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