We really out here. Been a while since I did a big ass newspost. I been dumb and lazy recently lol. Oh well read on.
AND IF I FORGET SHIT ITS BECAUSE IM FINISHING UP WRITING AND ITS 3AM AND I WANT THIS OUT LOL
(Someone remind me to add links to everything when I wake up lmao)
WARNING THIS SHIT LONG
THESE KEEP GETTIN LONGER AND LONGER
NO INTERNET BUT STILL HUSTLIN
Right after Christmas of 2018, I went to my old foster parents house for a few weeks. I didn’t have internet at my moms house, and I was working on and finishing up my first commercial video game, a deluxe version of Monster Mashing. I had to borrow my foster parent’s old stinky laptop, but it got the job done. However Monster Mashing didn’t actually get fully completed there. At that point in time, we were aiming for a Steam release, so I was getting all the API stuff for both NG and Steam sorted out while I had constant internet access. After a few weeks I got a bunch of the API stuff wrapped up and fixed a few issues with the game. The game was juuuust about ready to release, just a few more fixes.
But I had to go back home to my moms house. We didn’t have internet because of dumbshit and bills and whatnot she just lazy with them lol. We lived a few minutes driving out of my dinky small town, but we didn’t have a car or anything at the time. To upload and keep in contact with all the NG homies, pretty much every single day I would walk about +1hr in the winter cold all bundled up so I can nab wifi from the library for the day. I definitely prefer having actual home wifi, but walking wasn’t as bad as it seems. Except one time. It was VERY windy and cold and snowing and shit. If it was slightly more snowy you could call it a blizzard. But there was nothing more satisfying than finally getting to the library and being all warm and cozy. Since I walked to and from the library pretty much every single day, people started seeing me often as they drive by. Some lovely and nice people even offered rides, which I would always take. ANYWAYS, at this point in time, Monster Mashing is just about to release. Valentines Day 2019.
This was technically my first commercial game. Entering the BIG LEAGUES of game dev biz. I didn’t get my hopes incredibly high or anything, but in the back of my mind I did know that this could have been some crazy success that got me rich and famous and out of my small town. But expectedly, that didn’t happen. Monster Mashing came out, and got a few sales here and there. I’m not sure how many specifics I can share, but I’ll say we had to meet some threshold before we got paid, and it took a month or two of sales before we got there lol. There could have been a few things that contributed to this. We released on Valentines Day, and Nutaku was doing a big ass sale on that day. It’s like releasing a brand new full priced game during a big Steam Sale, probably not a good move. I’m not blaming or complaining or anything though, I find all the biz side of it just as fascinating. And live and learn yo heheh. Monster Mashing actually also had an exclusivity contract of sorts with Nutaku. We had to keep the full NSFW version of it exclusive to Nutaku for a few months, in exchange we get some extra press or something like that. And by that, I suppose they sent out a press release or something like that to some certain journo’s, because day 1 we had a few quick little articles written about the game.
There were a few more articles here and there, but they more or less said the same things. It was definitely interesting to see this. So that’s it right? Game released, didn’t make a huge splash or anything, game biz goes on. Well, we still had the Steam release coming up. And that’s where things get a bit more spicy. I described it in more detail in another newspost, but the basic gist is that we had a character in the game that was a bit… loli lookin. Steam wasn’t cool with that, so we got BANNED from Steam. An interesting side effect of that is that there was a small little article written about that too. This one felt different than the first few things, it felt a bit more organic.
It took me a while to notice this article, but when I did, I actually wrote up the author for a little follow up with more info. It was definitely an interesting and kidna cool experience.
As far as I know, this is the first sorta ‘press’ experience I’ve had for game shit. The fact that it’s from an unfortunate situation doesn’t take away from it too much. And also I don’t hate Steam or anything lololol, for the most part they pretty bro.
To rewind juuuust a bit before this article stuff, in the middle of April or so I was gonna do a small little gamejam with my crew. LoganPhresh as lead art, wit Digimin doin level design, NickConter doin additional animation, and my boy Fu helped out with some concept stuff.
https://twitter.com/LoganPhresh/status/1129439726979682305
https://twitter.com/ninja_muffin99/status/1168566839137296384
Sadly this game aint get finished. Maybe one day.
I was making this one moochin off my old foster parent’s wifi again. I was there trying to get things setup so that I could get a trip to Philly going for PICO DAY. In early January was when I got the invite, but there was a lot of stuff I needed to get sorted out for the trip, and my life was very NOT sorted out at the time. I’ll touch on Pico Day shenanigans later hehe.
In late April I finally got internet setup again at my house. And since im a cool ass hustlin bitch I decided to make a game. The Ludum Dare was coming up, so I got my boys together to make a lil game. The weekend that I got internet, I made Paristroyer with Arzonaut, Digimin, FuShark, and Nerostratos. At the very least, we got the game out and released it, somewhat… It’s still very busted and broken lmao I had like 10hrs of sleep total for that jam. It has pretty cool art so its good enuf lol. Somehow, that game was my first ever monthly 1st award.
This is another game that’d I’d definitely like to fix up and make an actual game, despite its flaws. I like the world.
ALSO in May was when I made SHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM.
I like this game because it busted shit and made NG look weird hehe.
SHOOOOM was inspired by Jojo here on NG. I also like SHOOOOOM because it’s like Newgrounds culture specific. Like a Newgrounds meme. I didn’t create SHOOOOOM, but only added onto it. Somethin I like about that.
Dang May was a bit wild. I ALSO helped put out a cartoon for Pico Day. Pico’s Awakening. I did some writing bullshit on it, and some music/sound effects. This was the first Pico Day in a few years that I didn’t make a game. Although I’m glad I was at least a part of a Pico Day submission of some sort. Shoutout to the crew.
BOOTLEG NG DISCORD, AND PODCAST SHENANIGANS
Pico Day was a bit depressing to be honest. There was of course the part where I was supposed to go but couldn’t make it, but there was a livestream going on and I just couldn’t take myself away from it. Neither could a few of my pals who also didn’t go to Pico Day. The livestream didn’t have anything really, just a webcam. No toons, no art, nothing like that. Really felt like you were the dude at the party that was just watching everyone else have fun because you couldn’t talk to anyone. It felt pretty pathetic, but we just couldn’t take ourselves away from it. And when it ended, the whole day felt wasted and like we missed out on Pico Day and Newgrounds spirit. However, I had a little ace up my sleeve. I had one final trick to have fun with my pals. Make something feel like a Pico Day.
In September 2018, the official Newgrounds discord server got deleted. There’s a bit more detail in that which I could go into, but I was pretty bummed about that situation. My birthday was also in September, and I was talking to my boy Ivan. I told him all i wanted for my birthday was a new Newgrounds discord server as a dumb joke actin all stubborn and shit, then Ivan made a dumbass novelty joke server. It was just me and him in it doing nothing for months and months. Until Pico Day.
On Pico Day night, I got my whole crew in that dumbass joke server. Told everyone to act like it’s the OFFICIAL newgrounds server.
We hopped in the only voice channel and just bullshitted around with whoever would join. That night I talked with people who I knew of for ages, and also people I’ve never seen ever before. I met people that I still talk to. Maybe it was just a weird coping thing, but this shit felt like Pico Day. Talking to Newgrounds weirdos and celebrating the community and how it brings us all together to create some dumb shit.
The next few days were filled with rascal shit of all sorts. There were NO mods, but it was pretty tame
Snackers and Krinkels have a heated debate
The gang being obnoxious on the frontpage, our marketing strategy.
The Discord is still pretty bumpin and thriving. I truly do think it has potential to be great for the community. Not even this one in particular, just some sort of spot where you can DEFINITELY just meetup and hangout and chat with other Newgrounds people. Twitter makes it weird to interact and make friends. Things can get one sided. Maybe you follow someone and they don’t follow back. Even if they do, it’s a different dynamic than say, talking with someone for days, weeks, months, and befriending them through something like Discord. I like to think this particular Discord is doing some cool things right. First off I made FulpTron, which is a Discord bot that basically is a Newgrounds/Discord integration bot. You sign into the Newgrounds API and it basically links your NG and Discord account. It has a few other cool features, which I describe in this newspost, so peep that.
The other shit we do on this Discord has been hosting collabs. I’ve seen a few times of collabs being hosted in discord servers, then once the collab comes out, the server basically dies. And all these people who talked in this one central place go their separate ways in a sense. Maybe it’s for the better, maybe that’s just how it’s been. The sorta philosophy was that the collab was hosted in a side channel of the server, a secret one. Once collab is done, people can still interact and talk with each other in the main channel. It also is a pretty decent source for collaborators. Once collab is done you’d also do shit where people still have the roles for the collab chat, almost like a badge of sorts. The 2019 Sketch Collab was organized first, then Christmas ADVENTure 2019 was hosted and organized in the server too. Both of those have wrapped up and I like to think it created cool engagements and interactions with people in the server. Looking back, the old official Newgrounds server has a similar backstory of sorts. That was originally a server for the DBZ Collab. However it morphed into a general Newgrounds server. The people from DBZ collab still had a role for being in it. Maybe that was some unintentional inspiration.
Going back to the bootleg NG server, it’s definitely had its ups and downs. There’ve been times when I’ve thought about just bouncin and ditchin it. But in the end I still really do think something like this has been good. Maybe I’m just biased. A LOT of my pals I met through the old official NG server, and now this server. It’s been nothing but beneficial to me. Maybe I see it as if it could be so great for me, it could be great for some other kid who wants to get into NG community. Shoutouts to Cymbourine for being co-admin and not letting me go crazy with power.
One of the people I met through the Discord, waaaay back on that Pico Day night, was littlbox who co-hosts the A Couple Of Crickets podcast. Pretty quickly I became buds with him and Goodl and eventually they asked me to be on an episode. Before then I was already a little bit of a fan of the podcast. When I didn’t have internet at my house, I would listen to an episode on my +1hr walk home. Me, littlbox, and GoodL were in voice call in the server, when someone brought up the idea that it’d be cool if the podcast was live recorded in a Discord of some sort. So I ended up helping them set up some of the server stuff, and then when it was time to record, we popped in the Discord and did our thing. I was a bit worried it might be someshit like only 1 person would show up, but my homies showed up and listened to the first ever live ACOCk podcast with me as guest. And pretty much every single episode of the podcast has been recorded live ever since. I also helped them out here and there with stuff too. Like making additions to FulpTron to play Newgrounds music. I even eventually got to pop on as an on and off segment “Cam’s Corner” lmao. Love them boys
I got into some other podcast shenanigans. WillKMR eventually hit me up to help him out with the Grounds Patrol podcast. This was another podcast that I was a fan of before I was asked to get involved with. I helped organize a good chunk of the episodes. Most notably, the Smash Collab Roundtable, the Madness Community Roundtable, and Krinkels and Swain. At some point I also started editing them too. Not sure what else to say other than ur boy out here hustlin hustlin hustlin I’m everywhere on NG baby.
One last little podcast thing I should mention is that I’m dabbling with a little thing with my boy HenryEYES. In September we interviewed StaticSkull, a somewhat infamous Newgrounds user from like 2016-2017. What I like about that one is that without a frontpage or really any exposure like that, that podcast interview got a little over 3K listens on NG.
MUSIC SHENANIGANS
For the past few years I’ve been on and off with music stuff. It wasn’t until 2018 when I started feeling like I was a little bit competent with it. This year felt much more like the music year for me. I dropped some stuff here and there, and in June I made this tweet
https://twitter.com/ninja_muffin99/status/1139595363805872128
And surprisingly I followed through
I release Gamerjuice0 on Bandcamp: https://ninjamuffin99.bandcamp.com/album/gamerjuice0
This album has been sorta in the works from about late-ish 2018 right up until it came out. While I didn’t have internet early in the year, I’d whip up music tracks. And since I couldn’t just publish songs when I was done with them, I was able to stockpile them all up and post them all at once in the album. Then over the next few weeks I uploaded a bunch of stuff to NG. I really like the way things turned out on this. It’s pretty much a full length album of chiptune and shit like that.
I still have a hard time calling myself a musician. I simply don’t see myself as one. I see myself as a programmer / game developer. However it seems like others saw me as a musician of some sort. In about July, my boy Snackers hit me up to make music for his cartoon series Duncan And Jones.
There’s something about Duncan And Jones. Snackers told me I could just do whatever for the music. Things could have gone many different directions. There was something inspiring about Duncan and Jones. It felt really easy to make the music for it. At the time the style I aimed for was a bit out of my comfort zone. It used a bunch of 80s/90s ass synth sounds for that oldschool ambient anime style shit. While I did use a few tracks I just had laying around on my computer and repurposed them, I pretty much whipped up and made the soundtrack for episode 1 within a week or two. The way I did music was that Snackers basically gave me a rough cut of the toon. More or less what the toon was gonna be but without all the animation fully in place. Then I just made whatever I felt was fitting. I think there’s something to be said about the VISION of Duncan and Jones, or at least the vibe it gives off, even without the music. Strong enough so that I can make fitting music for it without having been given direction. Or it inspired me in the right way. Right place right time. At that point I was meaning on bullshitting around with more retro synth shit.
Duncan and Jones sorta got me into using synths much more, and somewhat changed the style of my music. Snackers hit me up for me to make music on episode 2 and I definitely feel like I’ve gotten more skilled and used to using the synth and am able to do different things with it. It’s likely that in the next week or two I’ll drop a little Duncan and Jones EP with all the music I’ve done so far. The music for Duncan and Jones definitely some of my favourite stuff I’ve made this year.
Through the year I’d drop random tracks here and there. I’ve been working on this sorta rap project with my boy Dogl. Yung Nutz. We just bullshit around and whip up some dumbass rap song. I always find myself listening to them on repeat for days after they come out. The first one was ‘Yung Nutz - Beginnings’ and we didn’t know what we were doing too much. I think a lot of the inspiration for us was ‘The Cave’ series by KennyBeats, where he gets rappers in the studio and whips up a beat real fast and gets the rapper to freestyle over it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSSLqHJzy6Y
Watching those it just felt like it was so easy and fun. And wouldn’t you know it, it really was just that. Me and Dogl dropped a few songs. My fav of the bunch might be crazy.mp3, at the very least it’s the one I go back to relisten to the most. Honourable mention to Professional Jared. I love hiphop bullshit, especially on NG, so making my own with my boy is almost like a dream come true.
I won’t break down every single track but I do want to mention a few things. Last year I made some sorta games to express certain things, but this year I’ve made music to express those things. It feels easier to express it this way, however it doesn’t feel as impactful. Maybe that’s not the right word. Point is that I do hope to have a mix of the two. Use music I’ve made to make the games better. I’ve done that to a little extent with Whites/Blacks Only. I made the ending music to that. And Christmas ADVENTure 2018, I used my own music for the credits. I won’t neglect working with other musicians though just because I feel like I can make my own music, just depends on scenario or whatever.
For YEARS I’ve had this plan for a certain game idea. And part of it includes heavy use of music and rhythm mechanics. The masterplan is all coming together…
BACK ON GAME BULLSHIT
In the last half of the year I hopped back into the game making bullshit. In July/August I was working on a visual novel with a few fellas, but that had to be held off for another project I started working on. My Madness Day game. Madness: Incident 10V3 was a game I’ve had in the prototype stage for YEARS. It was only this year when I had the coding skills to at least partially realize the game. I worked on it with Cymbourine, and she’s a Madness freak and she did the art. I did most of the writing, and pretty much coded shit. I had to dig DEEP into the Madness lore and I learned a lot about the Madness series from this writing this game. Because I’m stupid and bad at managing my time, we ended up slippin up and having to release a day or two after Madness Day.
Usually I’m pretty confident with releasing games, but this one Cym really had to convince me that the game was ok enough to release in the demo state. I dunno maybe I felt like up until that point I was always pushing other people to release games with me, and the game was something they weren’t proud of and I didn’t even realize it. Well it’s definitely not like that with this Madness game. The reception was surprisingly good. There was only a few comments telling me the writing was cringy or boring. Actually you know what now I remember why i was a bit hesitant about the game coming out. I showed the game to my boy Digimin and he said it was ‘boring’. So I thought I was being some delusional creative. Like I didn’t even know what was good or not. Well Digi if ur reading this ur a fuk lmao. I was also going through some weird personal stress and anxiety as well. Anyways yeah the game came out, and people seemed to like it. One of my most liked games so far it seems. I wrote more about that game’s process in detail here: https://ninjamuffin99.newgrounds.com/news/post/1069170
Maybe about 2 weeks after I made Madness game, I got hustlin on Ludum Dare game with Digimin, Snackers, and Carmet. We made a dinky little beat em up prototype called Boho in Baller Land. While that game is a bit busted, specifically with hitbox shit and some animation timings, I do see it as an improvement in my game making skills. And I do see that game as being something I could work off of in the future. One thing about that game was that we actually didn’t do voting for other games in the Ludum Dare, so we actually didn’t get enough ratings ourselves to get a placement. Woops. A bit of a shame too since I think we at least could have scored pretty highly in the art category. Oh well live and learn.
Shit got a little bit rough towards the end of the year. I don’t think I did too much other than some music for people. I actually got a music commission, and that REALLY was hard to get all done. It basically held up all other projects of mine through November.
Along with this project holdup, there was some personal things and anxieties that made things a bit more rough, but I think ur boy got through it, at least for the most part. I read this one book about TED talks, written by the CEO of TED. He mentions the topic of people bringing up personal things in their talks. He says something to the extent of “if you’ve gotten through it, it can be inspiring. If you’re currently going through it, it could feel like oversharing”. I feel like recently it’s been hard for me to open up a bit more to people about things, and when I do I feel like I might be oversharing, or feel like I might be draining on them or something. This isn’t something that happened because i read the TED book though lol, it just put it into words how i felt about those things. I like to think I’m getting over that a bit, feeling like im able to share some personal things with people while going through it. But its probably always hard to do shit like that. Anyways theres that tangent hehe
At the end of November my internet got busted again. However this time I lived only a minute or so walking distance away from the library. AND this time I was HUSTLIN and making a bit of money from music commissions. I was able to buy a shitty laptop for myself so I can do a bit of work when i’m at the library. I’ve never actually had a real job before, and thus no money, so this laptop has been one of the very few things I’ve ever bought myself. Feels good to know I worked for it doing something creative like music. And if yall need music and you rich gimme money I’ll make u beats lmao
YEESH this is long so imma quickly wrap up hehehehehe
In mid-ish december i schmoozed internet off my neighbour. I then made a dumbass little game with my boy Wandaboy. Merry Christmas Tom Fulp. I mostly helped him by trying to teach him coding concepts and how to code games. I told him that this game would be a pretty simple beginner game. I walked him through a bunch of the beginning shit. What I coded solely on my own was the blood effects, implementing Newgrounds.io stuff, and uhh maybe somethin else. Otherwise it was Wanda who coded the majority of that.
And uh I whipped up some dumbass christmas music with the boys but whatever im about to fall asleep at my computer maybe ill update this when I wakeup
OTHER COOL SHIT
I recently hit 1K fans on NG. I usually dont make a big deal out of milestones, like 'THANKS FOR 300 FOLLOWS" or anything like that. Maybe since I know the Newgrounds culture is what makes 1K seem like more than it is. It truly was not long ago when I felt like people with 1K were the bigshots of NG. Its weird seeing myself pass people that I thought were bigshots around here. Like I'm not just some random guy in the community, like I'm actually doing something around here and making some sort of impact. Or maybe I'm just being over dramatic. I feel like its hard to talk about shit like this without feeling like a weirdo. Either feeling like im some big shot talking about my numbers, or some smallshit talking about smallshit numbers. In the end its not really about the numbers, more so what they represent, the impact and influence and notoriety and whatever else that i may or may not have around here. Its interesting to think about but also odd. In March some OG NGer bigshot told me that i was "one of the most prominent programmers on the site" and that really stuck around with me and got me thinking about my NG impact or whatever ever since.
Another thing that made me sorta realize this was the Ninjamuffin99 Birthday Collab, which was a dumbass collab my pals made for my birthday. Originally though that collab was meant for me since I missed out on Pico Day. Some wacky shit happened and it got weirdly deleted and then reuploaded in a way IDK the whole story but man that shit wacky and I love the collab hehe.
CLOSING THOTS
I feel like this deserved it’s own little section. I felt a bit wary about sharing this online since it almost felt like I was bragging and making other people jealous or something. But maybe that just says how highly I think of this and how much it means to me.
So this year I missed Pico Day. But the homies still hooked me up. A bunch of people signed a Tankman figure and mailed it to me. When I showed my mom I almost got choked up a bit, and when I was telling my old foster mom about it not too long ago I still got a little choked up about it and almost teared up.
I keep it right on top of my PC, and everytime I look at it I’m reminded that Newgrounds is my favourite shit.
If u read this far tell me some cool albums i need some new shit. Anything goes.
Hope everyone on NG has a blessed 2020
Snackers
God damn it cam I love reading these. Lovely tearjerker at the end there. And man looking back on the NG server bullshit, it was so funny lmao. Hearing you get inspired by duncan n jones really touches me, your music inspires me so it's like we got a nice feedback loop here or somethin lol, man this was a good year. Glad to hear you holdin out man, keep it up. Much love
ninjamuffin99
the first few days of NG server was a wild and wacky time. dunc and jones real good. one love baby