My mate Stu ( @sjhillustration ) has just released his first completed game project into the portal and it’d be great if people would check it out and drop him some feedback in a review.

Stu has been lurking here for a good 20 years now and has been involved to some extent in a lot of my own games. Hes actually the guy who came up with the title for my Gravoor series. Originally I was calling the quite frankly terrible title “Mouse Chaser”. Seeing him finally release his own game is really exciting for me haha.

I was originally thinking of Friday for releasing MÆRE II but I ended up getting such a great response demoing the game to local game devs last night at our monthly meet up that I just decided why bother waiting? It’s already October after all!

The game is now available in the portal. Can’t wait to find out what you guys think of it.

MÆRE II is almost finished. I'm aiming to release it at end of next week and I can't wait for you to experience it. It is a sequel to last year's MÆRE and addresses the most common feedback from the first game - mainly that you couldn’t lose and that a single playthrough was enough to see all that it had to offer.

Here is a link to the original game if you never played it:

MÆRE II is far more complex, with each playthrough offering unique events, adding substantial replay value. In addition to that the ghosts can kill you this go around, which really heightens the tension and stakes. All in all, this is shaping up to be a much better game than the first.

If all goes to plan this will be the first of two games I release during this year’s Halloween Spooktacular, which as a huge fan of the horror genre is my favorite Newgrounds event. In 2023 the original MÆRE game placed 4th in the games category, and I’m hopeful that MÆRE II will receive an even warmer reception from the community when it launches.

I haven't got much to share about my other project at this stage, but it will be a different style of game and potentially be even scarier than this one. Or at least it has the potential to be.

20 years ago today I made this account.

I'd been coming to Newgrounds a while earlier mostly to watch videogame parodies. I was a big fan of VideoGameDC and other sprite cartoons. Its a shame that these things were such a massive legal headache because I loved watching them and would still probably watch them to this day if more were releasing. They'd all have really juvenile plots like "What if Mario and Sonic had a fight?" "What if Link hired a prostitute?" and "Can you imagine if Mario did drugs?!" and I guess that was the appeal to 13 year old me. It was also probably a huge influence on Mazza.

I think one of the first things I might have seen on here was Super Mario Rampage, which was a really basic flash game about Mario with a shotgun. There wasn't much gameplay, just Mario running along and if you hit space he fired a shotgun at goombas and such. I wasn't familiar with the concept of fan works at the time and I think I was convinced it was some official Mario game lol. "Why would Nintendo release such a thing?" I thought. Sadly this game seems to have been removed now.

I'd been making games in GamesFactory for a little bit but when when I eventually moved on to Flash I started submitting stuff to the portal. I actually deleted a bunch of my old games off here when I was a teenager because I decided that they weren't very good. Thats something I regret doing now, especially since the things I did leave up were also equally bad anyway.

My advice to any young artists reading this is don't delete your old work!

You'll definitely want to look back on it when you're older. No matter how bad it is.

Here are the games that I remember deleting:

• Gravoor 1: Perhaps the biggest loss considering how I made so many Gravoor games going forward. Gravoor 1 was the same basic Gravoor gameplay from the early games but it was a lot more zoomed out and the whole game was set in an Egyptian pyramid. I think I had originally called it Mouse Chaser but then my friend @Sjhillustration suggested the name "Graveor Robboers" as an alternative because of the pyramid theme. Over the next couple of games this became "Gravoor Robboors" before eventually being simplified to "Gravoor".

• Mouse Maze: This was the first thing I ever got through the portal. It was a really basic mouse maze game where you have to not touch the sides with your cursor. In a sense its a per-cursor to Gravoor but its really just the only thing I could make at 14.

• Stick Stealth: This was a top down stealth game sort of like the original Metal Gear but with sticks. It was broken up into 3 sections, a base, a jungle where you had to avoid stepping on land mines and then another base. You had to avoid being seen by enemies as you moved through the screens. If you got spotted it was instant game over because I didn't know how to code a chase sequence lol.

• ASCII Heroes 3: There was a 3rd ASCII Heroes game, it was incredibly hard on purpose because I wanted to make a really challenging game.

• Flash Virtual Pet 1: A basic virtual pet game with no customisation or anything. I'd made a sequel so I guess I decided the original was no longer needed. The pet was a sprite ripped straight from Puyo Puyo lol.

• Some Zombie thing: This was a zombie survival game where you were holed up in a house and had to leave and run around a simple city map collecting food and wooden boards to keep yourself and others in the house fed and the doors and windows secure. It was reasonably ambitious compared to my other games but I didn't really have the skills to pull it off properly.

• Tetris: It was just a Tetris clone. Nothing special.

• A WarioWare Clone: A simple WarioWare clone. Maybe one of the first to be made.

• Penny Farthing Bicycle Race: This was a track and field style game about racing penny farthing bikes. You had to alternate pressing left and right arrow keys to cycle. This ended up being popular at my school and a bunch of kids would play it in IT class. The IT teacher wasn't a fan because he had a classroom full of kids hammering the shit out of the keyboards to play it and he was concerned we'd break them lol.

I stopped submitting content to Newgrounds around the time I started University. Mostly because I was super busy with that, then out of uni I went on to try starting my own games studio with a mate of mine (Same guy who I've recently made Politics and Politics USA with). We did reasonably well with releases on iOS and a PS Vita game, and got invited to do industry talks at quite big events such as the BFI National Media Conference, but ultimately we weren't making a great deal of money so we ended up going our seperate ways. We were approaching our mid-20s and living at home just wasn't cutting it anymore. So I went off and got a proper job.

After trying to make money on games for a few years the fun had really been sapped out of the hobby for me. I had this mind-set that whatever I make needed to make money and be market viable. This meant I didn't make anything for years.

I finally got out of that rut in 2023 and realised that I didn't need to worry about things like that. I just wanted to make games the way I used to where it was all about just making something that I wanted to exist and trusting that if I liked it chances are someone else will too. Since then I've released 13 games to Newgrounds and expect to release my 14th, MÆRE 2, in just a few weeks. I actually want to release 2 games during the Spooktacular this year so I've got my work cut out for me getting that done.

I'll leave you with a few screenshots of my progress on MÆRE 2:

(Note: The image is a little compressed here, it will look a lot nicer in the actual game.)

(Note: The image is a little compressed here, it will look a lot nicer in the actual game.)

As before the game is about trying to fall asleep in a haunted house. You have to close your eyes and try to fall asleep but if you hear anything make a noise in the room you need to stop and check the area you heard it from to make sure that nothing is there. If something does happen to be there you need to look away as looking at ghosts raises your fear meter. If you are afraid its much more difficult to fall asleep.

The sequel improves on the original version of the game by having dynamic nights, whereas the first game was more of a "ride" in that the events of the night were scripted, in this game the events are randomised so you should never experience the same events twice. It is also possible to lose this time, where as in the first game there was no lose state.

The game has a fairly complicated time system where when the player is asleep time speeds up rather than skipping forward. This means that ghosts and other entities will still show up and interact with the room even whilst you're sleeping, which I think adds an element of creepiness to the game and makes it feel a little more alive. So you might be sleeping, then wake up later to find something has opened the door or moved an object to somewhere else in the room. You may wake up whilst the ghost is still there.

Politics USA, the sequel to our UK election video game is out now. Since Politics 1 was as popular as it was it seemed to make sense to do a sequel focusing on the US elections too!

Ash from HS2 has provided us with 6 new tracks and revamped 5 returning ones for a total of 11 songs in this game. He has also provided some satirical scenarios to accompany each song. HS2 have also included 11 full versions of their songs that can be listened to via an in-game music player including many unreleased tracks. Now you can check out their music without the farts!

I have upgraded the engine so that the game runs more smoothly than ever.

Check it out now!

The last thing we want to do with this game is incorporate some visual elements from the September 10th debate.

I'll be getting on that right away and once we've done that the game is launching!

This sequel, focusing on the US elections this time, contains:

• New and improved engine
• Playable on both desktop and phones.
• 11 playable tracks - Each with their own leaderboard.
• 2 Retro LCD minigames.
• Music player with exclusive access to unreleased HS2 tracks.

My new game Bastard Aliens is out now is getting a positive response!

Its a typing game where you must shoot down aliens invading your farm to steal your cows. The game starts out quite simple but quickly progresses into a very hectic time.

I made the game as a bit of a break project between development of Politics. USA and my next big project MÆRE II.

Politics. USA is about finished and we intend to release it following the debate in September. The game includes 11 songs and an updated game engine. It is the biggest game I've ever made and it takes about an hour to do everything even if you're good at rhythm games. Theres also a lot of bonus content included this time including a music player so you can listen to the real tracks the music is based off of and a retro-style mini-game. The game will be playable on both desktop and mobile. Look forward to that in September!

Politics 2 is essentially done I'm just waiting on @HS2Band to hurry it up and fart up the tracks and tell me where to put the notes. We're probably looking at a September release regardless. Either way, its good to have the game in a near completed state so its ready to go when the songs are.

Here are some screenshots of the game. Ignore the debug text...

As you can see the graphics are now HD, do you think this looks better than the pixel art in the orignal game?

There is also extra content such as this retro handheld minigame.

The other week I exhibited my games at Owls Interactive, an eSports event hosted at the Sheffield Wednesday Football ground. Whilst eSports was the focus, they also invited some indie game devs along to showcase their work and chat to the guests about game development in general.

This was my set up for the day. I primarily had Gravoor Infinity set up for people to have a go on but I also had Sunday Drive and a version of Pumpkin's Sky Tea which was just the shooter sections available for whenever I got sick of Gravoor and needed a break from talking about it haha. We'd been told to keep the content family friendly so that took some games off the table, but later in the day I decided to put on Politics anyway which got some huge laughs from people.

Those who follow me on social media might have seen that I posted some images of games I'm working on before the event. This was mostly so I had things to talk about for the future on the day, but I figued I would also share those plans here with you guys and talk a little about each project...

First up is Pumpkin's Sky Blast!!

This game will be a sequel to Pumpkin's Sky Tea which is more of a traditional horizontal shooter than the first. Instead of randomised enemy spawning the stages will be designed and there will be new elements such as weapon upgrades and boss fights. I also intend to implement a 2 player mode.

Politics 2 is due out before the US Presidential Elections. @hs2band have more songs we did not implement into the original title, and with the US elections coming up this year too it seemed like a no-brainer to develop a sequel.

MÆRE II is the project I am most excited about this year. It is a sequel to MÆRE except where the original was a jam game made in a week I'm spending some time to really polish this one. For starters, the game will not be scripted this time and the ghosts will appear at random. This means that no two play throughs will be the same. You can also lose in this one, so its less of a "ride" this time.

One of the things that I think makes this game so scary is that the nights run on a clock, rather than skipping forward when you fall asleep. When you sleep in this game, time still moves forward, just the player's perception of time speeds up. So whilst this is going on you may still be visited by ghosts you don't even see.

I think this has real potential to be my best game over all.

The final game I'm working on this year is Crackhouse of Illusion, the sequel to Mazza. This is half done and has been parked for some time now. I do hope to get back to it at some point soon though.

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This is probably not an exhaustive list of the games I'll be making this year. I intend to participate in ScreamJam again this year and will be making something for that in October provided I'm not burnt out from MÆRE 2. No idea what this will be yet though.

If you haven't played them, check out the original versions of the games talked about above:

and let me know which of these projects you are looking forward to and would like to hear me share more about over the coming months. :)