In conjunction with the Slalomancers demo dropping on Newgrounds, the full version has received a major update, including a sports mode inspired by Rocket League, a race mode, infrastructure for exporting level codes (both for custom races and battles,) and several more features not present in the original February release. In addition to being available on Android and Itch.io it will also be releasing on Steam in the next few weeks. The demo does have one of these new features: Daily Mode, a unique challenge that refreshes once per day and is difficulty-scaled based on player progress.

In addition to game stuff, I released an audio drama titled Villainess in celebration of Labor Day. While I've been a writer for a long time, this is the first story I've submitted to the site which in my opinion showcases the kind of stuff that I do. In a nutshell, it's a story about people with superpowers, except instead of fighting crime, the super-abled caste is instead turned into cheap labor.

And last, I dropped a diss track for a guy on a battle rap page. The drama is pretty far removed from anything Newgrounds-related, but there's enough context provided that it should still be an enjoyable listen to an outsider. The content is uniquely personal even compared to my track record of having a very personal style of battling.

So the 2024 Flash Forward Game Jam was a pretty big crunch for me this year. I'd talked with both @ShinsukeIto and @Cyberdevil about some potential project ideas, and rather than picking one and sticking to it I decided to just do both. The result was coding my first fighting game from scratch (Kwing vs Cyberdevil) and making a sequel to Gloom (Gloom: The Pyromancer) which had more than double the content of the first game. And on top of all of that, both of these projects actually got off to a late start as a result of finishing up my two year project (and first mobile game) Slalomancers in mid February.

Suffice to say it's been a busy couple of months but I can't overstate how great it feels to get back into the creative headspace. I've got a TON of other projects in the works so hopefully more to come in the near future!

After over two years of development, Slalomancers is now available on Android! Download it from the Google Play Store here! Join the official Slalomancers Discord server here to play Maze Mode over voice chat.

Much as I love Newgrounds, I have to admit that as my creative projects have migrated to Unity, it's been a lot harder to stay active here. I've semi-successfully exported a Unity game to a web build once (the sound was glitchy) but right now it just doesn't feel like it's worth the trouble to do it on a regular basis, especially when my projects have largely been designed either to be mobile games or at best to function cross-platform.

With all that said, I am still working on Kabel, which has reached a point where it plays exactly how I envisioned: Simple, suspenseful, and punishing. I could say more but I think the game footage speaks for itself.

I do want to release a web version of chapter 1 on Newgrounds eventually, but this will almost certainly be after I have art and audio assets.

With Flash no longer running on browsers, I've decided to run through some of my old submissions and mark which ones function with Ruffle. This was a chance for me to reflect on the projects I've done over the past year (let's not talk about the fact that most are complete trash.)

• Don't Get Your Ass Chewed On - Turn-based strategy. Works on mobile.
• Mate the Marksman - Local multiplayer sequel to DGYACO. Works on mobile.
• Lincari - Puzzle-ish card game. Works on mobile.
• Barrel Smackdown - Casual action game. Works on mobile.
• Santa's Coming - Throwing game. Works on mobile.
• A Simple Shooter - Proof-of-concept I made for a local multiplayer game.
• Fishy Remix - A clone of Fishy by @XGen.
• Stick RPG: PSP Adaption - PSP-compatible collection of minigames.
• PewDiePie Adventures - Action platformer, some combat, 3 playable characters.
• Gemini - Point and click-ish horror game.
• Chernobyl - One-button local multiplayer with up to 10 players.
• Woof Woof - The last in a series of small-scale games I made for Game Jams in college, and an unintentional ripoff of Light People on Fire by @D-SuN.

Unfortunately my best game (Hungry Joe) does not yet work. Hitboxes are weird with the randomly-generated maps, sometimes preventing you from walking through narrow passages.)

On a complete sidenote, it's interesting what does and doesn't work. The drawing API seems a bit buggy (my ActionScript-only animation Jamrock's Lucky Day seems to have trouble removing stuff made with the drawing API) but the V-Cam in Blades runs way better than it did in Flash. Similarly, while some of my games which feature grabbing and throwing work (Santa's Coming), some don't (Rex: Origins.)

On the off-chance that anyone has been following my current projects, I'm working on a stealth game in Unity called Kabel. While the game is in a pretty rough state right now, the game's script is coming along pretty nicely (it's about a 2-3 hour read, by far the longest story I've written.)

I am now officially a college graduate! Classes have been sapping most of my free time for the past few years, to the point where most things I've released on Newgrounds during that time have been made for student Game Jams.

Now that I have some time, I've started working a bit more seriously on my next project, Kabel. I've mostly kept the details of this under wraps because I didn't want to announce anything before I knew the project was going to reach fruition, but at this point I've invested far too much work to turn back.

The ultimate goal for Kabel is a turn-based stealth game operated in Morse code. However, the vast majority of work I've put into the project so far has been hammering down a strong plot, which has been daunting in scale (the script recently passed 15,000 words) but nonetheless satisfying, since this is what I consider to be the most important aspect of the project.

Well, summer is here. Aside from the Game Jam submissions and a couple songs, I've mostly been taking it easy since the semester ended, though I can also say on a personal level, things have been looking up for the first time since I can remember. Most of my more recent activity has been related to writing projects and trying to teach myself Unity, so we'll see where that ends up.

If you really want to know what I'm up to, you can check out an extremely primitive proof of concept for Kabel, which includes the short story upon which the full game's script is based on.

It's really incredible how time slips by. In the past seven months I've gone on my first two outdoor climbing trips (after climbing indoors for 11 years,) written a handful of short stories (including Tar,) half a dozen new tracks, and completely gone off the deep end as far as my college career is concerned.

I usually try to constrict the subject of my news posts to content that I'm working on, but at this point I don't feel like there's much to share. I'm not nearly as active as I would like to be, and a combination of loneliness and aimlessness has made the past several months neigh unbearable. Not really sure how this year is going to go.

Finished up a year at my current university and now I'm all moved into an apartment. Feels like things should be settling down but somehow I'm not any more relaxed.

Related to content, I put out a flurry of battles earlier in the year and I've been competing in Game Jams which account for several new games on Newgrounds. I was pleased to see Rex: Origins make the front page and Underdog of the Week. So far it feels ike a pretty successful year.

I'm planning to do a project where I put out a new song (or two) every day for a week and effectively make an album in seven days. I have the topics I want to write about but the challenge is to do all the writing and recording within that time. This will likely happen sometime in July when I have the time.

Final note, I've been practicing Agario every day and honing my skills as a competitive player. Still looking for people to team with but as far as solo play is concerned I'm virtually unbeatable in one on one matches.

I could have sworn my last news post was only a couple months ago, but lo and behold it's been over half a year. I've gotten my Associate's Degree and I'm now 200 miles away from home working on my BS. Kind of crazy to think of how much has really happened in that time.

Exciting as the experience has been, I can't help getting the feeling that I'm drifting farther away from what I really enjoy doing. These past months have been far too busy for me to make games, and there's been too much pressure for me to do anything music-related aside from battles. I'm not planning on quitting either of these things, but I do wish that I could be working on my own projects right now instead of slaving over coursework. It's weird to think that the one thing I miss most after moving actually involves me being alone.

The good news is that as long as it may take, I am at college to solidify everything I need to know to make the shit I've been wanting to. Games like Threshold and Don't Get Chewed (the successor to Don't Get Your Ass Chewed On) are still a long way off, but working on Black Bill in my Creative Writing class promises more imminent progress. There's also an outstanding music studio here, so my vocal-mixing abilities should actually be decent by the time I'm done.

Not sure what else to say except that I miss making stuff. That said, I'm hoping by the time this is all over I'll be way better at it.