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.