What with tomorrow being the election and all, now seems like a good time to check out Poltiics USA if you haven't already. It was voted 4th best game of the month in September and works on both desktop and mobile devices.

In other news, I've been trying my hand at a bit of GameBoy dev. I haven't got a lot to show for it at this stage, but I'll hopefully be able to deliver a completed project on the format at some point in the near future. Not promising it'll be anything particularly ground-breaking though haha.

Stay Indoors has placed 18th out of 560 entries in ScreamJam 2024.

Given the number of entries this was a great result!

If you've not played it yet, play the latest version here on Newgrounds. Perfect gaming for Halloween!

If you're looking for further Halloween games to play, check out my MÆRE series if you haven't already.

This month I released two horror games. MÆRE II and Stay Indoors. Both received a really positive response and I’m extremely happy about that! Horror is one of my favourite genres and I thought I’d take some time to share some of the horror media that influenced and inspired these games.

Ghost Watch

Ghost Watch was a British TV movie that was made to look like a real live broadcast. This was before Blair Witch had come out and made the concept of found footage was widely understood. The plot is that recognisable British TV presenters at the time are filming a live investigation on Halloween night into a reportedly haunted house in a British suburb, only for the ghost to wind up being both real and extremely dangerous.

Ghost Watch’s strength for me is that it’s a haunted house movie set in a very typical British home rather than a mansion or some other location.

When the movie first aired in 1992 it triggered a bit of a War of the Worlds moment and the BBC were hit with thousands of complaints because viewers believed the events were real. Apparently my wife's step mother even called the cops when it was on trying to get them to go over to the house in the movie she was so convinced that people were in real life danger.

One of my favourite things about the movie is how they explain the increasingly horrific events. A character figures out that all of the people watching at home are feeding the ghost energy through their fear. Originally I wanted to do something like this with Stay Indoors. I wanted to give the impression that this haunted game finding its way onto the internet has resulted in the entity behind it becoming more powerful as players playing the game was serving as a global séance. This would be conveyed by having the game become more and more distorted and disturbing in the week’s run up to Halloween before ultimately on Halloween night the game was essentially set in Hell.

However because it was for a game jam I didn’t really have the time to implement this, or figure out how to make the audience understand that they should keep coming back for the full experience without giving the game away. Perhaps next year after I've bottomed this out a little further I’ll revisit the concept for Spooktacular 2025!

Suspiria

This is one of my favourite movies. Its about an American ballet student who gets accepted into a prestigious dance academy in Germany and finds that the academy is a front for a coven of witches. The 1977 version is best but the 2018 version is a good movie too and equally worth checking out.

Paranormal Activity

When it first released, and before they watered it down with about 10 shitty sequels the original Paranormal Activity was a terrifying experience. It wasn’t afraid to make the audience wait for things to happen and to me this is scarier than constant pay offs as horror is in the anticipation. Paranormal Activity gave me the confidence to allow the MÆRE games to be as slow as they need to be.

I think the studios completely destroyed this movie with all the sequels delving into the lore and the new ending they added in (The alternative ending on the DVD was the original ending I believe, since its the one I saw at a festival before the film got picked up for wide release). I learned from this that sometimes its best to leave some questions unanswered or you risk taking away what makes them interesting in the first place.

The Nightmare (2015 Documentary)

This is a documentary about sleep paralysis. When I was younger I had an experience with this myself that really shook me. This movie helped me to understand what exactly I’d gone through when this had happened. The movie reenacts people's accounts of sleep paralysis and the entities that they meet in these episodes. The documentary examines how many people's experiences are similar. This was another major influence on MÆRE.

I-Mockery – www.i-mockery.com

Ok this isn't a movie, but when I was first getting into horror I would basically get all my recommendations from the articles on here. They’d do deep dives into more obscure movies and had articles highlighting their favourite scenes. The site really showed me the fun side of horror and I think I’ve watched basically every movie they ever featured at this point. Thanks for the education @Mockery !

To a lesser extent, Yahtzee from Fully Ramblomatic used to do a lot of articles on slashers before he became the Zero Punctuation/Second Wind guy full time. This was also a big education for me for horror movies.

The Nightmare (Painting)

This is a 1781 oil painting by Henry Fuseli. Looking at this painting was I think what gave me the final idea for MÆRE and where the title comes from. The painting shows a demon sitting on a woman's chest whilst she sleeps. This demon is called a Mære, a malicious entity in Germanic folklore which walks on people's chests as they sleep bringing on nightmares.

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If you read this far then thanks for reading! I hope you’ll check out some of the movies I listed above and if you haven’t played them yet check out the games I’ve made. These were only some of the major influences on my work but there will be a lot of other things that I learned from.

I’ll be making some more horror games next year so be sure to follow if you’d like to stay informed of what I’m working on. I’d like to tackle the slasher genre at some point soon, as I’m a big fan of that. It will be a big undertaking but I have an idea for a sandbox slasher game. Sort of like Hitman meets Friday the 13th. It’ll be the biggest game I’ve made so far.

Which of my two games released this month did you prefer? MÆRE or Stay Indoors?

Also what kind of games, of any genre, would you like to see more of on Newgrounds? I’ve been thinking a lot about this as we get closer to the end of the year.

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.