The ME-OS demo is finally out now on Steam! Check it out: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1060490/MEOS/ (and please wishlist if you can!)

I'm gonna get into it more in a sec, but me and @SpicyCoffee finally got around to releasing the ME-OS update we've been working on for so long! You can tell why it probably took a while, we wanted to make sure that the demo that came out along with it was planned well, had tons of stuff, and was mostly bug free for a very enjoyable experience. You can catch a lot of the convo about this update/other ME-OS stuff on the Discord. Other than that, there was a bunch of stuff I revealed in the video above but not as much secret stuff besides the Jump Wars content. I like to surprise people with the additions each update, so I kept it quiet until yesterday when I announced the five new characters, and three new stages :)

The new Jump Wars additions were so fun, it was really hard to keep it a surprise! I got to add Vulpashka, which is one of my characters that literally came to me in a dream about having him in Jump Wars lol. I also got to add a friends character called Kitimek, and Classic Guppy (who was meant to be a gag character for this update but he's peak ok???). I was also really happy to add two internet legends, Little Devil from the Bubble Struggle/Bubble Trouble games, and Klayman from one of my favorite childhood series Klay World. I practically grew up on both those things, I remember playing Bubble Struggle on the ancient school computers during lunch, and I also remember laughing my butt off at Klay World and showing it to my friends at the time. Thank you a bunch Kreso and Robert for permission to use your characters! I also added three new stages, which should spice up the playing field a bit. I wanna say some more interesting stuff about a specific Jump Wars thing later, but I wanna quickly show some other things first!

I didn't get to work on as much music as I wanted to for this update (I have five unreleased tracks outside of ME-OS things, but for what? You'll have to wait until next Friday to find out...) but I did get to make three tracks for this update! Two I already released, and one will release tomorrow:

That's it for the big stuff, but if you wanna read about some other interesting things that aren't necessarily pertaining to ME-OS, feel free to keep reading! I like when people read stuff :D

One interesting thing I wanted to point out before moving to non ME-OS stuff, is you may have noticed that the Klayman character in Jump Wars has much more elaborate "costumes" than some other characters.

This is actually something we planned before even starting to sprite the character! Klay World had a lot of very funny and amazing characters, but one thing that really stood out to us was that the outline shape was mostly the same. So we thought, could we make an ultimate color mapped sprite sheet that would let us mix and match different outfits to recreate iconic characters? Well yes...no lol. The approach we were initially gonna go with ended up having over 200 colors for the shader to color pick and replace, and it didn't work nearly as consistently as we'd hope. Making alts, even if we slightly fixed the color mapping, would be a nightmare! So how did we do it instead? We made three versions of the sprite sheet: a variant that had the features of the default Klayman, Mr Black, and Chip, a version that had the features of Dr Bob, Retired Dr Bob, and Rick the Prick, and a version that had the features of Klayton. It was a pain to set up, but man is it worth it. This was the first character to implement this system, but not only that, it was also the first character to have custom voice lines on specific skins! Dr Bob, Retired Dr Bob, Chip, Klayton, and even the Dilly Dally Ghost (and some others) have their own unique voices, which just makes me so happy to see realized lol.

Anyways technical rambling aside (I just thought it was really cool and never really got to share it much elsewhere lol), I've been super duper busy! I love how I said that I wanted to be more active on Newgrounds in one of my previous news posts, and yet it feels like the opposite kinda happened. I swear I wanted to, its just every day was either making content for the game, or planning the demo release amongst other things. I'm entering the time where I told myself I'll be focusing on marketing the game, which to be completely honest as I've said many times before, is my least favorite thing to do. I'd much rather pay someone or something and just work on my game by adding more content, which is what I strive for the most! But it's okay, I gotta get around to it, and hopefully more people will learn of ME-OS (maybe even you reading this rn?).

Aside from that though, I've also made five tracks for @SpicyCoffee's upcoming project. I'm really excited for you guys to see it! I've been watching her work on it so much the past few months, and it's still crazy to me sometimes how skilled she is at what she does. I really want her to achieve what she wants, so she can make cartoons of her own and earn a living from it. Hopefully one day soon!

I'm also still nervous about the whole demo release thing as well. I'm nearing the point where once I have enough people following the game, I'll start a funding campaign (like on Kickstarter etc.) and the anticipation is killing me! But I really hope to get to that point very soon, as I really want to make this game reach all of the big goals I've always wanted it to.

Anyways, I'm gonna try to be active on Newgrounds more (oh look he said it again lmao!) because I really love the stuff on here, especially the music. I'm excited to browse some tracks today, as well as tomorrow, and hopefully the coming week, and the next... blah blah

I'm rambling (I'm actually writing this the night before I go to sleep so I can publish this in the morning lol). If you read till here, wow, thank you so much haha. If you're interested in my game, please give it a wishlist and join the Discord if you wanna see more frequent updates on it :)

I'll catch you all in the next news post!

- MG