This year looks to be the year of corporate seppuku, and up next on the chopping block is Unity, one of the game engines used to make games right here on newgrounds.com.

So, what'd they do?

Starting January 1st 2024, they plan to charge relatively successful devs (200,000 installs/life to date and 200,000$ or more in income for the last 12 months) who get their games installed 0.20$ on the regular rate.

And their clarifications on this matter just makes it WORSE somehow.

SAUCE.

Hope you're good with just handing out charity copies, and just asking for donations if Unity is your go-to engine.

So if your game gets over 200,000 installs (yes, not unique installs), I hope you got a wallet chonkier than a big time gacha game dev's because this is gonna start costin' ya somethin' REEEEEEEEAL UGLY. That isn't a shot in the foot, that is straight up blowing your legs off. What the hell were they thinking?

Of course, devs who've been using Unity are NOT taking this lightly.

Sauce.

Multiple developers have pointed out the obvious issues with this new fee, that would essentially be a meatgate to F2P games, mobile developers, and the small of indie developers suddenly finding they have a hit on their hands.

It would be a system where developing a successful game on Unity could bankrupt the developer behind that hit.

Shit's on fire lol.

This is just going to push devs to other platforms. Godot is totally free. Unreal is only 5% of revenue over $1M (50,000/million bucks).

No company is going to agree to a contract that opens them up to unlimited liability based on an interaction between third parties (Unity and customers installing their game) that they can't even audit. What then? Big game studios moving away from it, leaving small-time devs to get "taxed"?

What exactly the end-goal here?

This is a stupid business idea. Of course, it still looks like stupid business. Another thought I've had is that it might just be corporate sabotage. You almost never actually hear of it, but it definitely exists. This is suicidal enough to make me suspicious.

It would seem that the ancient pasta has come to pass.

What a future, huh?

Me, I'm using Flash MX2004 as the Old Gods intended. Complete with a serial number provided by Adobe lolololololol

Some whiny weirdo was trying to ruin this party with the apocalypse which was supposed to happen yesterday. So I was NOPE CHUCK TESTA and kicked the end of the world in the FACE 'CAUSE ITS PARTY NIGHT UP IN THIS HOUSE! YEAAAAAAAAAAH.

Alright now on to the good stuff.

It's 38 years of MY GODDAMN LIFE and STILL not dead yet, despite all the whining on normiespace about how THE END IS NEEEEAAAAAR! Feels good to win despite all the skeevy goons trying to get everyone on the internet hooked on fear porn lololololololol. Can't touch me! More importantly, I'd like to take this moment to thank everyone who sent me birthday greetings on this day, and for everyone who sent me presents for this day. I appreciate it, thank you all.

A very special shoutout to that anonymous individual who sent me a whole stack of free sound effects on a CC0 license. If you're reading this, cheers - I'll put'em to good use.

Well, 10 more years and I can yell 48!! again. LEGALLY. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Until then, I'm gonna sit back, relax and enjoy this ACTUAL summer vacation I've never had the chance to relish in YEARS. And by that I mean mostly work on games YEAAAAAAAAAAH!

So, what else is happening?

New game design!

The old system was great and all, but it's not 100% smooth sailing with ruffle since it depended too much on a lot of things that should have been done better than with random moving components and loops that should have breaks in them. I'm working to build a new design that does away with the shoddy movieclip-based designs 2014 me came up with and replacing them with optimized code for a better user experience.

Holy crap functions inside functions operated by ingame events! How did I NOT figure that out?!

I am retard.

Smooth animations (screw spins SMOOTHLY while it falls oh yeaaaaaah)and better minigames! Also lol placeholder UI/backgrounds.

...so what's this game about?

Here's a preview: EVERYTHING'S ON FIRE.

夏だね....

Look forward to it this summer! (maybe. You know how IRL is when it gets in the way)

Fresh NFT (newgrounds fun token) drop!

Since I know you fellas LOVE Newgrounds Fun Tokens, I went ahead and designed (COUGH COUGH) [just put'em together with MSPaint as directed by the Old Gods] one more for this momentous (riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight) occasion. Without further ado, enjoy!

Or maybe download and/or print them out like a Sticker Tycoon.

Whats next?

I've been pretty busy this summer, reading up on actual game development stuff rather than just trial-and-error'ing it through (with plenty of ctrl+z'ing, which I can assure you, takes up a LOT of my time lol). I'm confident that I've got what it takes to (Bane voice) go mobile - cross platform and all that. It'll take time, that much is true - but I'm confident that I'll have something to show for my troubles.

I have no idea how it'll end up being, but one thing's for certain - it'll be interesting!

Well, that's that from me for now. Now I need to go wrestle this hangover back into Oblivion with the power of MAGIC WATER so I can work on this wacky game some more. Byyyeeeeloooo!

PS: You read all the YEAAAAAAAAHs in this newspost in the voice of the announcer from Sega Rally Championship.

PSS: If I celebrate my birthday for two days due to time zone issues, do I age twice as faster?

o7

PRESENTING: IN PERSON. THE DODO-

-uh I mean

The Newgrounds Fun Token!

Full-size for downloading and stuff.

I'd like to thank @Edeshye for giving me the idea to do this.

... also, I clearly did not think this through and called it the Newgrounds NFT which... ends up being recursive as Newgrounds Newgrounds Fun Token. FUG XD. Oh well, I managed to do this just fine so this EVIL SCHEME is a GREAT SUCCESS!

... maybe.

Also, christmas is almost here and I've got a bunch of presents so far. Way too hyped for the big day already. A very big thank you for everyone who sent me these presents!

And on that note, I'm gonna go christmas partying like Iwakura Lain Santa.

See you in a week.

This wild and wacky analog fx on this video was made by my friend @Kehmicle! Check it out!

So what's been happening on my end of the projects?

Well then, take a look at this!

I'd say it's about 50% done at this point. Next's the shop, trading quest and filling out the remaining empty spots. SK10 will be the last game that uses the old V6 design type, and I hope to introduce the MK-7 (full ruffle compatible) games to you in the future so you can play these stupid games anywhere, whenever!

Newgrounds sure has some crazy good content out recently. Check these fine stuff out.

BONUS CONTENT:

Take a look at the materials of one of my favorite webcomic artists.

And now for relatively boring news...

Things haven't been so hot on my end. 2022 looks like it's gonna be intense, and only double digits from the red zone. Still kinda burned out from having to work through black friday, and now the holiday season's already hit home for me. On the bright side, all this overtime's putting mad cash in my pockets. It's getting so that I can just ride out the next apocalypse in relative comfort lolololol.

First off...

HAPPY JULY 4TH TO EVERYONE!

Next...

I have an announcement to make.

On this splendid America Day of 2021, I have made a startling discovery, one that has completely upended my insight on american cuisine. A discovery so great that it has me rethinking all my opinions on food.

It turns out fast-food franchises such as McDonalds and Burger King have nothing compared to homemade American-styled grilled beef burgers fresh from a BBQ grill. It was so good that I'm sitting here in a post-food haze just thinking about it hours after the party finally ended.

I attended a lakeside picnic celebrating July 4th, and they were making real burgers on a BBQ grill. Despite my initial misgivings about eating burgers, I stuck around and watched as the iron chef in charge of the grill assembled those krabby pa- uh I mean beef burgers. Compared to the offerings from fast food franchises, these burgers were on such a different level, that this...

...is what the insides of my brain probably looked like at the time.

The meat was prepared to perfection, backed with chop suey, broth and eggs. Then grilled just so to add some 'give' to it while being easy to chew. The broth added a new layer of incredible juiciness to make it EXTRA GOOD. The top-grade beef really must be something else. The veggies were crisp and the cheese was perfectly set in. The SECRET FORMULA (sauce) really rounded out the whole offering perfectly. Unfortunately, no Yogi Bears showed up to sneak off with the Pic-a-nic baskets. That'd have been surreal if that happened. Maybe the fireworks scared them off? lolololol

Speaking of fireworks, there's something amazing about watching a variety of fireworks bloom in the night sky while chowing down on some scrumptious burgers. Overall, it was a really fun time, and I made sure to thank the hosting family for their amazing hospitality before heading home. I hope they stay in the neighborhood for a good long time. I'd like to join them again next year for another fun America Day party.

Now I'm gonna go buy nukuler reactors for no reason.

"Is that a nuclear reactor?!"

"No. Nukuler."

UPDATE: So yeah, while I was at the internets party, I got word about this.

Turns out there's a sneaky new malware on the scene that does some evil shit to your accounts and computer. Here's the virustotal report for this thing, in case you wanted some extra information on this critter. Stay safe out there.

----------------

Well, it's the 22nd of June again. Time for me to spend the rest of the day getting drunk, opening internet presents while listening to a crude mash of anime music, slav hardbass and of course, obligatory for any birthday bash, 80s rock and roll music!.

I wasn't able to clock out of work as early as I wanted to today, but even if I did end up coming home late, it was pretty swell to see well wishes and birthday presents, some of them from a day before today - time zones, how DO they work?!.

Not that I mind - in fact, I see it as an excuse for extend the partying by 3 days! -moreparty.gif-

Stuff I got for my birthday.

Books!

"Books are the real treasures of the world!" - Skeletor

Music!

RECORDER BIRTHDAY

Holy shit I swear it was Ren-chon playing the flute just for me. [DEATH BY DIABEETUS X_X]

[one low-budget reset by the Great Will of the Macrocosm later...]

Now I'm gonna go back to play this game I actually owned back in 1990. Work was pretty intense today and I need to rest for a bit before I can jam out to the music again. There's much to do, lots of amazing new projects in the works - but just for today, I'll be taking it easy with an old-school classic favorite.

Why is this simple game so much fun

EDIT: OH CRUD MORE PRESENTS INCOMING!

I GOT THE DVD SET OF THE FIRST K-ON! ANIME OH SHIT!!!!111eleventyone

Well damn, this happened a little faster than I thought it would. And you know what that means, right? It's time to put that insane ol' master plan into action!

IIIIIIIIIIITS CIRNO!

-

So here's the thing that seems like the sort of wild success I managed to hit with the MLP Sim Date all those years ago. I was not expecting something this simple to be such a big hit here, but you know what they say - "don't let your memes be dreams". I'd like to give a special thanks to @Chdonga for the inspiration to drunkenly create this game and to @SevenTheEasterBunny for all the motivation and encouragement that made this project go from a mess of animations and badly coded buttons to the thing you all have enjoyed so much.

To me, the early 00s was a magical time, and to see the reviews where they mention how this game takes them back to this awesome time before the end of the world, that's a big achievement to me. As Shia Lebouf said 'DO IT! JUST DO IT!". Liquid courage helped out with that, but what was more important was the inspiration and encouragement I received from the project director and producer, and everyone who field-tested the early prototypes, ran QC checks and gave a lot of useful advice. I'll keep all this good advice in mind, because I've already started work on the next project.

Before we go on, though... lemme just say; Southern-style fried catfish is delicious!

Still, I was dead drunk when I put it together, so the code needed to be cleaned up somewhat. No plan, no prototype and no backup's great and all, but the cleanup turned out to be a lot of trouble (as seen in the funky errors caused during early release). But on the bright side, I understand how it works now.

Always comment your code!

I was surprised that ruffle actually managed to interpret that mess of code the first time around. It's a far cry from the early versions that would wig out when made to run a simple loop. Now that is impressive. Between this game and Robot Finds Kitten, I believe I can standardize all of my releases for ruffle compatibility now. One of these days, I'll actually do that.

Though, I did find some issues with ruffle, now that I took some time to push it to the limit. For one, it cannot render japanese characters in dynamic texts just yet, while the same output in flash works just right. While this basically breaks any game with the text in dynamic mode, a lot of .jp swf files I snagged from japanese internets and 4chan /f/ back in the day are pretty much unusable in ruffle for the time being. Darn shame, too. I hope that this is just early version weirdness and hey, given their track record with making things properly working... I hope it gets fixed real soon.

...when it does work, maybe I'll add that extra Samurai Shodown-inspired death variant with gold coins spilling everywhere and japanese text as a finisher to the katana-based attacks like I wanted to in the first place...

-

So, what next? I've done some work to streamline and perfect this new gametype's core system so it can run without being dependent on redundant and frankly horrible implementations of badly-written code like it was on its initial test. The last refit was particularly nice, and I hope I can make more of this type of games in the future. Learning and DRUNK SCIENCE sure is fun!

All I need is some free time and some alcohol to get those li'l hamster wheels in my brains rollin'.

Regardless of my irl situation - shitty as it is, the game development will continue! Non-stop! Topless! Akai! Aoi! AIUEO! Basugasubakuhatsu! (If you know where this is from, lemme know. I'll give you something nice!).

--------

In other, but equally important news, my friend JohnnyGuy has been having some tough times. I'd appreciate it if you went over there and gave him some kind words of encouragement, help and support.

EDIT: 1,000 fans!!??!?! This is madness!

Madness? THIS IS NEWGROUDS! *kicks myself off the wall for no reason*

---

PS: What do I draw now that the numbers milestone is done? What should I draw next? And for what number?

Well, that didn't take long.

888+ fans! I've been a bit slow on the production front this year because IRL was death incarnate (DEY TOOK MAI JERB!!11), but this is the sort of thing that really drives home the motivation. Hitting that milestone means its time for ART!

Pretty cute, ain't she. I ended up going for a comfy/cyberpunk combo this time. Next time I hit 999 fans, I'm definitely drawing Cirno. You just watch!

Now, you might be here for some exclusives. Wait no more, these are flashes thought long lost after a disaster in 2014, I present..

The Tsundere School Tutorial!

Originally designed (more like drunkenly cobbled together) in early 2014 to help some fellow members get a handle on flash AS2 coding and understand the basics of animation and coding, you can tell this is one of my earlier works. I had to clean up some code before uploading this because, whooey, it honestly wasn't that good. Still, I hope you find some use out of it.

The second exclusive: The triumphant return of Sex Kitten 7! 

Those goddamn commie nazis up at the RIAA somehow thought that a short extract from a music piece was a litigious offense, and newgrounds had to remove it from the collection. I replaced the classic Aphex Twin music with a continued loop of the game music composed by OG forkheads music talent Rellis. Seriously, what kind of shit was that. It was a short segment for use in the credits ffs! I bet those goose-stepping megacorp crackheads would do away with fair use and parody if they had the chance...

[Angry rant about copyright goes here]

... I really should have done this back when I got 777 fans, huh. Oh well.

Moving on... 

So, what have I been upto these days? Well...

As the games I made grew ever more complex, with my friend @johnnyguy mentioning that the last one was 'by far the most lengthy and directionally confusing in the game ive played', I'm adding the next, much-requested feature in; an integrated navigation system to the next game in the works! Building off the map used in Negima Sim Date and putting a modern touch to it, check out the previews here!

Obvious beta is obvious, but yeah - I intend to fully flesh this out as an interactive map for you to explore. With this done, I hope you all won't be getting lost now in the game world now, huehuehuehue. Hell, maybe I should do the same for SKOB now that I think about it. It would make it a little easier to play, right?

Also, have another preview of the work in progress that's Sex Kitten Casino!

A scenic view made by my friend @joshexdirad for this game. You can use the binoculars to check out all the awesome detail he put into this work, too! Also, the help file now properly describes the controls, AND had information on the 'running' function as well. No more having to be stuck at an uncomfortable pace! Zip around the building like the hyperactive ADHD Arne you were destined to be!

In other news, with the superb success of Sticker Tycoon,

I've started working on a brand new business sim game that DOESN'T involve so much clicking. Can't reveal too much details about this, but if you've played Dopewars for DOS or Dealer right here on newgrounds, you probably have some idea what it's gonna be about. Will it involve the forkheads classics? Duh, of course. Will there be over-the-top violence and comically-bad pickup lines? Hell yeah!

And here ends the update for now. Thanks for being swell, all 888+ fans and everyone else who has been reading up to this point so far (YES, YOU! READING THIS RIGHT NOW!). I hope you all have a good day in general, and an awesome spooktober in particular!

PS: Go check out the contest that @SevenSeize4President is running here!

HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY!

to all you ker-razy yankees out there!

MURRICA, FUCK YEAH!

Here's hoping you yankees and everyone else who celebrates this holiday has a great time of it!

Now Imma go set off some fireworks and randomly shoot guns an' stuff, 'cause MURRICA!

-

So, what exactly is the good news? Remember in my last update that I lost my job due to Corona-chan being dimicky? Turns out, I got my old job back and I'll be in the workforce starting July 15th. I was about 10% through my emergency reserves when the big scare was over and done with.

Its not exactly a fun job, to be sure - but it's kept me in the black for a good two years and I'm honestly glad that I'll be getting access to my work computer where I left some of my game projects waiting. I was kinda bummed because I kept thinking I'd have to rebuild them all for scratch, so this is sort of a huge relief. I should have been more careful and emailed all the project stuff to myself beforehand.

ah well, lessons learned.

Also, I'd like to take this moment to thank everyone who sent in those technical manuals I've been looking for. You people couldn't have given me a better birthday present! I'll definitely use these tomes of mystical knowledge for... you guessed it, even better game development!