Hey folks! This is a little bit different from what I usually post, but I'll get right into things: my first novel (or a novella, if you're feeling argumentative), "LOCKED", has been published on Amazon's Kindle service! Go here to take a look! 

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IBJOPK8

I originally posted a few snippets in the writing forum here, but I changed so many little details so often that it wasn't really worth showing until I was completely finished. It's a YA Sci-Fi, similar to The Maze Runner or The Hunger Games. If those types of books are your thing, I hope you'll take a look at LOCKED! 

It seems like the only thing I use this blog space for is postmortems! Hopefully that'll change in the future. :3

I know nobody actually reads this, but I do like to keep a record of these sorts of things. Anyway, I'll keep this brief and I'll get right into things. Nobody needs to see me write a novel about this. I had the idea of writing a song for every Zodiac sign in June of 2012. It was one of those late night, before-I-fall-asleep thoughts. I got started in December of 2012. 

I can definitely say some songs are better than others. While I don't think any are irredeemable garbage, the sound quality for some are better than others (FL Studios is certainly built for synth, and I haven't been 100% successful in making other genres like metal sound that great, but I've certainly improved). As a whole, the project taught me a lot about music theory, keeping your mind moving to prevent writer's block, and most of all, a few ins-and-outs of FL Studios that I didn't know about prior. 

Every song is available for free on Newgrounds. However, every song is available in HQ on bandcamp. Those versions are slightly tweaked from their NG counterparts too. You can download the whole thing for $1 there. Again, both the originals are available to listen and download for free here on NG, and the tweaked and updated, HQ versions are also available to listen to for free there on Bandcamp, and download for $1!

For 2014, I'm planning a similar project. For each month, I'll do a portrait of a musician that has influenced me in one way or another. Each portrait will be in a different style. I DEFINITELY need to improve my visual art skills (as you can see by some of the things I've put in the Art Portal...), and the only way I'll get there is by consistantly practicing. If you made it through this whole thing...wow, thanks for taking the time! :3

General updates:

- Still chipping away at that Flash CS5 beatemup. Confident that it'll be a good animation demo. Yadda yadda yadda.

- Orchestra of the Zodiac is coming to a close soon, and I'm VERY happy with how it came out. I'm so glad I did it, it was a really good experience in learning music, what works, what doesn't, etc.

Pico's Mission Postmortem:

This is one of those ones that would be long, drawn-out, and emo if I had the energy to do it. Back when I was but a wee '09er, I was inspired to make a little something for each major NG holiday: Pico, Clock, and Madness Day. I wanted Pico to be the game, since it started that way. Pico's Mission started life as a point and click inspired by what I had seen of Pico 2 at that point. The problem was that I didn't have the skill required to make it; it looked shoddy, and my level design was ASTONISHINGLY bad. I just had no experience, and wanted to make the very best tribute to Pico yet. It was like someone who started drawing two weeks ago trying to re-create Mona Lisa. The project fell behind and behind and behind until I knew I had to take a much simpler approach for the game to survive at all, and it became the action-oriented game that just got updated. Oh, did I mention that the game had been handled by more people than a porn star? Maybe I should've started that earlier in the rant. Eh. Sometime after Pico Day 2011 (if I remember correctly), I got a new coder...then another...then another...until I reached 5+. Half of them I'm VERY sure didn't even look at the file before taking 2-3 months to tell me they couldn't do it. I'm not saying any names, of course. :)

I had to end up finishing a few glitches off myself. The problem is...I AM NO CODER. I spent somewhere around 25-30 hours this week plowing through it, ripping my hair out the whole way along. Though it was an agonizing one, Pico's Mission was a lesson that taught me these key principals:

1) Know your limits. If you're only capable of Ms. Pac-Man, don't try to make Pac-Man Championship Edition DX.

2) Set time limits. A project that's been dragged out for years and years and years loses it's vision. See Duke Nukem Forever.

3) Quality over quantity. Nobody cares if your game has a fancy animation or neat looking background here and there if the substance is weak.

That's not to mention all the little game design things, such as what's boring, yadda yadda. In the coming years, I really hope to focus on those, ESPECIALLY the third. If I put out one thing a year that I love, I'm happy.

This is mostly for myself to keep a tracklist of things to work at and things I've done; having it on my userpage motivates me a bit more well.

* o3o action movie parody- canned. I didn't care for it, you didn't care for it, who'll miss it?! I never even started it; I realized it was completely stupid and likely embarrassing.

* Havin' a Ball!

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/609147

This was put together from November up through now; learned a big lesson on difficulty curve and invisible levels (almost entirely the latter). NEVER going to make another game in Stencyl as well; I had complaints of the game crashing in certain browsers, lagging more than it should be, not to mention that I just found Stencyl horrible to work with.

* Flash CS5 Beat 'Em Up

Still working at a silly little gadget that's a "torture chamber" for the logo of Flash CS5, a little tongue-in-cheek thing at the program so many devs (including myself) called a nightmare. Maybe I could just allow people to upload whatever image they want that fits a certain size and allow 'em to go at it in addition to CS5 (and likely Stencyl now, he he hi ho ).

* Pico's Mission

Almost a year later and I'm aiming to have a huge update which fixes all the issues with the game. Gimmick is the latest to hop on board as a coder. All in all, it would fix glitches and finally add in that final boss.

* Orchestra of the Zodiac

...is still going as planned. A song per month for 2013, I'm wrapping up Aquarius this weekend, uploading it (hopefully) Feb. 2nd, yadda yadda yadda.

Hey you! Yeah, you! Golly gee whillickers, you just love video games, dontcha? Of course you do! How about flash games, them too? Even ones that have cursed development cycles? Well then, how about helping to finish up the code for a near complete game? Details and such are here , but in a nutshell, it's a game from Pico Day that still has the "out to lunch" sign for the boss, along with a few other things that could be fixed. There's an ambitious version of the design doc as well as a required one; all that needs to be done is the required one. Anyone interested in helping me get a patch for this out the door for Pico Day 2013?!

So how was everybody's Madness Day? Hope it was good for you! I really enjoyed some of the submissions yesterday! All in all, it feels really great to finally have submitted something for each NG Day after trying to for years. Anyhow, I'm making this post to just provide some updates (and to be brutally honest, make a little checklist for myself). By pure chance, I have a little something for each Portal, so I guess I'll split it up that way!

Movies:
- o3o action movie trailer parody: Some of you like them, some of you hate them, and most of you don't know they exist. The little o3o emotes! To the dismay of many, I tend to use them a lot. I just think their cute, strange little appearances would be fun to base around an action movie trailer parody. Nothing too major, just something short and fun to do after breaking my back on my past few submissions.

Games:
- beat up Flash CS5/CS6: Burn, cut, maim, ruin, KILL! Another one to blow some steam off, especially after the Madness movie. Not gonna lie, I'm happy with the final result, but it was absolute HELL during development; it didn't help that I was stuck with the glitch-tastic Flash CS5. I had to download the CS6 demo just to finish the movie, and THAT glitched up in a weird way: it could never save over a file, but could create a new one; if I wanted to save one little change, I'd have to save as. This left me with about 2 GB of spare files by the time Madness Day came! All in all, this is just gonna be a little gadget where I'm aiming to have about 25-30 (hopefully 30) kill animations for...Flash CS5/CS6's icon (aiming to have the user be able to choose either).

Audio:
- Orchestra of the Zodiac: Detailed a bit in my last post. I'll aim to have a piece of music for each zodiac symbol (each month of the year), based upon that symbol's usual traits (for example, Leo, which is August, would have a proud, dominant orchestral sound, but a Virgo would have something more on the quiet, studious side).

Art:
- Still a Prisoner in His Home: Just a graphite piece done in Corel Painter to get me back into the swing of drawing. The title is a line of the lyrics from The Infection . I think it fits very well with the piece, and the song really hit home when I first heard it back in August 2010.

That's all, folks!

I know nobody reads these, but it's fun to pretend. :3

Clock Day movie is 100% done! All ready to submit on Clock Day, August 15.

Madness movie is in progress, pouring everything I've got into it to get it finished. That should be ready for September 22.

I'm gonna spread future projects out a bit more...probably just some silly stuff for a while. I need to get some good quality stuff in the Art Portal too. I'm thinking of having a new audio submission each month for 2013. Each one would be based upon the zodiac symbol of that month (such as a sound reflecting what tends to be the matching personality). I'll try to go through with it, should be interesting. I'd probably wrap it all up in one big .zip by the end of the year and name it something stupid like "Orchestra of the Zodiac."

EDIT- If you were a REAL man, you'd follow me!

1) Anyone have any spare Club Nintendo coins that they want for a Counter Strike: GO beta? Amount doesn't matter that much, I'm just saving up for that there Game and Watch. :3
2) Lots of projects! Currently working on a movie for Clockday. Its script was written a few years ago, and is called "SBC: A King's True Journey". I know I uploaded "A King's Journey" way back when, and that was basically the result of my extremely poor time management. I also hope to have a REAL Madness movie done for Madness Day, and that'll fulfill my _____ Day obsessions that started years back. I also sent SycneX some very quick concept art for a dungeon crawler he started.

Aaaaaaaaaand that's it. A quick little teaser I guess here?

the headaches-

After Andy70707 jumped on board, and got to work, it was soon evident how many holes my project had in it. How come some areas have shooting with a button and others with the mouse? How come this walkthrough literally has 20-30 dead ends? In short, I had planned VERY poorly. Communication is key to making any game, and to make matters worst, it was a tough time to communicate due to several problems in life at that time. Not only that, but there were just programming headaches in general where Andy tried his very best to put together my half-assed project; I just wanted to say that he's been very dedicated the whole time, and I'm truly humbled by it. The project quickly fell apart at that point, and Pico Day came and went. After looking back, I took a hard look at what I did, which led to...

the reboot-

this is about where Flashstorm jumped on board, as far as I remember. This is the build that took about 2 years to fully put together (although there were extended periods without development). A reboot needed to be put together; one that was fun, and took more creativity than "Pico's School but bigger". I decided that Pico worked best for the team as a shooter. The idea here is basically what the game is today, give or take some changes. This was meant for last Pico Day, but schedule coordination once again thwarted us. In all, we spent the extra time (first taking a break), but then we jumped right back in in about December, and threw everything we had in!

finally here-

Although it's not here just yet, I'd be very surprised if it isn't by the end of TOMORROW. Keep an eye out! Happy Pico Day 2012!

Hi! Andy70707, FlashStorm, and I are going to release a game for Pico Day called "Pico's Mission"! It's been in the works for years, and has gone through many different phases until we decided on one that works for all of us. Throughout the course of this week, to celebrate it's release, I'll be doing a dev log explaining it's long development. It'll go up until friday in 5 phases:
1 - The idea
2 - the search
3 - the headaches
4 - the reboot
5 - finally here

Now, Tuesday, the search. I had all my (horrid) animations and art together. I had a (vague and full of holes) idea of the game. All I needed was...a coder! Interestingly enough, finding a coder for this was much tougher than finding a coder for a platformer. I basically begged and pleaded in the (then) new collaboration forum, where I searched for a coder for about 2 or so months, until Andy70707 came forward. We chatted, discussed things, and got to work from there! Things were already gonna be rough, considering I found him in about Feb/Mar, a few months before Pico Day...