Hey Newgrounds!!

It's probably a good time to recap on what I've been up to on the creative side of the year of 2016! ->

Released a VIDEOGAME

On August I released my first "finished" game MasticaAstros! a videogame focused on astronomy contents while played as a 2d space shooter with exploration elements. This was the evolution of my thesis project on design school it somehow made it into one of Chile's newspapers, hahah!

I made an earlier post on more detail, but after a long process I can at last say that I have a 'published' game! One big learning experience, and also useful to start measuring the whole process of making a game from beginning to end, and how more than a year of constant work turns into...maybe 30 minutes worth of content?... (depending of the player... an average could be between 20-60 minutes) It's an odd thing to compare with making an animated short, but it certainly comes with a ton of more variables.

(it can be FREELY played here, the texts are on spanish, though).

DINOMELT!

Possibly the most demanding thing, and what most of my brain, arms, pens and sketchbooks have been occupied on, is my game DINOMELT. It has grown A LOT from its origins as a little 'metroidvania' styled platformer.

But so far it's been another big learning process. It's definitively one project which has taken more total work time than any other self-motivated project I've been into...ever?, it will take around one more month to reach its final state, but certainly not another year of development (at least for the version you'll play on Newgrounds earlier next year ;)).

And while I've been slooow with the blog and spreading the game over the internet, it's been cool to see a few early notices, good feedback from strangers, and even a Reddit post which was not made by me!

The rest of the 'creative time'

So I've been mostly focusing on a project so demanding that, aside from MasticaAstros, it certainly wasn't the greatest year to actually 'get things done' (that cake could go for 2014).

But it was still a fine year to find excuses for creative work, unsually a pretty game-focused year, but also the Newgrounds animation JAMS were great to experiment with smaller proyects; I worked on quite a bunch of Pencilmation episodes, and made a few more little LOOPDELOOPS (like this one)

But wait, TEN YEARS!?

Getting back to Newgrounds itself, being around the site for more than 10 years (starting from rough and badly sounding flash experiments) I've seen so many creators over the years who have gone through the site with awesome and even "cult-creating" work, that I've come to think of NG as a pretty productive and motivating kind of 'school'. at least it's been similar to one for me in terms of practicing animation and creative stuff of all sorts and collaborating aswell, where the feedback still keeps its constructive side, specially as one experiments and tries new things.

So another motivation for this brick of words is to also thanks to the community, all who have watched and reviewed with different perspectives over the years, the team behind all of those creative events, and to @Tomfulp and the ongoing staff!, it's also mind blowing to have reached over 1100 fans aswell. holy shmups.

I'll leave you with this real-world picture where earlier this year I was asked to do a 'talk' in a little festival at my hometown about my short 'Sprouting Frog Waves', where I talked about Newgrounds and the NATA tournament, It's always cool to speak about that side of NG in less expected situations, from my own experience Newgrounds hasn't made such a big impact in Chile (mainly due to the language barrier) but every once in a while someone would point out, "I started animating on Newgrounds!", or at least "I used to play a lot of games there!"

See you next year, when I'll finally have a game for all of your lizards.

SPLAT!