Ahh, the passage of time - comforting, dreadful…it comes all the same.

Back near the end of 2020 I was becoming more active on this here site, Newgrounds, and the looming “death of Flash” despite preservation efforts like the Ruffle emulator existing, caused me to pitch a jam about creating new Flash content to be playable in browsers via Ruffle. I threw the name “Flash Isn’t Dead Jam” out there along with a cringe illustration:

This is actually the first time I’ve looked at this from my PM’s since like, I sent it, YIKES did I ever fling this together LOL

Tom came up with a better name, and here we are, the Flash Forward Jam, which I’m rather pleased with the continued turnout of! It’s thanks to you guys it’s been happening for 5 years now!

Anyhow, just for fun I made something for the very first Flash Forward - that would be the thing that’s turning 4 today:

I think the theme of “new Flash content” got me thinking about older versions of Macromedia-era software like Director, couple that with the thought of “I wonder if I could both emulate something like that AND something like Baldi’s Basics in my own way”, and Randy Learns Science was the finished result!

It’s scrappy, it’s goofy, It wasn’t made with trackpads in mind, I may have done some things differently now as I didn’t give things TOO much thought, but I wasn’t expecting the small but positive reception it would receive, as it got decent YouTube coverage and fanart!

This reception quickly got me thinking about a follow-up, landing on a Windows XP-styled OS environment and the school subject of History. For a loooong while I only had the idea of potentially having things you do in the OS impact the game, sort of a back-and-forth type of deal, but I had ZERO ideas for it otherwise. One day I began thinking about point and click adventure games, what I liked about the genre, what I did not like, and how I had never finished one aside from like, PICO VS BEAR DX, and how I had never finished anything in this little game engine I had tinkered in since childhood, Adventure Game Studio…which at the time had just added a web export…heyyyyy!

Fast forward to today, and Randy Learns History is currently one of my FAVORITE creations. The average playtime is slowly creeping longer than the average Humongous Entertainment junior adventure’s playtime, and YES it’s coming to Newgrounds even if the file size is a bit unfavorable for say, a mobile device.

It may be a little embarrassing, but I threw together a bit of a percentage-based progress update for today to let y’all know where I’m at with this dang thing:

So as you can see, the core of the whole thing is planned out, while the bulk of the content, not including polish and removing placeholder, is breezing past the halfway point. I have also prioritized voice acting a bit below getting the rest of the stuff into the game.

The plan is still to finish this thing this year, and boy do I NOT wanna go far into 2026 with dev if I miss that goal. I’m starting to get to that stage of working on something for many years on and off where I go “Is all of this stupid? Have I made a terrible mistake?” sooooo, I need to be done. :P

Thank you all for supporting me all these years, thanks for enjoying games of mine like Randy, and HAPPY BIRTHDAY RANDY! See y’all when History is ready for launch! Gonna make some NOISE about it!!

It’ll be coming to NG first, then itch and GameJolt the next day, most likely.

Ooh also, don’t forget about that economic boycott happening in the US!

—XOXO DN

The high points of 2024 for me were some of my BEST EVER,

let’s touch on them a little bit as the year comes to a close!

GAMES

Firstly, as far as games go…I released NOTHINGGGG!

That should change after Randy 2 is done, as you know the deal by now - it’s been my primary focus and quite the beast! But it’ll get finished, and I’ll get back to putting out some small projects again!

However…I did contribute some costume art to Tankmas this year, and a Randy da Mouse costume dropped alongside Ritz the Rat! Been super cool to see people walking around Tankmas as Randy as I get this game done!

(Note: Not all of these made it into the game)

Randy Learns Science also turned three years old this year (sheesh):

EDIT: Oop, I forgot that I also contributed to the map pack for Bird Tapper!

ARTWORK

As for artwork, I drew some stuff here and there this year, namely the Secret Santa piece for @Nebulate that I absolutely love the way it turned out:

And the piece I did for the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese zodiac, of which I am one, having been born in 2000:

I also did two more pieces in the “obscure indie” theme I started doing last year:

It’s safe to say that’s not the last you’ve seen of my obscure indie tribute art!

The two others I did last year:

AUDIO

For audio, I slowly continued to trickle out the fun lil’ Randy Learns History OST, as an ongoing, gradual tease:

And I also participated in an interview with the one and only @Aalasteir:

MEETUPS!

My main involvement with NG this year was just bein’ in the community, like going to another two MEETUPS!

I was at Pico Day and the TooManyGames meetup this year, and also got to visit the NG office for the first time, all of which were some of THE highlights of my year!

[Pico Day Recap]

[TooManyGames + NG Office Recap]

I also got even comfier in the BBS, a borderline..."regular", shudder...

AND I also gradually began to date the wonderful, passionate @CaptainStevie! Love ya dude!

To end this section, have some "met this person for the first time" selfies I've never posted to NG until now:

(Pictured: Me & @LeviRamirez)

(Pictured: Me & @Megacharlie, whom I've known from NG for the past decade!)

-In Closing-

Despite not releasing anything this year (like Randy 2 as I had hoped at the start of this year), this was a SUPER AWESOME year aside from the usual highs and lows! I love all the friends (and the boyfriend) I’ve netted through the site, and this has also felt like a year I’ve made lots of strides in! Nobody’s perfect, but I am content with the person I’m slowly becoming.

My random, unsolicited advice for the teens on the site is: adulthood feels different and not at the same time, but overall mental maturing feels wonderful. Life is hard, but good!

Take care of yaselves as we all ring in 2025, and Newgrounds’ freakin’ 30th anniversary!!! Gonna be a BIG one full of a lot of tributes, I’m ready for it!

-XOXO Dungeon

(Ooh ooh, some other people were doing shoutouts in their recaps, so I will follow along and do my own, in no particular order:

@Nebulate @CaptainStevie @CheddarExuberant @Rushmilk @PsychoGoldfish @Tamag0 @Aalasteir @URAYsan @AlixBalica @bagofmeat @MrSignmeout @Memorizor @MrShmoods @Natalie-Bitezz @Bituin @MisterMantid @Lolofyr @NamedudeDev @ElRandomGMD @SkilledFella @AlexToolStudio @TomFulp @CarpetBakery @Megacharlie @LeviRamirez @BallisitcBanana @Smugarug @Peti @Misty-Starling09 @Stepford @BrandyBuizel

If you're not here it doesn't mean I hate youuuu! <3)

Today marks two years since meeting my boyfriend @CaptainStevie for the first time. It’s not a dating anniversary, but it’s become like one for me!

Ironically we met in the collab group chat for the NG themed dating sim Love Me NG 2, of all places :P

I wanted to put together a small kind of scrapbook-y blogpost to commemorate today and to get all that YUCKY public affection out of the way! Blegh, who needs that?

(Artist: @LionsNotice)

(Artist: @MKMaffo)

I would not be the first to meet someone romantically through Newgrounds BTW!

💚🧡

Every day I try to get at least one thing done on Randy 2 even if it’s small. I'm officially at the point in the project where I'm just ready to be finished with it, not because I don't enjoy working on it, but because it's been cookin' so long I don' want it to burn!

I miss putting out / contributing to handfuls of small projects each year, and I'm startin' to get antsy and impatient about people finally diving into this thing. Not to mention I'm probably hypin' the project up too much in my head! The first Randy game definitely had a good reception and this game is gonna be bigger and better than that one for sure, but it's just...gonna get the reception it's gonna get and that's all there is to it!

(Artists featured in this GIF: @Memorizor, @MisterMantid, @NamedudeDev)

I had said at the start of the year that I wanted to finish the game by the end of this year, and that time frame is STARTING to sound like a crunch...and crunch is bad! A famous video game man said that once.

I also have to remind myself that while, yes, it's possible to make a game of this scope in less time than it's taken me so far, I AM trying to make (in my free time!) an art-intensive, fully voice acted point n' click that would likely take 2-3 hours to play through to all the endings blind, in one sitting.

Soooo I dunno when the game will come out. I don' wanna spend too much longer on it tho! I'd say the progress on finishing the first ending (without polish and everything put in) would be...let's split the game up into 5 game "sections" to get to that ending - there's about 2 sections left to finish!

It'll be SUPER motivating to have the game playable from start to finish once that ending's done, which is my primary goal at the moment.

I'll also use this newspost to once again thank everyone who's contributed to this project so far, to thank people for the feedback I've gotten along the way (including one friend who said "that's bullshit, you should change that" to something while playtesting, which I did), and to thank the musicians who've let me use their songs in the game AND who have made music just FOR this game! (@TeraVex and @Dieswyx!! <3)

Everyone involved has been makin' the DREAM WORK, as I've had to deal with life stuff and a (non-life threatening) health condition that's slowly gotten worse (that I still haven't gotten a handle on yet) while chipping away at this. I've touched on the latter in the past on NG but kinda omitted details later on so as to not overshare publicly, but I will say being on the spectrum elevates it for me preeeetty badly. Cooool stuff! But anyway. Workin' on this through all that fog and busyness will just make finishing it all that more sweeter!

Thank you for readin' all this mess! Can't wait for y'all to PLAY VIDEO GAME...NOT TOO FAR IN THE FUTURE.

(NPC designed by @PinkTopHat)

GameMaker's getting an overhauled runtime! It recently entered open beta and should allow for all sorts of neato stuff, like coding a game in your favorite code editor, improved performance, using other coding languages, having more control over runtime functionality...it also seems like they'll be targeting WebAssembly for it at some point in the future, which gets me a bit hopeful since GameMaker games targeting the web have a bit of wonk to them, notably on mobile devices. Stuff like Pico-8 and Godot have a better feel in that respect, so if this new runtime eventually brings GameMaker stuff on par with the other mobile-friendly stuff, I'll definitely be updating all my GameMaker work to it!

Last weekend I got to meet some friendly NG faces for the first time at the TooManyGames meetup, and then had the absolute privilege of visiting the NG office with others!

Thank you to everyone at the office and Tom for having our bigger-than-expected group over, thank you to Cortat and all the organizers of the TMG meetup, and thanks to everyone I interacted with and hung out with over the weekend!!

The rest of this is gonna be a captioned photo dump so I can post from my phone quick and no-frills. Enjoy!

Tom attracted a formed line this year at TMG, possibly due in part to a newer crowd and our stage being positioned straight across from the con entrance. Poop Game is being demoed in the background!

@CaptainStevie and I getting out of the muggy, stormy, hot weather outside and taking refuge in some office of sorts.

@TomFulp finally getting to the bottom of what crashed his website that one time.

(The story behind that is that I accidentally had an extra copy of the Homestuck Act 4 book that I could no longer return, so I offered it up to the office to “find it a good home”.)

(Also! The person behind this NG shirt, @MechanicalMantis, is now selling this shirt if you want one!)

Huddled around watching and playing Nightmare Cops! The workflow on this game project is so fascinating, we got to see some of the early levels, some unfinished stuff, and the game running in Ruffle even, because it’s literally ALL in Flash just like Tom’s previous console game work! Also THE GAME IS AWESOME. People’re gonna LOVE this, including me!!

While we are on the subject of Flash workflows, another core memory of the visit was sitting on the couch with @Megacharlie talking about the tools he’s developed for Jackbox! Another case of “it’s literally just .SWF files”! So so interesting, thank you both for showing things off!

Our group had weird taste in anime.

As a side note, this area is SUPER CHILL for hanging out with people in!

You know it’s a huge deal to see a vending machine when you get the Vending Machine Enthusiast retweet!

To answer your question, the key for it broke I think, or something happened to the key, and until that’s fixed there won’t be any more drink dispensing in the office :(

The NG rat and mouse are now officially bros! Thanks for drawing this trading card and for a great chat @MKMaffo!!

Ready for battle! The figurines left post-Kickstarter I assume.

I’m on the NG chalk wall, ma!

THANK YOU EVERYONE!

EVERYTHING BY EVERYONE!

...and not, at the same time!

But sewiously - Smiling Friends season 3 confirmed, Punch Punch Forever goin' past the pilot, GETTING THIS GAME (Friday Night Funkin'), the rise of micropublishers, dare I say...that Digital Circus thing?

The "shift in vibes" that started in 2020 continues onward - it's a really exciting buzz that I'm sure you, reader, have felt! Even with big social medias beginning their downward spiral, the advent of buzzwordy AI that companies have a firm grip on the teat of, industry layoffs, the CEO of Spotify having 4x the net worth of Paul McCartney (?????), and things OVERALL SUCKING RIGHT NOW (though they always have been)...creative people have STILL GOT IT!

Personally I would love to work in a creative industry eventually - after Randy 2 I wanna start thinking about that kinda stuff. Freelance? Landing a pipe dream?! I think I need to work more on my non-game engine programming skills, too.

Speaking of Randy - after Punch Punch Forever episode 2 I really started to reassess the punch (ha) the comedic bits of the game have, as PPF is fairly on-brand with my sense of humor. I'm pleased to report the finished game will be Funny!

We've also started getting more organized about drawing stuff for the game and I've started to put the important beats of the whole game to (digital) paper instead of keepin' it all up in my noggin. I'm pretty confident I can fill the whole cool game outline so far with Awesome Coherency and Decent Dialog!

So that's been going good! And I hope your work has been going good, too.

Remember: People have been talking about the nearing demise of humanity...since cuneiform tablets!

<3 -DN

Pico Day was the most surreal Friday night of my life so far.

Over 300 damn people showed up at a venue that worked out super well for everyone, cartoons were screened, I got to exhibit a playable work-in-progress demo of the second Randy game and got some great feedback, had internet people incredibly humanized for myself even more, and pretty much every Portal was covered, Movies, Games, Audio and Art!

Newgrounds is turning 30 years old next year - it has survived the dot com bubble bursting, ad revenue drying up (and the site not being “advertiser friendly”), the “death” of Flash, the late 2010’s “dry period” on the site…

And this past Friday we broke a meetup record.

I could develop senility and memory loss in my elderly age, and @TomFulp at the top of the stairs that go down to the theater, laughing and smiling and looking onward as the crowd applauded and they tried to get the cartoon screening’s audio to work, would forever be ingrained in my mind.

I already wasn’t worried about the future of NG, but now I’m definitely not.

Enough sappy! Some shoutouts before we get to my lil’ photo dump:

@CaptainStevie @Lolofyr @TeraVex @MisterMantid: Thank you for contributing (and for your future contributions) to my funny mouse game and for hanging out around my demo table! Thank you Lolo for making us all Randy buttons to sport, and thank you Steve and @CheddarExuberant for the build-a-bear of my fursona that left me speechless for probably the first time in my life!

@Smugerryarugerry: Thank you for the kind words and for your sick push-up skills!

@BallisitcBanana: Congrats for being the only one to play through the entire demo to the cutoff point I put in!

@GirZiggler: Thank you for a copy of your EP!

@PukeBomb: Your table came out awesome, I enjoyed being your rival dojo across the way from you…though who teaches the finer martial art is yet to be decided. :P

The two young kids from outside the venue that snuck in briefly like the IRL equivalent of visiting NG when you’re too young for it: How apt!

@BrandyBuizel and @Coby: You KILLED it!!!!!!! I commended Brandy while I was there but you both went above and beyond making this happen. Thanks for the fresh glowstick, Brandy, and thanks for the trading card thing, Coby!!

Everyone who helped set up and strike everything down: Good hustle! The venue was appreciative of our Boy Scout leave-no-trace cleanup and we worked pretty fast!

To everyone who attended and everyone I met that I haven’t named here: Was this awesome or what?? Thank you for making this awesome and for saying hi to me!

The weather: Thank you for cooperating!

Pictured (left to right): Me, @MisterMantid, @CaptainStevie, @Lolofyr

Pictured: Me and @CarterSterling

Pictured: @CaptainStevie

I have a bunch of footage on my video camera to comb through, but I’ll probably put together a little video on Pico Day and post it, maybe to NG and opt it out of awards, take the opportunity to do a submission like that, hehehe. Just gotta troubleshoot getting the video off the camera’s SD card!

HAPPY PICO DAY!!

-XOXO DN

Random late-night thoughts:

I think something cool about creativity is that you can take a concept and "rekindle its flame"; anything from aesthetic, to medium, to genre, to an idea, to subject matter. You can just go "Hey this is interesting and/or means a great deal to me, this should exist, I want to give it the respect it deserves" or "how can I expand/improve upon this this and/or make it my own somehow?". Carrying an idea further along human history even a tiny bit.

My creative voice in games has ended up a mishmash of things that mean a lot to me: A cute, simple cartoon art style, "multimedia"-era entertainment, lower-resolution or "dated" visuals and audio, and an overall comedic but carefree vibe that's very internet-inspired. I'm proud of it!

I think this also applies to preservation work, too. Aside from things like services that get shut down (which I don't blame people for trying to revive or recreate to various legal dubiousness), I always thought nostalgia was kinda weird for digital media in the sense that you can pretty much just GO CONSUME THAT MEDIA STILL! You can still play old PC and adventure games! You can draw in MSPaint and tools like it! You can still play Flash games and movies! You can still play Wii and DS games, you can still go make Flipnotes! (Someone should make a modern Flipnote-like animation tool if it doesn't already exist, see: something cool about creativity)

Point being, we've got interest in consuming creative history with books and movies and such but I feel like with most people when it comes to digital media, there's this idea that it's just "inaccessible", and "antiquated". It ain't easy, sure! But look at the efforts of stuff like Ruffle, ScummVM, GOG, Internet Archive...Newgrounds even! I think it's exceptionally important. Advancements in mediums and technology are important too, but so is digitizing those ol' film reels, so to speak! And I think people should still be able to "film on reel" too...sure the "indie retro" aesthetic is a bit oversaturated but not everything has to have state-of-the-art AAA visuals, and things aren't inferior for not having them, obviously.

Concepts should just...exist!

Obviously this is all glancing over harmful or amoral subject matter and concepts, but I think ya hopefully get what I mean!

2023 was an important year for me with some ups and downs (what’s new), but overall a pretty great year!

GAMES?

I didn’t do much in the way of new games on NG this time ‘round - only two games that I was involved in!

The first was Booba Beat with @CaptainStevie, @CheddarExuberant and @Keeby:

[it occurred to me I may have to rate this blogpost A if I link it here even if it'll only show based on your content settings and such so...just go look for it]

This was an April Fools release and my first A-Rated Newgrounds game and it’s incredibly ridiculous and I deeply apologize for it...not!

Sadly I somehow didn’t account for not every device being able to pull off millisecond-perfect timing, thus the timing offset detection method I implemented which just reset the game...caused some players to just have the game reset on them over and over. This, coupled with the game’s boner-killing content, naturally tanked the stars it initially had on release.

I plan on an update that should fix this and remove that detection reset altogether!

Then in June there was Love Me Newgrounds 2:

I was brought on to this project by @VoicesByCorey and I'm very grateful that I was, as I met people like @CaptainStevie and @CheddarExuberant through the project in late 2022! It was a bit of a chaotic dev cycle even by the time me and the later recruits came on, but the finished product came out pretty good if I do say so myself!

I also: Took the reins on, and completely didn't make happen, Tankmas '23! All to make it more...special when it does happen, yeah, totally the plan there...

And that brings us to...

MEETS!

2023 saw me at two NG meets, both of which I have writeups about here. I have a distinct memory of June's when things were winding down a bit and the NG dog tags were being given out to people marked as coming...It felt like being back at a day camp as a kid or something. Some kinda beautiful blend of old feelings and the new...

"It's a brand new feeling! Or have I felt this before?"

And then in October I ended up being "furry handler" for Steve for a little bit, as well as the other end of holding up his NG flag in the photo op, both really cool things! What else to say, but how special these meets are! I suppose I would count them as what "made me emotional" as per my 2022 recap's goals.

RANDY? THE MOUSE?

A lot of '23 was spent working on Randy Learns History, the sequel to Randy Learns Science; although I feel like things really started to kick into high gear for it near the end of the year. This still-relatively-small game became a BEAST, and the world of Randy is about as expanded upon in this as you could ever want! There's also a lot of small things in this point n' click which aren't anything new on their own but feel very unconventional for the genre, though that's probably just me badly explaining the game has a very unique voice going on, which is cool! We're at about 30-40 minutes of average gameplay and my goal was an hour, sooo I've probably overshot on that goal, WHOOPSIE! I can relax about that now and just focus on gettin' things done and makin' them fun, you dig?

My plan right now is to release Randy Learns History...THIS YEAR. Though I'll have something more conk creet later on as far as a release window goes, I'm sure. Still lots to do! I'm excited to get this silly thing into everyone's hands, and as always I have to give a shoutout to all the contributors on the game, this thing would not be what it is without y'all and I can't wait to slap your names in the credits!!!

TWENTY-TWENTY...FOUR!

I started this year off dealing with Covid, GRAND STUFF. But as I said, the main focus this year is finishing and releasing Randy 2 to Newgrounds and such! I'll also try to be in some things as usual and make some smaller stuff if I can manage. You may catch me in something...BIRD TAPPY next month. Oh, and that Shoot Trip Die update should come out sometime too, whenever @LeviRamirez is finished with it.

Do I have a goal for this year like I've had the previous two years?...

...

NAH. Although it's going to be the Year of the Dragon this year, my zodiac sign. So I'll just take that extra good luck and have the year I'm gonna have!

Also, I feel like I've become a lot more down-to-earth over the past couple years and a bit better at writing stuff like blogposts, they feel a lot more readable and concise. I'm pretty happy about that I s'pose!

Have a 2024-riffic year everypony!

-XOXO DN