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.

For some time now I've been struggling to come to terms with what I'm really trying to accomplish with my creative endeavors. I'm a very self-driven person, so much of what I do (especially in the realm of making games) is just a result of developing an idea I like and bringing it to life. That said, I would be lying if I said I didn't care what people think of my work. Most of my expressive outlets, especially in my writing, attempt to tell people things they aren't comfortable hearing and to open a dialogue about things that I consider important or at the very least interesting. This is evident in most of my games and music, where I tend not to repeat myself and have experimented with different genres of game or messages in songs rather than take the time to master one or two styles.

For the most part, I'm motivated to do this because I feel isolated by my ideological differences from other people. I'm polyamorous, but I'm a lot more guarded than most people that fit that description. I'm decidedly less angry than most people that self-identify as nihilists. I'm far more confident than most introverts I know. I see Darwinism as an observation of life rather than an idealization of power structures. I believe that consciousness is a property inherent to all matter, which challenges the idea of humans as individuals as well as existing ideas of what life is. It amazes me that despite the years of personal growth I've experienced, I can still look out the window and see a majority of people far older than I am that accept pre-packaged ideas of religion and politics.

But back on topic. Over the past several months, my personal quality standards have interfered with my music, which is the reason I haven't released a serious song in a while. I've had this idea that if I could somehow improve my rhyme schemes and make my messages a bit more explicit, someone would finally absorb what I'm trying to say and reach out to me and then I would have friends. Of course, under scrutiny I realize that my actual talent and voice has nothing to do with my inability to connect with people. The real reason is that I don't have an active audience.

People I know in real life (let alone over the internet) seldom care about what I do, and if I'm lucky enough that they spend five minutes playing Hungry Joe or listening to Upstream, most of them will just say something like, "That's cool, I liked it." What's vexing about this is that I can see that in myself, too. I could care less about the black and white photography that my chemistry classmate brings with her everywhere. To be completely honest, I don't care what anyone else has to say at all. Whether this is the cause or effect of other peoples' apparent apathy or something else entirely, I'm not sure, but it's putting a major burden on me when I think about what I can do to actually build connections with others, and the hypocrisy that I don't actually want to. Hell, from looking at my audios it's obvious that I'd rather rip someone a new asshole than put myself out there and talk about what's important to me. Maybe I just haven't met the right people, but looking around me it's really hard to maintain the belief that I'm ever going to.

I'm going to end this obnoxiously long post by inviting people to actually comment. Tell me why you clicked on this, why you read it, or why you're following me on Newgrounds. What drew you here? What's keeping you here? What do you want from me? I'm not planning to do commissions for future works but I do want to know who my (admittedly small) audience is.

It's kind of late for a year end review but I figure I should say something about one of the most active years of my life. Between releasing the action roguelike Hungry Joe (and landing it on the front page,) eleven consecutive wins on Top Rank MC, releasing nine songs, quadrupling my hourly wage, and rounding out the year with a 3.9 GPA, 2015 was full of a lot of victories. It was also one of the most solitary years I've had in a long time (shoutouts to Hope for keeping me from going out of my mind) but I suppose you can't have everything.

Anyway, I figured I'd drop a link to Hungry Joe for anyone that missed it. The project dominated every minute of my free time for half of the year, and despite a few hiccups, the game has more depth and replayability than any other game I've made thus far. Cheers!