This has been quite the year for me. I started competing in Ludum Dare in April and now have three completed Compo entries, all of which have done reasonably well. My LD activity - and more recently, Tumblr's lewd nuke - have spurred me to become active here again, after not really checking in for about five years. I've now racked up two more frontpage appearances and another Daily 4th Place.

My aim for 2019 is to ramp up my game dev activities, and start producing larger games outside of Ludum Dare. I already have a larger PICO-8 platformer in the works, using the base engine from my LD43 entry, so hopefully I can get that released at some point next year. My LD41 entry, which I never posted here, will finally hit the site on either Pixel Day or Valentine's Day.

A big thank you to everyone who's been playing and supporting my games this year! I hope to comtinue making them for many more years to come.

First of all, can I just say: having been here for 13 years, it is amazing to watch this place get catapulted back into the limelight by the whole Tumblr fiasco. Artists I've been following for a while are flocking here in their droves, and it's great to see. On the off chance that you're reading this having migrated here from Tumblr: welcome! I hope you'll enjoy it here!

Now, to business: my Ludum Dare 43 entry, The Gods Are Angry, has proven more successful than I'd ever hoped. Frontpage, Daily 4th Place, and it's currently the thumbnail for the site's LD43 collection! I'm annoyed with myself for rushing it out the door with the end cutscene and restart procedure completely broken, but I've just released a second patch and those should all be fixed now.

Thank you all for your kind words and support. It's great seeing so many people enjoying the game. Looking forward to LD44 already!

A few months ago, I took part in my first Ludum Dare, and while I was proud of my entry and it did well, I felt it needed a lot more polish before it was ready for Newgrounds.

My LD42 entry, however, is polished enough that I'm submitting it here right off the bat! My first submission here in six years, my first-ever wholly-original submission... I proudly present AsterVoid!

Play it here: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/715373

And feel free to go and rate it over on the LD site as well: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/astervoid

Wow, this place has changed... loving the new profile stuff! When was that added? It's been too long since I checked in here.

But here's something cool: an actual game from me! I entered Ludum Dare for the first time this weekend, and threw together a bullet hell/dating sim mashup in PICO-8. Unfortunately that means I can't submit it here, but I hope you'll give it a play nonetheless! It's called Love Is A Battlefield and you can find it here.

I hope I can get some more stuff done this year!

Starting "as soon as possible", whenever that may be, I'm going to be working as a graduate software developer! It's not what I set out for, but it's still great news! I'd like to add that I cited MSC4's Daily Top 5 award as one of my achievements on my CV, and I mentioned my experience with ActionScript in my interview, so in a way, this site helped me get the job! Thank you, Newgrounds!

I won't say this'll affect my activity levels here, because I'm inactive enough here as it is :P But man, am I excited for this... and my uni graduation ceremony's in four days as well!

So I just did some math... I've now officially been a member of Newgrounds for more than half my life.

I knew this day was coming, but now that it's here... man, I feel kinda old. And it gets worse because by exactly this time next year, I will have been a deviantART member for more than half my life as well.

I feel like you guys feel like I don't appreciate you, but I do. This site has been a huge influence on me over the years, and I'm amazed and honoured that even now, over four years since I made the last one, my scene creators are still wildly popular and I continue to be sent scenes that people have made in them. Thank you, guys. I'm glad I could give you so much entertainment these past 11 years.

I seriously need to re-download Flash and knock something out for you guys. It's been too long, and I might actually be able to use ActionScript now :P

I'll get the most important thing out of the way first. This morning I got a message from one of the site's mods telling me that people are getting their reviews deleted for posting links to their creations in their reviews. Posting links in reviews is against the site rules, something that evidently slipped my mind over the years. So please, DON'T POST LINKS IN YOUR REVIEWS. I love seeing your creations, you guys make some pretty imaginative stuff, but I don't want you to get in trouble for it. Send me the link in a PM or something instead.

What's more, at least one guy actually submitted his created scenes to the Newgrounds Art Portal. To be honest, I wasn't too bothered by this, but needless to say that's also against the site's rules and I'm assuming the images got deleted. So again, please don't do that. There are plenty of other channels through which you can share your creations.

On a more positive note, my first two scene creators have now been renamed to take advantage of the site's increased (or scrapped?) character limit for submission names. MSC 3 through 5 will retain their current names for the foreseeable future. The games' descriptions have also been tidied up a bit.

Sadly, I no longer have the original .fla files, so I can't post any updates or improvements for the older games, and if/when I ever make MSC6, I'll have to start again from scratch. But maybe that's a good thing. A clean slate, new and better code, a much prettier interface. It might happen one day. There's clearly still plenty of demand for it. We'll see.

That's right! Today marks ten years to the day since I first signed up for Newgrounds. It's weird to think that I've been a member of this site for pretty much half my life now, and that it's shaped a lot of who I am.

When I first signed up here, I was a naive, borderline-autistic 10-year-old, taking his first steps onto the wider Internet. My idea of "animating" was to draw a bunch of still frames in MS Paint and then string them together. My idea of "constructive criticism" was to hurl insults at anyone who made a game I wasn't any good at, or a cartoon that insulted something I like. I couldn't write a single line of ActionScript and I couldn't draw to save my life (still can't, tbh). My profile picture was a Sonic recolour.

It took me two years to get my first submission on the site: a crude Madness Combat scene creator, inspired by Shomer's iconic 2005 one. I made it using code from a dress-up game tutorial and sprites from a sheet, and didn't expect much from it, but the reception was fantastic. I made two more the following year, and MSC3 ended up becoming the Madness scene creator, getting frontpaged, showcased in the official Madness collection, and receiving over 850,000 views to date. MSC4 went on to achieve a rating of 4.27/5, which is utterly phenomenal, and higher than such iconic games as Ultimate Flash Sonic and Madness Interactive! Finally, MSC5 got me my first-ever Daily Top 5, in 4th position.

By the time MSC5 was released, in February 2012, I was a far more mature 17-year-old, with a far more intense interest in video game development. I can't deny that Newgrounds has helped play a part in shaping that ambition. I've since taken a hiatus from Flash in order to focus on making larger, more professional games, as well as taking a degree in Computer Gaming Technology, of which I am about to start my final year.

Since this is such a momentous occasion, I feel I should do something to celebrate it. And since Newgrounds now supports Unity games, I'm going to submit a bunch of my WIP Unity games to the Dumping Grounds for your viewing pleasure! Hopefully this will give you an idea of just how far I've come since I first submitted OMG Madness Scene Creator here all those years ago. I will also, at some point over this weekend, try and get round to FINALLY doing that thing that I need to do in order to start receiving ad payments from Newgrounds again (I forget what). Because I'm probably owed well over £100 in ad revenue by this point, and I could really use that money :P

UPDATE: Here's the first game. This is more of a sandbox than an actual game, I just screwed around with a bunch of physics effects. Warning: it can get VERY laggy!

I've had a bit of a SNAFU with my Google account and can't access the old Project 20:15 blog anymore, so all new posts will be made here: http://project2015-v2.blogspot.com. The previous days' posts will remain on the old blog. If I manage to get my old blog back again, I'll transfer the posts on the new blog over to the old one.

Also, happy Madness Day! Forgot all about that. Sorry I don't have anything new in the pipeline currently. I'll be busy with university this year as well, as it's my final year and I have a 10,000-word dissertation to write. How fun. Wish me luck!

Let's look forward to the future rather than back at the past. Last month was the 10th anniversary of my first-ever "animated" short, next month I'll be turning 20 and next September will also mark 10 years since I joined this site. To celebrate this and a few other things, next year I will be undertaking an ambitious challenge: Project 20:15.

Project 20:15 is a writing challenge, where I will attempt to write a single short story or vignette every day for the whole of 2015. Each short will be based on one of around 30 projects that I have come up with in the last ten years but never finished (and in many cases, never even started). Again, this will most likely mean no Flash submissions for 2015, as I've committed myself to this instead. HOWEVER, since this place accepts Unity games as well now, I will try and publish some of my uni work and other Unity experiments here, most likely to the Dumping Grounds at first. I know it feels like I'm abandoning you guys but believe me, I don't want to disappear from this site entirely.

My Project 20:15 shorts will be posted here: http://animatron-project2015.blogspot.co.uk/ They will all be tagged according to which project they're based on, whether they're canon to said project and so on. I may post a few of the better ones here - I think there's a Writing section in the forum so I may post a few there as well, or at least a link.

My plans for the next couple of years are still up in the air, but I certainly don't plan on forgetting this place, since this is where it all started. Maybe I've outgrown it. Maybe I haven't. But I don't think I can ever leave it behind completely.