I turned 21 today! My first alcoholic drink is gonna be a Mike’s Hard Lemonade (‘cuz I like lemonade already anyway).

Pistol for President with @Kejayco and @BioPlant coming very soon, and PVBDX shortly after! <3

This summer has probably been my most unproductive ever, in terms of my hobby work and collabs. I dunno what the cause of that was but I didn't do as much dev on a regular basis as I usually do and just went silent on NG, lol. But now that I'm gettin' outta that rut, I feel I can make another news post of where crazy ol' me is at:

My Scratch to GameMaker converter Graze is on GitHub!

Far from completion, my own lil' Ruffle-type project (though it's not really an emulator) has been put up on GitHub so I can open it up to contribution from Python devs and testers, and to manage production of it better. We're still in the early stages of adding code conversion and I need to de-YandereDev my code and sort it into functions. But other than that, this'll be exciting to come to fruition even if I'm just chipping away at it on the sidelines!

Check it out here!

PICO VS BEAR DX

I need to draw and code the final boss, it's just been tedious adding in all the spoken dialog (but HUGE thanks to @PsychoGoldfish for helping me get Flash's finnicky audio controlling working for that) but we're getting there! I don't wanna say this month JUST yet just in case but it's gonna be very, very soon. It's a short game (slightly more extended than the original) but hopefully worth the wait!

Attacking the Tower

The Strobe Interactive team recently posted the gameplay trailer for our Henry Stickmin fangame Attacking the Tower and it's broken 100K views on YouTube already!

I like making stuff okay?!?! <3

A soft goal of mine after most of these projects are done is to pump out stuff at the rate that @Stepford does, even just a little bit. Since I'm a project fiend as you can see, that's just...the dream :P

Very admirable!

First up will prolly be Pico VS Bear DX with another @VoicesByCorey credit as Pico!! STAY TUNED!!!

-Dungeon XOXO

Happy Pico Day, all!!

I’m not gonna be the only one, but my Pico Day game, a remake of Pico Vs Bear, isn’t gonna be posted today. I estimated last night that if I crunched and pulled an all nighter, I could probably finish the last two bosses (without polish) leaving voice acting and sound effect implementation, and the ending to do. And I wouldn’t be able to work on it today until tonight. But with how cool this is turning out I don’t really wanna rush for less than what I have planned.

As Miyamoto totally said...”Thou shalt not treat Pico Day like a game jam if you’re making something that people would appreciate not being rushed.”

Here’s a GIF of the first boss which IS done though, and actually pretty damn solid. :D

You can also thank my brother @PinkTopHat for suggesting (and drawing for it) the idea to have you be able to take Bear’s shotgun after beating him and being able to switch between both guns which function differently. I guess playing those dang FPS games are good for something in casual Flash game dev!

Also, If you’re a Newgrounds supporter, you can check the supporter party forum and play up to the first boss for now if you’d like!

But enough about that. There are some other Pico Day things to talk about here, namely this cool surprise from the current NG wall art by @Slyvern:

“Look mom, who is also a Randy - I’m on the Newgrounds!”

Finally, whenever @milkbarjack’s game Pico Clicker goes up, one of the Pico faces in that collab was drawn by me, keep ya eyes peeled for it while playing!

Can’t wait to share the hard work of everyone on the PICO VS BEAR DX team, and THANK YOU to everyone for getting everything in to me before Pico Day, lol. I’ll repay your timing with a belated Pico Day game. X_X

-XOXO Dungeon

Here's your update on how all that stuff o' mine is going!

RLH.exe

It was too much fun. I'm (leisurely) making another Randy Learns... game. Not much else to report yet as it's early in dev.

Pico Game Remake?

Makin' something Pico-related for Pico Day with @BillPremo, @Dylz49 and @VoicesByCorey (@TomFulp helped with something specific for it too). I will say it's a remake of an old Pico game. Will reveal what it is when it's posted, probably on Pico Day! If I miss the deadline for Pico Day it's ok, still gonna post it 'cuz it's coming out freakin' amazingly. I'm doing music for it as well and JohnnyGuy let me use one of his songs for it too!

GRAZE (Scratch to GameMaker conversion tool)

Sprites and Sounds of the Scratch project carry over perfectly now with vector sprites next to figure out. Next up is the biggest hurdle, CODE. I want the games to function in GameMaker as close as possible to the original Scratch versions, and support as many Scratch functions as possible. This is why I'm not rushing this, I wanna get it right. The games start up the same in both engines now though at least:

Variables aren't displayed on screen yet as you can see, and there's no game code beyond that so far either. The way Scratch project JSONs are structured for code is kinda weird but once I figure it out, a lot of basic Scratch functions will be quickly supported and then maybe I can start to open up the tool for testing!

Also I said before the tool targets Scratch 2.0 project files since that's what I'm familiar with having taken apart, but I think I'll be able to support Scratch 3.0 files eventually too.

Also don't ask why my test Scratch project's a ripoff I did when I was younger of the One Line Tetris gag from :the game: - It's got enough basic Scratch functions to target for now.

That's all from me for now!

Keep bein' awesome, all you other creatives here!

-XOXO Dungeon

Flash Forward 2021 has come and gone (and seems like it'll be an annual thing) and BOY has it been the coolest thing I've ever been a part of! To all 51 entries to the jam (50 not counting mine), you all did an amazing job!! I still have to play a few more of them but what a turnout! I literally just came off of being a guest on the Newgrounds Podcast but I wanted to pen my thoughts on the whole thing.

I pitched the Flash Forward jam to Tom after seeing the "Welp flash is dead for good, Newgrounds will die with it probably" posts on social media begin to set in. And although they didn't last long, It still kinda got to me a little bit. Plus, Ruffle was getting good enough to emulate most flash games coded in ActionScript 2! So after a shower I was like "I'm gonna just do it. I'm gonna get a prize pool going and pitch the jam idea to Tom". Originally the jam was called the "Flash Isn't Dead Jam" but after some back and forth and Tom liking the idea, the Flash Forward Jam was born!

Shortly after the greenlight I wanted the excuse to make a flash game too, so I went with the idea I had for a while, a faux operating system environment with some evil kids edutainment game or whatever. And that became Randy Learns Science! My first game with a crap ton of fanart flowing in shortly after release, which was new to me.

Originally my idea for an entry to the jam was one where it was like the game ROM CHECK FAIL, but Newgrounds themed. Mike from Ruffle's dev team would have messed somethin' up with the big fat machinery in the game's story, and suddenly all the Flash games got mixed together, oh noooo! Though, I didn't really know which NG game mechanics would have blended well together.

The first jam game to be completed to my knowledge that got frontpaged was Type Help, the text adventure...engine? I wanna finish the adventure it comes with eventually.

Then came Drop Cannon shortly before the flood of deadline-making entries including mine. I was hyped for this one, I mean, a new Tom Fulp web game?! I didn't care what it would be, it would just be amazing when it came out, I knew. And I did end up enjoying it on release, playing it with a huge grin on my face. It definitely feels like a Newgrounds/Nitrome hybrid.

Another notable entry for me was I'm Outta Here by @TheCarpetBaker - The Riddle Transfer feel to it was off the charts, and feels like what Strobe Interactive and I wanna do with our Henry Stickmin fangame Attacking the Tower, just pure attention to the source material. Only got stuck on one puzzle for a bit, can reccomend!

Cat Burglar by @starBlinky was a fun time, played that one mostly on my phone. Got the addictiveness of those kinda games down, 'cuz I didn't stop until I beat the game.

@matt-likes-swords of EBF fame got in on the Flashy goodness too, which was cool to see! Though I still have to play their entry Bullet Heaven 3.

The most ambitious entry had to be Roguebot Rumble by @PsychoGoldfish and friends. They tried to cram as much into the game before the deadline as possible and crunched for it too. And in the end Ruffle's mileage varied for people playing the game and it was switched over to Newgrounds Player. Ruffle will run games like it better as it is developed, but it's still sad to see that after their hard work on the game.

I could go over all the rest of the entries to the jam, but I'd be here all night.

What came after the jam though, and that just happened today, was my guest appearance on @TheNewgroundsPodcast! Man. I had never been on a podcast before and I was admittedly nervous before heading on to chat about the jam and my entry. It didn't help that there was an influx of big NG names on this particular episode, with Tom Fulp, Jeff, and the other devs they brought on. Even with mental preparation days before, I STILL got on the recording sounding like I was spontaneously brought to the stage from the audience. People afterward commended me for staying cool while being obviously starstruck. What an amazing feeling though, would absolutely be on again, and I'm proud to call myself among the NG boys.

Years ago I had felt like I had missed out on the web game "hayday" online, making cool stuff and making a name for yourself online creatively. I learned Flash a little bit when I was younger but by the time I felt I could put out polished stuff, it was too late before Ruffle - Flash was dying. But all of this made me realize that infinite well of creativity online, doesn't matter your tool as long as you're comfortable using it to create - that well is still out there. Alive and very much well.

<3

(In other news, my brother caved and joined Newgrounds himself! He's @PinkTopHat and he'll be posting his creative work and definitely will be collabing with me a lot since we're very close creative partners.)

Flash Forward Jam

(Promo art by @zattdott)

Flash emulation with Ruffle is getting THAT good - which is why I wanted to help fund the prize pool for this game jam. Who doesn't want to see a bunch of brand new Flash games to celebrate the preservation efforts of interactive media dear to our hearts??

There's $2K in prizes on the line AND the deadline's been extended until the end of February, so I thought I'd make a lil' cheat sheet to incentivize people to MAKE SOMETHIN'! It doesn't even have to be extravagant, or a "game". Pico's School was made before Flash had variables!

For more advanced stuff, try the old ActionScript 2 documentation.

The only other roadblock I can think of is getting a copy of Flash that has ActionScript 2 (the only thing Ruffle supports right now). Well, my buddy Megacharlie has ya covered with his archive of old versions of Flash! See if you can't get a version running. I know CS5.5 works for me and has AS2 support!

When you upload your jam entry to Newgrounds, tag it with "flash-forward-jam" !!!

And don't forget to check off "Works with Ruffle emulation"! Kinda the whole point of the jam.

And yes, even though I helped start this jam I had to take the excuse to make a lil' Flash game. Expect that soon! I know Tom Fulp + Jeff and PsychoGoldfish are making new Flash games for the jam for fun too. :D

February's gonna be exciting to see!!! Good luck, interweb creatives, and make crap like it's 1995 or somethin'!

IT LIVESSSSS!!

-Dungeon

It's this guy again! Wanted to talk about what I've been working on. And what I'm working on, is a Python tool that's very daunting but do-able. It's a tool I would have loved to have when I was younger, it's something I'm gonna use for an old games collection, and it's...

When I was around 6 to 7 years old my introduction to game programming was Scratch, an educational tool but powerful coding environment considering it's a buncha blocks you snap together to make things do things. You can make whatever you want within the confines of the program, and Scratch's FAQ states your creations with it are yours to sell or do as you please with. But to bring your work OUTSIDE of the program, you were very limited in functionality and still are. There's a bit of functionality that budding game developers comfortable with Scratch could benefit from...or COULD have benefitted from:

• Save data for less arcade-style games
• APIs for Newgrounds and GameJolt (etc), if you so desired
• Exporting to devices other than PCs
• [insert things other game dev software can do that Scratch can't]

With Graze, you run your .sb2 Scratch project file through the program and it reads your project's code, moves over the sprites and sounds and basically re-codes the game in GML as a GameMaker Studio 1.4 project file! Upon doing some digging around I found that all the code stored within a Scratch project is just stored in a .JSON file, making this conversion tool STUPIDLY easy. It's just a matter of re-creating each Scratch function in GameMaker from the ground up.

So far, the tool carries over the game's background sprites, and object sprites and sounds are next. Once that's all done it'll just be a matter of doing the re-coding code which I've like, started 1% on already and was the first thing I did. As such, Variables from the scratch project are also carried over, seen here:

(yes I later appended "global." to variables and "var_" to the names so they wouldn't conflict with GameMaker function names)

The tool's origins begin with @Megacharlie attempting to code such a tool in Lua and me immediately being like "zomg I need to see something like this exist". Eventually the project stagnated but once I figured out the JSON and GameMaker metadata heavy lifting, the project was back on and even Charlie's like "sweeeeeet" looking at my progress with it so far. So thanks Charlie, for making this happen.

Once it's finished I guess it'll go up on GitHub so stay tuuuned!

In other news my Flash game (emulated in Ruffle) Face It! got frontpaged on Newgrounds. Oh, and the Henry Stickmin fangame Attacking the Tower I'm coding for is still going well - expect some animation teasers in 2021.

OK time to go play the Friday Night Funkin' update.

-Dungeon <3