hi everyone :3 I haven't posted a whole lot so far this year so I wanted to give some updates on what I've actually been up to. I have been hard at work on some new toys but its a slow process.....

SNACK SLICE 2 UPDATE ( ITS OVER )

I was workin' on it quite a bit near the end of last year, and engine wise its 90% feature complete, really just needs levels. But there's a big issue with it. Godot's default physics engine sucks a whole lot of ass! Luckily, a plugin exists that can replace those default physics with the Box2D physics library, which is a whole lot better. However, box2d uses Godot's C# support, which currently in Godot 4 can't be used to export to web.

I thought about possibly doing just a downloadable game, but to be honest its been very discouraging to work on it knowing that I won't be able to share any of it here.

I'd still really like to make this game, all it needs are levels and art. Sadly though, I'm gonna hold off on it until C# support comes to the web exports of Godot 4. It's unclear when that will actually be, but as soon as I hear that it works IM MAKIN THIS GAME!!!!

SOMETHING NEW??? ( WE'RE SO BACK )

I'm makin a little sandbox game!! The gimmick is that everything takes place on little square planets that you can hop around. There isn't a whole lot to show for it right now, a huge chunk of the work has just been making sure this game is even capable of running on the web. Godot may not let you use C# on web, but it DOES let you use C++ on web!! You still have to jump through a million hoops to get even that working though lol. A good fat chunk of the more technical stuff has been finished though, right now the game is just lacking content and any sort of goals.

I tried making a similar gimmicky sandbox game about 3 years ago and failed hard, I wasn't anywhere near experienced enough to pull something like it off. Even today this game is really putting my skills to the test. It feels good to be challenged again though, there's nothin even close to the feeling of finally getting something working after tolling away at it for hours. Point is: I'm having a lot of FUN making this project and that combined with the fact I'll eventually be able to post it here is all the motivation I need!

I've released the debug builds of this game to the public, so if u feel like giving it an early test, have at it!!

Be warned that there will be bugs and possibly crashes right now though. Friend of mine had the background turn green I'm still trying to figure that one out...

That's about all for now though. I might try and take a break from the planet sandbox game at some point and make something a little smaller. I feel bad having no games up for 2024!! I made a bug for that bug collab that's comin soon. I'm also almost at 500 fans here on ng and that's pretty cool too, thanks for that :]

hopefully i'll update yall on the game soon enough,, bye byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

what a portfolio, huh?

hey everyone, it feels a little early to be doin' a year in review recap, but the thought of writing one of deez excited me, and since I don't have anything else planned until 2024, I thought I might as well just give it a go. I'm also gonna be including some 2022 stuff as well, since I never made any sort of recap nor was I very present here on ng until the very end of 22'.

QUICK 2022 RECAP

I only started doing stuff here on newgrounds near the beginning of 2022. I only uploaded a few pieces of art, and one shitty little game. From August - October, I worked on a long personal game, but after awhile I soon realized I was nowhere near prepared enough to make what I had scoped out for myself. I knew if I continued, I'd only waste my time making something utterly shit, so I shifted focus. I made Snack Slice instead, and threw it here on newgrounds. When Snack Slice got front paged, I suddenly had a lot more motivation to make smaller games for this lovely website. A month later, I made Cake Quake.

2023 PROJECTS

SQUADADDLE

At the beginning of the year, I started with a plan to create 1 little game each month of the year, to gather practice. I immediately failed when I spent too long making SQUADADDLE, released in February. Looking back, I wish I had delayed this game even further. While the game is juicy, with bangin' tunes and visuals, I failed to see just how difficult it was. Overall, I'm still pretty proud of it, just wish it had an extra week or two in the oven. It was also awesome to work with @iMustFeedit who made the bangin' tunes. This was also the first time I've won a monthly here on newgrounds! That was an exciting day.

LUNAR WORM

Lunar Worm, similar to squadaddle, kinda fucks in the juice department but is overall lacking. It was just made primarily to get a lil idea I had out of my brain though, so it accomplished its goal. Also, bangin' tunes as always.

HELIOX STATION

Heliox Station is the longest amount of time I've ever spent on a single project that I actually finished. I wrote devlogs here on newgrounds about this game, so you can read those if you really want to learn more, I won't bother repeating it. I started that game out of a desire to make something with a little more story to it. After a while though, I ended up just not having the energy to bring it up to par with what I truly wanted it to be. It's got a faint oooooh mystery lore shit to it, but it not what I ultimately wanted it to be. Overall though, compared to my previous puzzle type games, it fucks. And that's a win for me. It was also nice to work with my epic swag partner @Staggernight on something.

PNGTUBER PLUS

PNGTuber Plus is a weirder project of mine. It's not really related to anything I've done on newgrounds, but I should still talk about it since its taken up quite a big chunk of my active brain since I released it. A while while ago, I made a custom program that would give me a slightly more animated avatar on my rare twitch livestreams. It was all hard coded though, and at some point I got the idea to make a program that would allow anybody to import their images and make goody little avatars. I threw it together in just a week (rather sloppily in all honesty), and it ended up doing unbelievably well over on twitter dot com. That was, alarming, to say the least. Suddenly the amount of bug reports I was getting made me regret making it so fast lol. But it ended up alright, and I want to thank all the people who've used it and donated to it! Your generosity means I'm gonna be able to move out sometime in 2024, and god am I grateful. fuck

https://kaiakairos.itch.io/pngtuber-plus

SENTIENT CLEANING DEVICE

Tom Fulp announced the Halloween Spooktacular, and I wanted to try my luck at making something spooky. I thought of using "limited perception" as a scaaaaaaarry game mechanic, and eventually that turned into Sentient Cleaning Device. In my humble opinion, sentient cleaning device sucks a whole lotta ass, but I didn't care. Usually, something of mine sucking ass would get to me a bit. I can be a little hard on myself when it comes to this type of stuff. But something about this project helped me let that idea go. It sucks ass, but that's alright. So you can imagine my astonishment when SCD won 2nd place in the spooktacular!! I still don't really get it lol, but again, thanks so much to the judges and mister fulp of course.

PLUMER QUEST

The last game of 2023 is a special one to me. It sucks, it's stupid, and it rocks.

2023 ART

I've drawn for the longest time, my entire life, but I has sort of lost my passion for art. It really slogged away in my high school years, and it stuck like that afterwards too. Something about newgrounds though, it's really given me new life. I can officially say that in 2023, I'm starting to like drawing again, I only wish I could do both game dev and drawing at the same time lol. Anyways, I'd just like to display some of my personal favorites I've done this last year.

there's also quite a few nice sketches over on my twitter but bleh bleh whateva'

2023 LIFE

I don't wanna get too personal on da timeline, my private life is just not something I wanna make a habit of sharing. I can share a lil bit tho. Like I said, for the first time since I was a small little kid I feel pretty passionate about my silly little projects and art, and that's awesome. its a feeling i've missed. it's easy to feel a little,, behind,, given all the time i just spent doing fuck all nothing. But it's better late than never. I've been tryin to make games for more than a decade now, and getting to it again (especially with my adult brain) is just incredible.

Workin my real job's been goin well. Not gonna share too much about that, but I've never been one for bein' a wagie so the fact I've been able to stick with my current job and not hate it to high heaven is a huge win in my book.

I turned 21 this year,, I don't drink though so it doesn't mean a whole lot to me lol

Oh, and this year my long distance relationship is no longer long ! We still don't live together, but its nice actually being able to see your partner whenever. huge, HUGE win.

This November I went to Oregon with my partner, and it was lovely. It's the first time I've ever been out on my own trip as an adult, that's worth something I think. Thanksgiving food rocks as always.

2024 FUTURE

There's a lot I want to do still. Not everything will be done is 2024. Some of its certainly more of a 2025 type of adventure. But we'll work on it when we get there...

I'm lazy so imma just make a list :

• Finish Snack Slice 2, planning to be my first ever steam game!
• Practice by making some small story type games. I want to learn how to write!
• Continue to update PNGTuber Plus or possibly completely rewrite it
• Finally move out ! Been a long time coming.
• Maybe finally learn how to make music better. A skill I've wanted to acquire but its been hard finding the time.
• I want to participate in the newgrounds community more!! I've done a lot of solo work, but I'd like to try my hands at some more collaborative projects or even try my hand at some animation. (if there are any collabs comin up or u need me to program a game collab jus hmu im serious)
• Also want to meet more people, here on newgrounds and just in general.
• Draw more. Just a lot. Remember to use my stupid sketchbook. ive been SLACKING!!
• Probably more stuff that I can't think of rn. I'm sure I'll pick some new ones up during the year too.

CONCLUSION

It feels a bit stupid to say, but god damn. Newgrounds has done so much for me. Creativity and makin' stuff means everything to me. Newgrounds revitalized my desire to be creative, and pulled me along with it.

Every year I find myself becoming more and more of a fleshed out character, and who I was even just a year ago starts to feel more and more distant. I could have never guessed who I'd become back then, and I imagine I can't predict who I'll be when I'm writing my 2024 recap either. The battle with my stupid gay mental health is ongoing but I'm determined to see it through. I've been getting better every year, I've been acquiring more skills every year, and I've been learning new things every year. 2023 is not my peak though, not just yet. I've got some work to do.

thanks to tom for sending me this rockin' sticker

happy new year newgrounds !

New visuals for everything!

hey everybody, I've done a lot more work on Snack Slice 2 since my last update! Last time I only showed the basic slice ability and how much cleaner it is over the original snack slice. A good chunk of what I've done since is more technical and not very interesting, but I've also made many visual changes to make the moment to moment gameplay feel as good as possible, as well as have everything nice and clean to look at.

Here's a big list of all the new changes:

• Added the eating guys from the first game. This time around, they only need to eat ONE food object instead of a certain amount of food. In snack slice 1, lots of people and myself on retrospective playthroughs really didn't like this mechanic as they'd often just barely miss the required amount and be forced to restart. The eating guys are also way better animated this time around, done by @Staggernight :]
• Previously, the black terrain was done using Godot's tilemap feature. This time, they use polygons and can be any shape. This is much easier to work with and may allow me to create some kind of level editor in the future.
• Sliceable objects now have "depth" to them. This is done by layering an additional sprite behind the main sprite. This additional sprite can be any texture, allowing objects to look like they have some kind of inside.
• Nicer backgrounds. The new backgrounds use a similar shader to the one in squadaddle, and is far more interesting to look at than the plain backgrounds in snack slice 1. The shadows also make their return.
• Slice particles. They look pretty similar to the way they did previously
• Level loading, transitions, and reload button. They've all been given nice animations that I really love, and is way faster than before. In the original, you HAD to press R to reset, but now you can now click to reset with the mouse as well. I'm hoping to make the entire game playable with mouse only.

this gif doesn't do it justice trust me it looks CLEAN

• Freeze points. These were in the last game but they were a bit shit.

that's everything i can remember off the top of my head tbh there's probably a few more things but these are all the things worth showing right now. I think I'm at the point now where I can start putting together some levels. I want to do a super mario world style map, but we'll see if something like that works for a game like this.

ok goodbye see ya i might take a break from this to draw my gift for the ng secret santa that ive been putting off oops

helo,, it's 2 am rn and im currently listening to tunes and being sleepy. i got some work done today tho, and i thought i'd post it here to hold myself accountable to this project:

around a year ago, i published Snack Slice here on newgrounds. It's the first game I've made that got frontpaged here on ng! A lot of my previous games (pre newgrounds arc) never got a lot of players, so having a game of mine get some love gave me a lot of motivation to make more games here.

It's a buggy, horrible mess that I'm not too proud of, but I must credit it with causing 2023 to be my most productive creative year yet. And for that, I'm grateful.

I've always loved the concept of the game, and I at some point wanted to revisit the idea and make it more stable. That's when I stubbled across a godot plugin that implemented the Box2D physics library. Box2D is MUCH more stable than godots default implemented physics engine, so when I saw this, I knew I had to try recreating the snack slice mechanics...

and so i did!

this new version of the slice mechanic is much, much better. it's now:

• Much more stable, physics wise. Expect less physics jitter.
• Supports slicing concave physics objects! (previous only convex shapes would work)
• Slicing multiple rigid bodies at once is much faster than it was in snack slice (it used to wait a frame between cuts because i was and still am bad at programming)
• Slicing objects no longer has a random chance to create inaccurate objects and is basically perfect (outside some scenarios where sliced objects are extremely small)

Unfortunately though, the Box2D plugin for godot requires the mono C# version of godot 4, meaning I (at least currently) can't export it to HTML5 to post here on newgrounds. If I make this better version of snack slice, it's going to have to be a downloadable game only.

Unrelated, but I've been wanting to make a steam game. I have some ideas for bigger projects in the far future, but before I go and tackle them, I'd like to get some practice with using steamworks and its api. I got a little bit when putting PNGTuber Plus onto steam, but its not a game, so I didn't get the full experience. I've been wanting to make a small, simple game i can publish to steam, but have it still be beefy enough that it feels fair to charge money for it. I just haven't come across a good idea for what that steam game will be yet...

unless... :0

I want to make Snack Slice 2 (working title) a real, honest to god, steam published commercial game. The concept is simple enough, that I think with a handful of fun mechanics and enough levels, I can make a worthy game without sinking a huge amount of time into it. I want to keep it small, and I don't want to charge a whole lot for it. I mainly just want to learn and get experience rather than make money. I'll shoot for a game only worth a couple bucks, to hopefully not overload myself with work.

This game has a lot more planning and everything to go through, and to be honest, im predicting it won't be much like the original snack slice at all. I don't have much else to share right now, just wanted to throw my ideas onto the grounds cause I like writing up my thoughts (i really should do this more often about random shit tbh)

invisible water floating

anyways goodnight everyone im goin to sleep zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

tap in

Just released a lil update for my program incase any of yall wanna check it out :]

once again procrastinating getting back into streaming by going to ridiculous lengths to make my stream nicer looking

idk what i did to get user of the day but !!! thanks newground!

released updates 1.1 and later 1.2 for heliox station to hopefully help players

changes:

• game now saves at every restart checkpoint, allowing you to close the window and come back to the game
• options menu where you can toggle fullscreen, change music or sound effect volume, or clear your save data
• made X key interact/grab, C key is now rotate block. Shift is still interact for people who preferred that.
• edited the tutorial text to reflect control changes and give additional information

I made a walkthrough as well that WILL NOT FOR THE LIFE OF ME embed on the game page