First and foremost make sure to check out our Steam page! Making one was long overdue, so I'm really glad it's finally here. Wishlist if you are interested too, as it really really helps! I'll talk more about it further in this post, but let me show you guys some cool stuff I've been working on for now:

(I hate vertical/square content but it gets seen more on YouTube so oh well lol)

For the past week or two, I've been porting over a ton of old content from the "classic" Java Guppy's Quest to SP Struct! It's something a lot of people said they would like to see, so I couldn't pass the opportunity to add this stuff. A ton of old players, enemies, backgrounds, entities, and HUD were added from the Java version, even including unused enemies and backgrounds! It was really fun to add that stuff as it was really nostalgic, and hey maybe even some of you remember that stuff! One thing about the HUD, you may notice that when you play as the "old" characters, it completely changes as that's how it looked in the new game. While when you play with the new character (only Guppy at the moment in the beginning of the video), the HUD is much smaller and cleaner.

I also improved character code a lot as well such as enemy movement/wall/edge detection code, and added a lot of other things that were overdue. This includes volume controls, auto music changing on selection in the song picker, and a pause screen for play mode.

I also did a ton of Jump Wars stuff! But unfortunately I can't really say what it is just yet, I like to keep that stuff a surprise... so instead check out this little montage I did of different character compatibilities on the PreOS stage!

As for the Steam page, it looks so nice now that it's finally here...

I wanted to create one for a while, but wasn't sure when was the right time. Then I found out I was very wrong for delaying it because the earlier it exists the better, so I made sure to finish up the remaining work and put it up. Hopefully once enough wishlists happen, and once the demo gets decent attention when its out, we can do a Kickstarter! We have some massive plans for it, including some really awesome rewards that we think people will love. So lets see how that goes as time goes by!

As for other stuff...

I've been crazy busy doing all kinds of things the past two weeks. It's been driving me nuts! I can't even tell if this post is messy/all over the place or I'm overthinking it haha. I've been playing a bit with paid advertising on sites such as Instagram and Twitter, and it has been a really big emotional turmoil thing. I kinda suck at managing with excitement I guess but I'm trying to work on it as much as I can. I also want to make more frequent posts like these, showing off what I've been working on, but I feel like making videos and then posting everywhere is super exhausting. But hey, I said I wanted to get better at doing marketing stuff, so it's something!

Emily just got really busy again with a lot of other stuff, so I have to prioritize tasks that require less 2D art. But that's fine, as I still want to see if I can do some stuff on Gon Ball Rally (the marble racing game in ME-OS), Keyccordion Dawn (the rhythm game), and definitely music. I have a feeling that late September/October I'll be releasing quite a few new songs!

Anyways to end this long post, I'd like to thank you all again for reading up to this point. I really really really really appreciate it! I'm really happy that we don't feel alone on this journey and that we have amazing friends and supporters around us all the time that help keep us going. I'll try to update you all again soon, but for now I'm gonna go and try to vote on some songs here on NG!

Thank you!

- MG

P.S. Fun fact I was debating on if I should make that SP Struct video for a week, but when writing this post I thought I should make it so I had to rush and make it within an hour lol

Let me start by showing off this quick montage for our operating system simulation game, ME-OS!

I hope the parts don't go by too fast, it's just that there is so much to show (I couldn't even put everything in to be honest haha) and I want to make sure everyone gets to see something they like before they look away! Another thing about the way I structured the montage, is I tried to give somewhat priority focus on the "bigger" games and apps opposed to the smaller or jokey ones, as I don't want it to look like just a minigame collection or something (even though we definitely have a lot of minigames). Oh and if you liked this montage, make sure to join our Discord since that's currently where we post the most about the game, and a lot of other fun stuff too!

And now on to other stuff

If you'd like to know how the game is going, it's generally going pretty good! I've been adding new content, and @spicycoffee has been working on some more assets for the game including the potential UI/UX improvements. I can show some sneak peaks of what's happening lately! For example, I am currently working on the next Zelomedia Splash (flash game spoof/parody collection) game (I plan to make a few for the coming update) which is a spoof of some club hitting flash games I played as a kid. Do you think you know the reference to this one specifically?

This is still very work in progress by the way, so keep in mind that some things will change when this is finished! I also was working on some fun commands and revisions to certain objects from other games to make them less error prone outside of their default environment. For example, here's Jump Wars Pico being spawned into Royal Squared Color and then camera focused!

You could spawn things for a long time already, but a few things to note:

• Shortcut paths were added, meaning that something like |jwchars| resolves to E/GameFiles/JW/Chars . This saves a lot of time typing, and you can get the rest of the shortcut paths by typing 'getshortcutpaths' in the terminal
• cameratarget is a new command that tries to find if the current scene has a special "retargetable" camera and then tries to focus on a specific object.

There are some other super fun commands, including the ability to change a spawned Jump Wars characters player number dynamically, meaning you can have CPU fights outside of Jump Wars itself! It's weird but so cool.

Probably the biggest change so far though that's being made for this coming update, is not as flashy, but man is it super useful. Take a look:

You can now switch between fullscreen (priority) applications! For those new to ME-OS, this might not seem like a big change. But it's actually huge!! Switching between priority applications means you can practically crowd your taskbar with whatever you want and pick it up right where you left off. This kind of changes almost everything about how ME-OS can be played, and means that we don't have to rely on windowed applications for this feature anymore (even though we will still be adding a lot of windowed applications in the future, you can have multiple of those at once on the screen!). We wanted to add this feature since the beginning of ME-OS (2018), but couldn't figure out how to do it properly, and now it's finally done.

There's much more stuff that has been going on that I'll show later, but here's the last thing I'll show for now. I completely forgot in 2019 that I took a bunch of pictures for a background pack that never made it into the game! So I quickly fixed that, and now I have a background I remember being really excited to take for a long time finally in the game. It's a reference to something stupid so I'm not sure people will get it, but here is the background called "SnowyEgretbg":

The biggest hurdle with development though, as always, is marketing and reach. Honestly I dunno if I said this before but marketing seems just as hard, if not harder than making the game itself. I always have so much energy and excitement towards working on music, code, even art which is hard for me but still; though marketing just seems like some kind of evil maze that's impossible to see the end of lol. We're making this game first and foremost out of passion, so most efforts go towards the content department, but man I gotta get better at getting this game to be seen by other people or something!

Complaining aside, I hope you guys liked what I had to show today! While I have time, I will do my best to check out as much music and art here on NG as I can, as I really wanna get back into using NG more frequently. I just in general seem to only work and sometimes have little breaks, so I don't have much time for almost anything outside of work, but I want to make sure to do a few other things and rating music (and sometimes art) on NG is definitely one of them!

As always, thank you so much for reading up to this point, it means a lot! See you hopefully soon!

-MG

It's finally here, ME-OS LIVE 3 shows off the new 0.0.57 update for our game!

We (me and @spicycoffee) were working really hard since October to release this update, pretty much most of my free time at least! We're really dedicated to getting more people to see what we got so far before we start stuff like crowdfunding, and hopefully the demo we announced towards the end of the presentation (hoping to release one with next update) will help with that! I already said a lot about this update as a sneak peak in my previous post (check it out if you haven't btw it has a lot of gifs too), but now I can happily share more! To avoid being repetitive I'll just show the new stuff from the presentation video :D

Let's start with the Keyccordion Dawn update... we have added SIX new songs! This is the most amount of songs we've added in any update so far (and believe me we wanted to add even more...) and a lot of them are guest songs! 3 of them are also by the awesome Newgrounds composer @F-777 (thank you so much!). Here's a quick skim over the songs we have so far in the game:

(sorry for the crappy gif quality but) as you can see, we have 18 songs in total now! And we wanna add so much more than 18 too! We've also been working a lot on visuals for certain levels, which allowed me to do cool stuff like this:

I'm honestly very happy how the butterflies turned out still, I worked pretty hard on making them look nice! The other songs have really cool visuals too but I don't wanna block up the whole post with just Keyccordion stuff, so check out the video I linked at the beginning of this post for more :)

Now onto Jump Wars, the ME-OS platform fighter. We added TWELVE new characters and a new stage! We seem to keep doubling the amount of characters we've been adding for the past 3 updates... oops haha. The new update includes a lot of original characters, and some guests including Root, Digby and Floyd by @jerbjpg ! I discovered this amazing show through Newgrounds, and ever since I've been in love with it. Me and Emily still quote funny stuff from there to this day whenever we talk about random stuff lol. I don't want to block up the post with gifs again, so if you want to see the Jump Wars updates only, check out the trailer we released here!

Jump Wars definitely got a bunch of content, but for now we're gonna jump on to the next exciting thing to show off...

We added a lot of new desktop windowed apps! This includes the minesweeper clone Weshrel Sweep and the weird MandelbrotEX fractal explorer! Here are the two in action:

(last one I had to make the size really small because otherwise the gif would be too big lol)

Both of these have much more footage in the video presentation if you wanna see more :)

Besides this, as I said a lot of stuff new to this update was shown off in the previous post too. And more excitingly, we will be hopefully releasing a demo with the next update that comes out! So if you wanna find out more about the game, you can check out the website, the wiki page, or better yet join the ME-OS Discord! We always post new stuff there and just have a pretty chill community, and if you wanna suggest things its best to do it there too! Plus you'll always be the first to know what the new developments to the game are. So come join :D

Also if you like this game, please show it to your friends! We could use all the help we can get right now to really get this game out there, and it really helps motivate us knowing that there are people waiting for it to come out :)

Now on to the other stuff...

Here comes the part where I tell you guys that I've been super busy again... but I will still keep trying my best to appear on NG more often and do things I like to do! I really miss rating music like I usually would, because I'd often find a lot of great musicians that way and I also like to make people feel nice by telling them how good of a job they did haha. Also I had a jam idea I wanted to do a few months back but it ultimately fell through, as I didn't have enough time to unfortunately dedicate to it. I still want to do it though, so as soon as I get the opportunity to properly organize it, I will! I'm not sure I have much else to say right now though, my brain is kind of all over the place because I know I have to do a gajillion other things today. But you made it to the end of the blog again! I really appreciate anyone who reads these things, it means a lot. I really put a ton of effort into this game and other stuff I do, so having someone see the progress makes me feel very nice, especially considering how hard it feels to get something out there for others to see haha

As always, thank you very much for reading, and I'll see you in the next blog post!

- MG

Hey everyone! I might have mentioned this before (I should've at least), but I made the entire soundtrack for @spicycoffee's new animation! You can check it out here if you haven't yet:

I've been watching her work on this animation day after day, and I tried to do anything and everything I could to help. So I thought it would be cool if I made the soundtrack for any part of the animation that could potentially require it! I ended up making seven songs that I will be releasing over the span of the next seven days. In fact, you can hear the first one here!

The order in which these songs will be releasing is in the order I have finished making them. They all have completely different genres and directions, which was pretty fun to tackle! Structurally and progression wise they are all pretty different too, and I hope that if you like them you will also like watching the cartoon :)

So yeah, stay tuned for the span of this week, as I still got six songs to upload over the next six days!

Other than that, I'm really proud of Emily for releasing this; I've been watching her basically do this for so long, especially since April where I would see her at the table downstairs from 8 in the morning and often going past midnight. Ever since I knew her, I knew how much she wanted to one day release a cartoon like this one, so seeing her finally get there makes both of us really happy.

And in other other news, I'm still working on getting that next update out for ME-OS as well as the third LIVE presentation hopefully late this month or early July. We keep making updates bigger and bigger so I always underestimate how long its going to take... oops. With Em more free now though, we can hopefully wrap things up and get it out there! There's so much I want to show but am keeping secret until the LIVE ;_;

After this update (0.0.57), version 0.0.58 will also likely be the one that a demo drops. It's long overdue for a demo, but at least this way it will be pretty sizeable and enjoyable! Sometimes I forget how much content there really is in this game already because very time I reach the point of adding something, I always want to add more lol. However, the biggest obstacle will be marketing/sharing around the game from now until the demo drops so more people can find out about it. I kinda suck at this part as I've said before, but I'll try nevertheless haha. If anyone can help spread the word, it will be super duper appreciated!

Oh looks like it's the end of the blog now :O

As always, I thank you very much for reading up to this point! I hope to keep you all up to date with some awesome info. Chat with you all later!

-MG

Hello everyone! I rise from the grave again. Been super busy (very unpredictable I know) so I'll just start this off by talking about updates to me and @spicycoffee's game, and what better way to start then with a cool picture?

We've been working on ME-OS tons and tons as usual, but haven't been showing much. That's because some of the stuff we want to keep a surprise... but this we can show (also we share progress very often on the Discord if you are interested). Finally we have an Image Viewer! Flip through images in any directory (local and external), zoom in and out, and have tabs of other pictures from other folders opened. We might add more features, but for now this has covered a long empty hole and browsing images is a breeze. Good bye old ugly glitchy File Surfer popup UI... Also does the location of the image look familiar to any of you? Hmmm

You might have also noticed, but some windows (mainly File Surfer, Image Viewer, and Mimi Player Mini) are now resizable! Hooray for better UI! Speaking of visuals, check out this addition to Lum Paint!

That's right, finally we have brush shapes in Lum Paint now! Not only that, but the drawing algorithm has been improved a lot. No more random gaps between strokes, and also just generally much more optimized and can even handle lag spikes and complete a relative line since last capture. Now for a little bit of Gon Ball Rally:

After receiving more input from beta testers, the ball movement feels much more "free"! Before it used to be more "realistic" in the sense that it would be harder to stop at faster speeds, but now it feels much more responsive as an in between approach. People seem to like it (and unfortunately the gif doesn't really illustrate how the game feels haha) but I felt it was important to share. Also here's another thing I wanted to show:

Zelomedia Splash finally has a proper menu! For those who don't know what Zelomedia Splash is, it's kind of a collection of small funny parody flash like games. Some of them are even released as standalones on Newgrounds! Ice And Fire Tower Defence, Super Hard Quiz P2!!, and Whoopie's Playtime.

There's a ton more stuff that I will announce in the next ME-OS Live (previous one here) but also some secret things I can't say, such as new guest songs in Keyccordion Dawn, and some awesome new characters in Jump Wars! So check out the ME-OS Discord server if you want more frequent updates on that :)

Also yesterday was ME-OS's 6th birthday! It's crazy how time flies, and sometimes its absolutely terrifying ;-;

Now onto other stuff!

So last time I mentioned that I was really busy. Well I guess I got even busier (both with this, work, and other stuff) so I've been around a little less. At least the health issues got somewhat better, so I don't feel like I'm suffering as much anymore!

One thing I've been doing aside from ME-OS is I've been helping @spicycoffee a lot with her animations. Mainly from the sound department though of course haha. I mostly did/found sound effects for two upcoming animations (one is supposed to release tomorrow actually!), and a whole seven track soundtrack for an animation she made coming out in June. Honestly both of them are so great, I really wish you'd all see it. The one coming tomorrow is a shorter one and cute, but the June one is like over three minutes long or something. I still find it crazy how she manages to do such amazing work (but to be fair she literally would work from 8 am to midnight for like the past two months so...)

Some of my other friends have also been doing some pretty cool stuff that I hope they'll show soon (also idk how much times I have said the word "stuff" in this post but I feel it's too many lol). However one thing I am really happy to show is that my friend @FelixBlobDev finally released a demo for his game Kewtia Crystallite Hunt on Steam! So far many people seem to be enjoying it, and hopefully you guys have time to check it out. It's like Mario 64 but with a lot of original stuff and cool gimmicks. Here's a dumb quick gif I made (gif compression sucks) of me running around with a character he made for me, but there's much more on the Steam page:

Anyways aside from all that, I'll really try to be more active as soon as I can, but there's lots of work to do all the time! I'd love to talk if anyone wants to comment on any of this stuff or anything in general. I always really appreciate you all reading my posts, and thank you once again! See you next time :)

-MG

Hello everyone again! Sorry for being so busy and not posting much lately, I'll say more at the end of this post. But lets start with something juicy!

Packs have finally been added to SP Struct's Guppy's Quest builder! This might not be the most flattering looking pack, but it is because it's from my ancient and old Java version of a project I was working on. People who have stuck around with me for a while will remember this, as it's from around 2015/2016! But anyways, this addition of packs feature allows you to mix many different tiles, entities, and other elements together to create weird and fun new levels. A lot more will be added to this soon!

Another feature I wanted to add for a while is an online chat! When you're in a lobby with friends, there's already a ton to do on ME-OS. But if someone isn't on voice call with you and needs to type, it would be annoying to go in and out of ME-OS. So now we have a functional chat built into the taskbar! Not only that, but you can style your text and even use emotes. Much more will be added soon, but this is just a nice little thing to mess with now and has already been super useful during testing with friends and beta testers.

Another thing to check out is the ton of new additions to MEVST! Firstly there is a new interactable piano keyboard attached to the app, allowing you to see what's being pressed and allowing you to click the keys as well. Not only that, but we also added banks! Banks allow you to pick much more instruments from large collections. In this case, I added the classic midi sound bank and you can see me use it in the video at one point. One thing I didn't get to show in the video (because honestly I dunno how I would) is that you can play music for your friends online through MEVST! So if you want to show off your cool piano skills, whip out your midi keyboard (or computer keyboard if you can somehow lol) and start jamming!

There's currently a lot more coming to this update, just a lot of it I want to keep a surprise. But we already have 5 new unrevealed Jump Wars characters fully implemented (more coming to the update though), 2 new fully implemented Keyccordion Dawn songs (also more songs coming), so much QoL and other features it's crazy. If you want to check out more of the stuff, I post very often on the ME-OS Discord!

But now for the more boring stuff... I haven't been posting as much lately because I've been extremely tired (work, health issues still, and of course developing the game) and don't find as much time to market/share information about the game. I think I generally am pretty bad at marketing and showing off my game in general, so if someone has any tips I'd love to hear them haha. Even now I'm sure there's more I can show and tell, but I want to get back to working and making cool stuff for you guys.

As a side note, sorry if I have been reviewing stuff less often lately, I want to get back to it a lot! Time has been a poopyhead and not allowing me to do as much as I want. But there's so much great artists here (of all kinds as in music, visual, etc.) I really want to get back into telling you all how great your stuff is!

Anyways if you read this far as usual thank you very much, it means a lot to me. I hope to reach more eyes with the stuff I do, but I really appreciate everyone old and new who stops to read these posts.

Stay awesome!

-MG

Hey all!

Just in case you missed it, I released a game the other day on Newgrounds! It's called Ice And Fire Tower Defence, and it has two fun teams that you can pick and play with. There's a lot of characters (16 soldiers, 10 summons) that all have different stats and even behaviors, so I tried to put a lot of variety in there!

This was my first attempt at making any strategy game, let alone Tower Defense game. I got some pretty interesting feedback, but kind of mostly what I was hoping for thankfully. I wanted people to find for example that spamming soldiers is not a good strategy, and I even saw some people tell me at first that they did that and are losing, but after found out a good spacing strategy to basically allow themselves a clear path to victory. I'm also pretty happy as at the moment this is my highest rated game on NG, that must mean that more people like it on average :D

So yeah if you have the time and want to play a fun little game, check it out! And thank you for reading :)

-MG

Finally, after a bit of a delay, Ice And Fire Tower Defence is available for you to play right here on Newgrounds!

There's even a new song that comes along with it, probably one of my longest in a while :D

I worked pretty much non stop all of December and the beginning of January on this. Evenings, weekends, holidays, even my birthday haha. It was definitely more than I expected for a small game; I expected the art to take a while, but the balancing of the game (making sure both sides have their own advantage and it isn't insta win with one team over the other, and even the difficulties too) proved to take up even more time. Making the song was also a very long process, especially because it had specific intentions in mind: not too distracting, not too repetitive, long... etc.

It was also my first time not only making a Tower Defence game, but a proper strategy game as well! As a kid I always stayed away from these, as they would look too intimidating or instruction heavy for me to bother. I tried to adjust that a bit by making the game a bit easier to understand and not requiring a high skill level, and also giving it a more friendly and happy theme by putting my creatures and such in there as well.

One of the (unfortunately) unforeseen difficulties is that my health problems are still being super weird, which made me lose much more time than I'd like to have working. I tried to take as little breaks as possible but with how this weird problem is acting it felt like it would incapacitate me completely. But it's okay, the game is finally here and that's all that I care about!

Besides all this stuff, this game is gonna be part of the Zelomedia collection on ME-OS, and I also wrote a wiki article about it if you'd like to find out more. I'm gonna get back to working on Portal Dreams, a lot of Jump Wars and Keyccordion stuff, and hopefully have a new ME-OS LIVE (direct like video) for you all in April! Me and @spicycoffee work very hard pretty much any opportunity we have to make this game come to life, and we really hope that one day it will be something many people will be able to enjoy.

Thank you once again for reading up till here, I really appreciate you all, and I hope you're all having a great year so far!

-MG

Hello everyone, happy new years!

I wanted to post a post like this at night, but I was enjoying hanging out with family and wanted to wait till a bit later. Just wanted to say this has been a really fun year, and in the scope of Newgrounds in general it was very fun! There was the summer meet up in Toronto which was very cool as I got to meet even more people this time, and the actual stuff we did was also really fun. I didn't think I'd ever get to see a ZabuJard movie in an actual movie theater but that was an amazing time lol. I also accidentally made it to the Newgrounds NJ meet up (I was away from home visiting my extended family, but then a cringe terrorist attack happened, and me and Emily wanted to leave early but planes were only going to America and her family is from NJ bla bla bla) so that was pretty fun too! I got to play pool which I rarely get to but I really enjoy, even if I am not as good as I'd like to be lol

I also met some cool musicians on the site this year! I usually like to listen to music in the morning from latest in the audio portal (haven't been lately just because I have been extremely busy) and there were some super neat people. I'm always surprised how the music on this site covers so much ground, even in terms of stuff I like! From stuff like older techno/dance/trance stuff being pretty much perfectly replicated, to classical/orchestral, to amazing vgm sounding stuff... etc.. And even outside of the audio portal I saw some really cool games and movies, although not as much as I'd like to because of the busy stuff. Hopefully I'll get to see more this year!

I really feel like this site is one of the last places where people can be more pure and genuine if that makes sense (?) so I'm really grateful for it. It focuses on the actual creativity of someone, what they're capable of doing and bringing to the world, and not stupid non-issues or useless drama. Every time I open something like twitter I just feel dread, fb is full of shitty ads and nothing of value, and IG I pretty much only look at memes on lol. Here though I know I can find fun, great people, and much more.

But yeah, before I move on to the update about the game I said I was gonna release in December (oops lol but dw I'll explain!) I wish everyone here a great year, full of health first, but then happiness and then creativity! Let's make this year even more successful than the last :)

Now for the update:

I just needed to delay the game I was gonna release by like a week ish, hopefully not any longer! It started out planning as a small game, and it still kind of is, but it's my first time making a game of this genre and I kinda underestimated it... mostly in terms of how hard it would be to balance it/make it fair, but also how much art I'd need to make. I love drawing, ever since I was very young, but man art is just so hard for me. I'm not even pro at it, I have a style I like to use since I was like a kid or whatever but even then it's still hard! Nevertheless I really, really hope to get it out by this Saturday. I know for sure it'll come this month and I promise if you'll be patient you'll probably enjoy it!

Anyways thanks for reading to this point, I always love it when people read these news posts! See you hopefully soon :D

-MG

I had an awesome birthday today! @spicycoffee surprised me this morning with this art on a t-shirt:

I dunno how to make this picture smaller lol but is okay

I really liked this present and I can't wait to wear it when it becomes less cold outside!

Also just a quick update about my game thingy that I want to release this Saturday... so far everything is on track! My headphone wire broke and I couldn't use them for two days but it's all good now, so I just have to finish coding and the music, and then test it, and hopefully it'll all be out soon! I hope people will really like this one :D

Anyways just a short thing, and I hope anyone celebrating today had a great day!

-MG