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!

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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...

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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!).

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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*

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