it would derail my whole day of being productive. Stuff like that where it genuinely impacted my life and mental state.

I think since then I’ve found myself to appreciate the homies I got and knowing that even if I don’t see it all personally, I do think that there’s a lot of people happy for me and my success, whether I interact and talk with them directly about it to see them happy. I do remember what it was like when I had NO friends, no one to talk to about anything. At this point in time I’m very grateful that I have a very strong support structure of people around me who keep it real. Right now I’m still in a bit of a state where I feel guilty whenever Friday Night Funkin’ comes up in any conversation I have, and maybe I DO talk about it too much. But it’s kinda hard to NOT talk about it. Whenever I separate myself from it all, I do see that I genuinely do love working on it and just in general I think it’s an awesome as fuk game. And cool shit is happenin because I’m a cool ass bitch, basically what the whole situation boils down to. 

This newspost a bit scattered, just wanted to get some thoughts out there in writing.

December was pretty wacky. In case you haven’t been paying attention, I worked on a game that got 2,000,000 views and kinda went viral. If you look it up on youtube, you’re gonna find videos with hundreds of thousands of views, and if you can scroll for days trying to dig through every piece of fanart on Twitter. It’s definitely been overwhelming to say the least. It absolutely is a dream come true. Any gamedev in my position would murder to have a 1/10th of the attention that Friday Night Funkin has. It’s been pretty much one of the only things on my mind all December, and because of that it also has felt a bit isolating. Even if I can talk with my pals about it, there’s always something in the back of my mind that feels a bit guilty, like I’m always just talking about myself and my problems. It’s overwhelming to look at numbers and compare myself to classics that inspired ME. It’s cool to see though, and makes me feel proud. Trying to be happy for my own success is a bit of a tricky line. On one hand, it’s like “aw hell yeah, this game I made is fuckin awesome and is blowing away everything else”, on the other hand, it can so easily feel like I’m just some dweeb rubbing in the one lucky break I have. I know for a fact it fills Newgrounds with a certain amount of hope, because I know whenever I saw ANYTHING Newgrounds related get any amount of attention it was inspiring. Whether it be Derpixon’s porn animations getting millions of views, or even the Among Us crew having some roots in NG, it all felt like Newgrounds as a whole was slowly taking over. It’s weird to think that me and the other FNF fellas are a part of that, but really something like this I’ve been waiting for ever since I joined the site. It really has been my dream to be a part of a project that could somehow help out Newgrounds in some way. And it ABSOLUTELY happened.

I don’t think there’s a piece of me that’s like, “naw, I don’t deserve this” because I know it’s all sorta just random chance and right place right time lightning in a bottle type shit. Made good plays and most of them worked out VERY well for us.

It’s weird to think of myself or anyone else on the team as ‘famous’. Almost feels a bit in denial, maybe it’s true maybe it’s not. I think especially looking at numbers it’s easy to compare to other game developers I look up to, and it’s weird to think that I’ve been slowly creeping up on them. And of course shit like Twitter followers isn’t the end all be all of success, but like I said it’s just somethin easy to compare to. 

Twitter has definitely been strange, but I don’t think I use it too drastically differently than I used to. I still find myself making dumbass tweets and whatnot. I literally am FLOODED with notifications basically 24/7, to the point where I almost can’t even check my mentions. For a while that’s been overwhelming, to try to keep up with every single comment and reply, but I think I’m slowly realizing that it’s gonna be impossible to make sure everyone gets a piece of my attention. I’m slowly starting to realize that with DM’s as well. I used to try to reply or respond to most questions or messages, but it’s been A LOT, and it’s been spread out through Newgrounds, Tiktok, Twitter, Instagram, and Discord. I really can’t find a place to get away from it other than fully disconnecting, which would probably be good for me to do at some point in time.

It’s weird to think of the potential success. I mean we have a VERY good hand dealt to us right now. The stress I don’t think comes from the possibility of us screwing things up, but almost moreso if we DON’T screw up. Because if we are very successful, it absolutely will be life changing. The thought of having even more than 5000$ in my bank account is crazy, so what’s gonna happen if there’s 10K? 100K? What if this game turns me into a millionaire? If we fumble our chance there’s gonna be a ‘what if’ in the back of our minds for a long time, but at the very least my life will more or less be the same and I’m back to just making dumb little gamejam games. But if we nail it, and everything goes even better than expected, it’s like nothing will be the same. I never grew up with money, I’m still not exactly used to buying myself things too often. At the start of the year was when I had one of my first real jobs ever, and I was able to move out for the first time. At the end of November I moved across Canada to a city in Ontario. That happened not because of the game btw, but it’s like, I think December has just been such a drastic and crazy whiplash for me, and it sorta been makin me lose my mind, just a little bit. Hard to know what things am I doing because I’m just going crazy, or what things am I doing because I sorta ‘changed’ in some form (good or bad). Maybe it’s too personal and real, in case she’s reading this, but did you guys know that I confessed to a girl for the first time ever? Did I do that because I’ve been so stressed with everything? Or do I just have some sort of newfound confidence and I’m just sorta developing as a person? Obviously it’s a mix of both, but it’s always more tempting to think of it as one or the other, and try to overthink in my own mind about it to the point where it feels like I’m short circuiting my brain. That whole situation been complicated but in any case you probably understand my point, where it’s feeling like there’s a chance that all this stress and overwhelming-ness from the game and everything around it is affecting my personal life. 

That’s it for now, there’s a million more things that’s in my head. Usually I do a yearly recap or whatever but oops I just wanted to have something out there about Funkin and my own brain. I’ve been trying to take it easy. Game, watch youtube, relax. But it’s been hard. Even writing this and posting this I know I’m gonna get a good handful of messages and replies telling me to take it easy, oh well. I DONT KNOW ANYHTING LOL. I will say the fact I’m writing this means I’m in a bit of a better situation than I was not too long ago. Felt hard to focus on anything other than game stuff directly, whether it be browse twitter for fanart, program the game, or reply to messages from FANS (it’s weird for me to call people fans but it is what it is I guess). It’s good for me to get these thoughts in writing and whatnot, and get it out so it doesn’t feel as isolating.

Happy new years Newgrounds XDD

If you have used Newgrounds in the past day or so, you've probably seen the game I worked on, Friday Night Funkin' on the front page. I worked on it with @PhantomArcade, @Kawaisprite, and @evilsk8r . Go follow all those boys, and then play the game:

Took me a few days to write this newspost, been busy fixin a few things for the game. Scoreboards, lil extra polish, quick little ideas, and then balancing that all out with takin decent breaks and whatnot.

If you want some cool lore/backstory of the development, we originally made the game for Ludum Dare 47, and the theme was 'Stuck in a loop'. I think I woke up at noon that day, and just on a bit of a whim decided I wanted to make a small little game, a rhythm game. This jam I didn’t care about the theme, I just needed an excuse to work on something. I knew I wanted music from my man kawaisprite, and I actually asked a few people before I landed with PhantomArcade and evilsk8er. Before this project, I hadn’t even interacted with evilsk8er whatsoever, he was one of @kiddbrute ‘s pals, and I asked Kiddbrute if he wanted to make a game, but he was busy so and he told me evilsk8er would probably be down. I like to work wit new people, and this worked out pretty nicely if I say so.

If you been paying attention to my stuff, you probably have seen that the game been doin a bit of wild numbers on Twitter when I put out. It’s definitely been a lot to process over these last few months, and there definitely been a few lil roadbumps here and there. But I think at this point I can confidently say we have a solid feel of going forward. It’s hard to temper expectations and gauge what everyone thinks. In the end I know that we’re gonna make a dope ass game, and when that happens it’s gonna be good shit. I been trying to say that THIS Newgrounds release is like a bit of a demo, but it’s hard to articulate it without sorta blatantly putting it in the title or description or whatever. As everyone has probably guessed, we have much bigger ambitions for the game, and I think everyone assumed that to be the case anyways. We did accomplish a good amount of things in just a month for a web game, so seeing a LOT of people really be excited for it, it’s funny to think of what it’d be like when we REALLY release the game we see in our heads. 

Right now there’s definitely been a good few issues people have had with the game that I expected to some extent. Polish bits here and there, difficulty spikes, even some of the visual design. Before it came out I showed the game to a few people and they mentioned that the purple arrow sometimes can feel like it blends into the backgrounds. All stuff like that. This release we’re definitely going to improve over the next little while.

Next up on the to-do list is REBINDABLE CONTROLS, DIFFICULTY BALANCING, a better scoreboard system (with scores in-game), stuff like options menu (if you want to disable the camera zoom effect thingie that could feel distracting). So there’s a lot of things that I’m conscious of that people have been wanting or complaining about.

I suppose to cap off this newspost, if you want to support this game, toss it money on ITCHIO https://ninja-muffin24.itch.io/funkin

OR literally just show ur pals friends whatever. It’s less so about all the attention, but the crew workin on it right now aren’t doing it fulltime, and even BEFORE any of it blew up we had plans to continue development, even if it was just a few hours per week on the side. But every little bit helps. We don’t wanna fumble shit, and we wanna make a good ass game for Newgrounds, while possibly making coin off it to pay for our hard work. Most would probably say we’ve already accomplished the cool ass game part, but this is a small taste of what’s likely to come.

This was a quick little newspost with a rough idea and plan. We’re still figuring a lot of things out, as I said before, this game literally did not exist 1 month ago. Everything’s been happening really fast, and we’re just trying to keep up with everything and stay true to the game. At some point we will have a roadmap for ourselves, and maybe we’ll even share it with everyone. Or we will work on this game in silence for the next 3 years. We’ll see lol

Some creds/shoutouts from me since we don’t have credits in-game yet lolol

Love to @SrPelo, we added Skid and Pump as part of the sorta ‘Halloween demo’, he supplied vocals for kawaisprite to chop up into the music, and he also helped out early on when the game was essentially just some WIP video that was floatin around on Twitter. Lov u pelo

Shoutouts @fizzd . He made the game Rhythm Doctor, and he also wrote a guide on how to do rhythm game logic that I’ve been referencing for YEARS at this point. If you dig through FNF's source code, you WILL see elements of this. This game would not exist without him.

Shoutouts the HaxeFlixel homies, @Geokureli, and @01010111 (Will Blanton lol) for helping me sort out a few coding issues and problems. George gets the credit for the upcoming rebindable controls, the backend shit he wrote for the Ritz DX update (hiatus/coming at some point lol) and I just heisted that shit lol.

Shoutouts @Kiddbrute, he tossed me EvilSk8er’s direction, and also kiddbrute tha homie lmaooo

Shoutuots @wandaboy, @thriftman, @luis those guys r rascals lol

EDIT: also shoutouts Jeff @johnnyUtah for helpin out wit new logo forgot him last nite oopsies srry jeff hheeh

Love to anyone who loves the game. It been a crazy ass month.

Go play the game, and as always, the game is 100% open source on my Github:

https://github.com/ninjamuffin99/Funkin/

It’s been exactly 5 years since I joined Newgrounds. I joined way back when I was in high school, and now I’m in my early 20’s fresh age 21 and shit. I’ve written a bit about my early days of Newgrounds, but this post I’ll write some shit that’s been on my mind lately. Having been on Newgrounds for a good solid chunk of time, it’s interesting to see certain people come and go. I’ve also noticed a sorta new age of people poppin in. People who made their accounts only a year or so ago starting to gain organic prominence from the site. New kids on the block and shit. 

One thing I like about Newgrounds is that aspect that still holds up today, that people can still be homegrown here. I think with the current social media culture shit, we’re going to start seeing more and more prominent artists come to Newgrounds with already established fan bases. But as time goes on I think people definitely need to pay attention to new kids poppin up on the scene. Even if they’re annoying, obnoxious, rude, bad at animating, whatever. I specifically remember early in my days on the site, I was making shitty ass animations, and to this day I’m very thankful that people like @Saminat not only gave me the time of day, but was super cool to me and did voice work for a shitty ass animation I worked on way back. Saminat could have easily been rude or mean or whatever to me, and maybe if that happened I coulda been turned off the site entirely and not got to where I am today. 

Another person I’ll rep for the same reason is my man @PhantomArcade. Way back me and him were working on a game, and I really didn’t prove myself game design or programming wise all that much. But me and him still got to working on some projects here and there and he was real cool about doin shit. Same situation as earlier he could have easily just told me to leave him alone or whatever and it coulda been a turnoff for me for NG shit.

There’s easily many many other instances of people bein cool to me to name them all, those 2 been on my mind lately as I been working my way through writing this post. Shoutouts u boys lov u

It's very easy when you already have some friend group or whatever to simply interact with them only, and that's fine to do so, but I think it's almost always worthwhile to keep your eyes open for new kids and shit. Not only younger 14/15 year olds or whatever, but just people new to Newgrounds in general. I think one of the special things about Newgrounds is the community, everyone lookin out for each other and interacting and talking and collaborating and whatever. I feel like I've fallen into it a bit where I slip on some of the new shit because I already have a friend group and people I know and people who know me or whatever.

It’s definitely been a ride so far, especially though this year. I don’t wanna jack myself off but I do hope I’m somewhat a good influence on the community, even if I’m a little rascal here and there. Love NG. It’s very interesting to be at the point where I can look back on a few years of NG, see how the site and culture has changed. I do think it’s on the rise, and it’s been very inspiring to see fresh blood. People still discovering Newgrounds shit, not only through nostalgia. I guess I’m somewhat in that category, but I think it’s still interesting. 

Anyways some cool swag updates of what I been doing, I been hustling on a COOL ass animation. Won’t say too much about it but it will definitely be awesome and one of the best submissions of the month when it comes out yeah probably.

Lately I’ve very much been stressing about a lot of things. It’s very nice and pleasant to be writing things out like this. Everyone knows this year has been a bit of a doozy. I been having horrible sleep schedules and shit, bad work ethic, and just going stir crazy in general. Slowly workin my way through it, comes and goes yall know how it is. I been trying to ease up on balancing a billion different projects. Sometimes it works out, and sometimes it all just crashes and nothin goes thru. Showbiz baby. Lately just have been focusing on this one single animation and have been able to make some good progress on it, so it’s been nice to have more or less 1 main project cooking, even if just THAT can become overwhelming at some points. Everyone is probably all burnt out through this year, so I’m probably not alone in feeling all that.

To roll back to the first topic, shoutouts to all the fresh blood on Newgrounds, whether ur some 14 year old kid or some late 20s guy who stumbled across Newgrounds trying to find a community. I’m glad the Newgrounds community ain’t gettin stale, makes me very hopeful for the site. And I’ll say something that I’ve said about last year or so, I’m hopeful that Newgrounds isn’t just ‘some springboard’ into other more lucrative ventures like Youtube or Steam or whatever. I do think that one day Newgrounds can be the beginning, middle, and end. Something that you can ride with for life, because I ain’t ever wanna bounce outta here. I don’t know exactly what that’s gonna look like, so we’re gonna have some more interesting years ahead of us. Lov everyone who uses this site.

if there's any dumbass typos remind me in the morning lolololol

I WAS GON MAKE A GAME BUT GOT DISTRACTED WITH ANOTHER PROJECT SORRY KRINKLES

I know I got a few homies who aint even see Madness Combat, and I know you're reading this right now. Not watching the main MC series on Madness Day is like not watching Home Alone in December, get on that shit gang its a NEWGROUNDS HOLIDAY

SMALL UPDATE ON CURRENT SHENANIGANS, IM WORKING ON A COOL ASS CARTOON YOU GUYS ARE GONNA BE SO AMAZED WHEN I FINISH IT WITH MY BOY WANDABOY. I AM PUTTING PRETTY MUCH ALL OF MY CREATIVE ATTENTION INTO IT RIGHT NOW

go play the game i made last year with @cymbourine

just kidding

check out this toon though