So the Faces of 2022 Collab has been out for a bit now - and quirks aside people seemed to like it!

For those out of the loop, the collab is a collection of 105 different disembodied heads of Newgrounds origin, that you can also quiz yourself on to test your NG knowledge. It was inspired by @TomFulp's Faces of 2012, which itself was inspired by @LiLg's entry for the NG 2013 Calendar.

So how did this come about? Well for some reason at the beginning of this year (or maybe earlier?) I noticed that the ten year anniversary of Faces of 2012 was coming up, and thought it'd be cool to do a more modern NG take on it, 10 years later. It being a collab this time around only made sense, too! So June rolls around and I put out a call for entries in the BBS. The thread goes nuts! Keeping track of so many artists was a bit tough (I accidentally had more faces lined up than the 105-face cap I wanted, for a bit!) but there was no trouble getting enough people on board! I also started coding the game around when finished art first started coming in, so that way I wasn't scrambling near the anniversary to get it done...I still ended up scrambling a little anyway but I'm glad I started on that when I did.

In early October I run into a snag! Up until this point I hadn't been targeting the Web for the game while testing, just Windows. But what this meant was, I had to fix things that worked differently in GameMaker web builds! Not a problem - but then I may have accidentally found a bug in GameMaker's web exporter! Which I still wanna report to GameMaker sooner or later. But basically - with all the sprites for all the faces in the collab, for whatever reason if you tried to make an object change to the sprites of certain faces, they would just NOT go to them, and always go to the face preceding it. EVERY time you tried to! I was stumped on this for a while. But thank you to @Spagato for helping and coming up with a workaround for the bug for the time being!! I really appreciate it.

( One of the buggy faces was you, @VoicesByCorey :c )

So the anniversary of '12 comes around and I'm PRETTY much ready - but I thought it'd be funny to also post '22 at the exact same TIME '12 was posted, in addition to the same date. A minor detail, but if I thought if I could finish in time, I'd go for it. When I'm finally able to be at my PC, I work quickly, loosely aiming for that date-time posting window and looking back and forth from GameMaker to the clock. I manage to make it in time for the silly joke!! Manually too, I didn't schedule the game to be auto-posted. As a result of this though, I spent the next day fixing things that I had overlooked in my haste and listening to feedback I was getting. A bit rocky! But it was out! I'm very proud of how it turned out too, I learned a lot of stuff about coding and GameMaker during this project.

So what do I think, now that it's over, that I could have done better?

• Could've kept track of all the artists a little bit better!
• I should have started targeting the game for a Web build like, as soon as I started coding it.
• Made a more PC-friendly control scheme (I had mobile devices in mind)
• The faces in Study Mode could have linked to where the faces come from! I had everything set up to be able to link to the face artists at least, but just linking to the artists felt weird. And then the anniversary rolled around and I just never did my idea for linking both! Sorry!!!

(I might try to implement those features later down the line but IDK yet!)

All in all I think it was a great learning experience hosting a collab like this and I think it didn't turn out too terribly! Thank you all for playing it, thank you to Tom and LiLg for making the original, and thank you to all the artists who participated!! <3

AND NOW, PROJECT UPDATES

RANDY LEARNS HISTORY! This is like one of my main projects at the moment and it’s coming along so damn well and I’m having a blast working on it. It’s a lot more art-intensive this time around so I’ve enlisted a group of friends to help me chip away at it! You got Randy fans turned dev team members @Bituin and @Nyaamori, you got @felix-rodent, @idonthaveanamedude and @Misty-Starling09, and the incredibly talented @MisterMantid, who’s working on a cool animated pilot and - just - LOOK at their animation work AAAAAGH!!! LOOK AT IT!! (As well as their pilot concept stuff!)

There’s gonna probably be some “activity center” stuff again but it’s primarily an ADVENTURE GAME this time as I keep saying. The goal is to make an adventure game comprised of everything most people and myself like in the genre, in the Humongous Entertainment control style and aesthetic. I know everyone’s trying to make adventure games that “aren’t frustrating!!!” but I think the mixture of escape room-like clear objectives, and that taste of autonomy the genre can give but without not making progress, will be a nice combination.

And LORE! Randy lore! You won’t wanna miss this!!

I don’t know how long the game will take to play through yet but it’s planned to be longer than Science!

Hmm, what else? Everything else I’ve mentioned in previous news posts that isn’t done yet, I’ve been slowly chipping away at. But nothing really of note there yet! I just know to tell you to expect more games from me in the future as always! Love you all and thanks for reading. :3c

Be well!

-XOXO Dungeon