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

I was thinking on this for a bit but... Whoopie's Playtime is now playable on Newgrounds! You can play it here:

This game is heavily based on janky platformers that I played in the mid 2000s as a kid. Half of them were even on Newgrounds! I say were because they got deleted at one point for some reason... To be more specific, the games were called Mario Vlax, Luigi Castle on Fire, Waluigi, and Sonica. I didn't realize this at the time (although I noticed the similarities), but all of them seem to use the same engine. Which engine? I have no idea! I think I was trying to research last year, but to no avail. Before I explain what I did though, I should provide some context:

This game was made for ME-OS, my operating system simulation game full of games, programs, and OS like features. More specifically, Whoopie's Playtime is part of the Zelomedia Splash collection, which is comprised of smaller/simpler flash like games and parodies. With this one specifically, I tried to make it just as janky as the engine it was inspired by. The enemies move very similarly, the timing/speeds/physics, etc.. However I thought that people might get a bit grumpy if the whole game plays super annoying, so I toned down the default unfairness/difficulty, and added an unfair mode that can be turned on in the options. That mode makes it as close as possible to the engine including frantic timing, random/unpredictable enemy movement, and more. I'm really hoping that someone recognizes what I was going for, that would be really cool as I'm not sure how many people played the source inspirations haha.

Initially I wasn't sure whether I wanted to upload more smaller ME-OS games on Newgrounds (especially with one coming very soon, but more on that later...) but this one felt like it had to be here. I mean after all, at least a portion of the inspiration material was uploaded to NG almost two decades ago! That's a loooot of time. I'm hoping people around my age or older feel nostalgic playing this, and people who don't feel the nostalgia just get a fun little game to enjoy. Either way I just owe a lot to this site because it formulated a large chunk of my childhood, as well as exposed me to very talented people/very cool content, and even friends! So I hope you enjoy this little tidbit I have to offer for now :)

As for the thing I mentioned earlier, I'm making another Zelomedia Splash game, except similar to when I released Super Hard Quiz P2, this game is being made with the intention to release to Newgrounds as well! I've been spending the past two weeks animating/drawing, which makes me wanna claw my eyes out, but it's gonna be awesome (I hope!). I don't want to reveal the theme just yet, but I'm aiming for this coming Saturday, if not the next one (29th).

If you're interested more in ME-OS, make sure to join the Discord server where I talk more about this stuff/show sneak peaks, host events/contests, and more! Otherwise, thank you so much again for reading, I love this site and I love showing you guys my stuff!!

-MG

The ME-OS art contest (music/visual/etc.) had it's deadline moved to Dec 8th! If you want to make some cool art in exchange for cool prizes in the game, join the Discord and read the contest rules! Anyways, let's look at a funny gif...

That's right, the Portal Dreams game for ME-OS is getting items now! They can be used in single and multiplayer, and add a new edge to the game. You have to find and collect these items before you can use them, and so on. And of course, I implemented one of the hardest ideas for an item first, because I like to torture myself... a portal shot ©™®!!1

I've always been fascinated with portals in games, so once I decided to add items to Portal Dreams... I knew I had to make an item that can create them lol. Getting the shaders, math, physics, etc. done for this was all a nightmare... to put it into perspective, the easiest thing I had to do was rewrite the entire player movement code to a more physics based system lol. It also works with teleporting any prop, too...

I've been working on this game a lot recently, as it's not one of the only planned release titles I want to have with ME-OS, but also such a fun game in multiplayer. I mean, me and my friends already mess around spawning random stuff in multiplayer here and just create complete chaos lol. Now with all the improvements, changes, and additions, playing with my friends should be much more fun next time lol

I've also been getting other stuff done on the other games in ME-OS here and there, and man it's so much work! I work at my job during the day, and then right after work on this until I usually just go to bed. But I know it will be worth it, just gotta get more people to discover the game lol. My dream is to just make this game be me and Emily's success, and even if it flops well... I'll still keep developing it lol I love it :)

I also have to release three remixes by the end of this year that I haven't even started yet, so I gotta get on that really soon! I don't think anyone will guess what they will be of (and even if you do I can't tell you smh).

Besides that, I've been really trying to keep reviewing stuff like I like to on NG. When I have the time to, I usually go through like 10 songs a day (if I can, more, and if I also can, some art) and it usually takes a good hour to do that. Unfortunately sometimes I forget, and sometimes I don't have the time, but I really like to knowing that it might make someone happy that day. Only thing I worry about is if my reviews are like, samey if that makes sense? But I always try to really write what I think even if it does seem overly optimistic lol. So if you ever see my review on your stuff and it's just full of good things it's because I really mean it!

I feel like I could write more but I should probably get back to work... if you read this far thank you! I dunno how much people out there read my news posts but yeah. See you next news post!

-MG

The ME-OS art contest continues! If you like to draw, make music, write, or do anything artistic in general, feel free to join for a chance of getting a cool prize such as an item in the game itself! The more people join, the better the rewards get, so if you're interested then hop on the Discord for instructions and submission channel :)

This is my totally legit contest submission I made in Lum Paint, I worked really really hard on it..

As for the updates, we've been really busy working on stuff for the next update ever since the last one came out. There are currently a whole NINE characters that are planned to maybe come out the next update for Jump Wars (nine is a lot so maybe split over the next two), and two of them are already done! There are also a lot of Keyccordion songs coming the next update as well. One of them you might have already heard, which is this one:

But otherwise there's a good few other ones coming too, including much more guest songs. Some of the guest songs I'm honestly really happy with, but you'll just have to wait and see... at least four new songs will be coming to the update for sure!

Otherwise I've been working on improving some other things and starting on stuff I've wanted to for a while. For example, a lot of people had different thoughts on how to improve the controls for the Gon Ball Rally marble racing game, and I've made some changes that people seem to say feels way better. One of those changes for example is having better control over stopping the ball faster if you want to go in the opposite direction, etc..

For the next few weeks, I will be implementing more of the Jump Wars characters, the Keyccordion Dawn songs, and hopefully some more stuff I want to show for next update... I can't wait to show it all!

One more thing though, would you guys be interested in public demos? Basically stuff from the current game just with a bit less content that you can download for free and enjoy to see how you like it. And what games, programs, and features are you excited the most to see?

Lemme know and thanks for reading!

-MG

We're hosting a big ME-OS art contest from now until November 24th! You can make any kind of ME-OS related art whether it be a drawing, a model, a song/remix, writing, etc. for a chance to win some prizes such as content in the game! To find out more or submit an entry, join the ME-OS Official Discord and check out event-submissions channel.

I'm really excited to host this event, as it's the first ever ME-OS event in general. Me and @spicycoffee have been hard at work on it since 2018! Man that's a long time... even though both of us are very busy these past five years, we put a lot of time aside to work on this project as well. But recently, I want to make a bigger effort engaging with current members of the ME-OS community, and want to introduce it to more people as well! So if you haven't heard of the game before, or are curious to find out more, now is the perfect time especially with an event going on :)

Thank you for reading, hope you consider joining!