Newgrounds.com — Everything, By Everyone.

Conga-Rats to the Winners. ;P

Soooo... let's say you've agreed to contribute to a Flash, and someone added a 'Credit' to you... Where on 'Your' account can you see Flash that you're accredited to? ;? I feel like I'm missing something obvious here.

At 10/24/13 03:08 PM, OptimisticOctopus wrote:

At 10/24/13 02:30 AM, SpyderZ wrote: Woot! I made it back to the site in time for a Writing Competition! =^.^=

Your entry was pretty great, man. I always thought that song was massively fucked up and creepy.

Heh, yeah... when I was younger of course it was just a cute little song, but as I began actually paying attention to the world around me a little more... I realized how jacked up that 'Song' really is...O.o!

Woot! I made it back to the site in time for a Writing Competition! =^.^=

Hush-a-by baby…

Running through the woods he could still hear its voice… or whatever it was… whispering through the trees. Daylight had left long ago and this thing… it seemed content to stay just out of sight, whispering at him all the while.

And worse, the things it whispered, while sounding innocent enough, had some kind of… power… to them. With these newest words, the screaming he’d been doing, in the desperate hope that someone… anyone… would hear him, had stopped in his throat, and he could no more scream than he could fly. Even trying made it harder to breathe, which running as he was, was not an option.

On the tree top…

The rustling of the leaves above him caused his stomach to drop. It was no longer behind him. Stopping where he was he looked about desperately trying to find it. If he was prepared when it tried to drop on him he could… what? Die prepared? He had no weapons, not that he would know what to do with one. He had nothing to fight it off with. He had been playing in the forest behind his home against his mother’s rules… rules he wished now that he had followed.

There were things in the forest the adults had all said. Men would go out at night and never return. Some said the injuns had taken them… but the stories of nightmare creatures filtered down anyway. He thought they were just stories… stories to frighten children into listening to their parents, but this didn’t feel like the kind of story he wanted a part of…

When the wind blows…

No longer was it just a rustling above him. The trees seemed to sway with those last words, as if a forest itself had begun to dance in tune with this thing’s desire. He had no doubt what the thing wanted, him. He’d wandered into the woods at night, and now he was through. He’d never again see his mother’s stern but loving smile, his little sister’s annoying, but somehow endearing gurgling, or his father’s disappointed frown.

They’d only moved to the new lands the year before. He’d been excited by the opportunity to see a new world. Something completely different than the boring life he’d lived up until that point. He was sick of his schooling, and the thought of living in a new world full of adventure had excited him to beyond bearing. When they’d landed, he wanted to do it all, explore, fight injuns, find gold, but life on this side of the water turned out to be far less exciting than he’d hoped.

The cradle will rock…

The ground felt as if it moved beneath his feet, throwing his balance and sending him tumbling through the underbrush. The sharp thorns of whatever it was he had been standing next to tore into him, and his face was smashed unceremoniously into a nearby tree. Grabbing the wood as one would hold log floating down the stream in a flood, he felt as if it were somehow sturdier than the ground he was failing to stand on.

No longer able to keep his balance on the forest floor he tried his luck pulling himself up into the lower branches of the tree… which somehow seemed unaffected by the rocking and roiling of the earth below. The swaying of the trees seemed to have moved to the ground below somehow, so he made his way further up into the branches above, his thoughts of making it out alive now almost gone entirely, his thirst for adventure no longer seeming so inspired.

When the bough breaks…

Between one branch and the next, the entire tree let out a sound as if something inside it, something important to keeping the whole thing together, had just been torn out of it by force. With a shudder the tree began falling apart, almost in slow motion, that breaking sound echoed in all the trees surrounding him as the entire forest now sounded as if it were tearing itself apart.

Desperately trying to find a grip on something that wouldn’t just drop him to the ground below, he managed to hold tight to a particularly large branch that was angled across a nearby tree, and as such it was falling far slower than the rest. As the branch itself snapped he dropped the remaining few feet to the forest floor and curled into a ball covering his head as if his arms would do anything to protect him from the trees collapsing all around.

The cradle will fall…

Silence. The sound of the breaking falling trees, the low rumbling that had accompanied the roiling of the earth, even the wind and other more natural sounds of the forest had quieted. Daring to uncover his head, he looked around at the carnage around him, and was stunned at what he saw. The trees standing tall as if they’d never moved. The ground as flat and undisturbed as if no one had been this way in years, and certainly not as if it had just be rolling like a stream beneath his feet. It all looked perfectly normal…

Standing, his legs unsteady as they expected the earth at any moment to toss and turn once more, he looked around in disbelief. Looking down at himself, the tearing of his clothing had not vanished, it was as if ‘he’ were the only thing in the forest that had been affected by… whatever it was that had just happened. Shaking in fear, he began to wonder if it was possible that he had…

And down will fall baby…

A scream, his mother’s scream, pierced the night, and all the blood felt as if it had drained from him with that sound. His little sister. He didn’t know how he knew, but in that moment he knew that something had happened to his little sister. All this time it hadn’t been him in danger, it had been her. All of this was a distraction, or something worse. His sister…

Running back toward the house, towards the sounds of his mother’s wailing, now punctuated by a sound from his father that was nothing like he'd ever heard from a man he'd seen as invincible. Screaming out at the night, the things power over his voice now lifted, “Take me!" he tried to bargain, helplessness flooding him, "Don’t hurt my sister! She doesn’t deserve this! I disobeyed my mom, not her! She’s just a baby!” Screaming into the night, his voice was swallowed by the darkness, and the only answer he received was its final words…

Cradle and all.

Bah! Of course I'd come across so awesome a prompt too late to contribute! ;? Maybe next time... I'll have to remember to peek in here more often. O.o!

At 1 day ago, TomFulp wrote: 1) Do you find yourself ignoring the big content showcase box here on the front page? I've been told it doesn't make enough of a "call to action" and while looking pretty, people aren't being as enticed to click it as they should be.

I do click through it, though I think that just because I "Trained" to expect content there. :P

2) Have you explored the content genre browsing? I feel like this is a really powerful system that a lot of people are overlooking; some have even complained that we removed genres. Go to the games page and scan the categories in the left column. Click around and start exploring. The categories get really in-depth and you can sort by all sorts of criteria. Right now we default to sort by date, which was an attempt to put the spotlight on new submissions but may have been a mistake. Instead we should probably default to sorting by score but maybe set the range to "Year" instead of "All" so there's more movement in the space.

Yep. Love it. ;P

This also makes me wonder if the games front page should be different. Right now we showcase the latest games, popular games from this week, highest scoring games of the month, highest scoring of the year and highest scoring of all time. Popular games tend to just mirror the front page. Best games of all time feels pretty static (instead maybe it could have a random selection from the top 200). But instead of all of that, I'm wondering if we should return to something like the old site, where we have a per-genre showcase. For example, the first box under "Brand Spankin' New Games" could be "Best New Action Games" and list the latest four action games with scores greater than 3.3 (number is based on some personal observations but not set in stone). The showcase would continue with "Best New Adventure Games", etc. I'm thinking it would better highlight the genre categories and might give people more direct access to stuff they like.

I like this, as long as the "Best of X Period" page still exists, possibly as an "Other Pages" or sommat. It's a nice visual reference (And introduction to games you may otherwise have never tried). I know you can filter these categories, but really, just to see the "Best of X Period" games, I wouldn't likely sit there changing the filter over and over comparing titles.

3) Have you been making use of the feed button (the star next to logout) in the header? It lists new submissions by artists you have favorited, something that was only available via email in the past. We intend to merge all favorites into one list of people you follow, so that you can easily add them from their user page and not have to add them in the context of a piece of content. Our current system (where you favorite artists based on content categories) is really old and has some charm but it feels like overkill nowadays.

Nope. But then again, I am not prone to following people. I enjoy coming and sampling an ever changing sea of different content.

4) Have you found yourself doing anything more or less as a result of the new layout?

I'm using the Forums more, but mainly to give feedback on the new and changing site. I've been coming to Newgrounds for a "Couple" years (Created an Account when medals were introduced? I think?) and I love the direction this site has been going. ;P

At 20 hours ago, TomFulp wrote:

At 1 hour ago, Vorlek wrote: The flash 'splash pages' for each game are a step way way way back imo. Its like going back to the old design when i signed up (2005) which was quite cool 7 years ago... but Flash is really not needed for a button just loads the flash...

You can toggle these under your display options on your account page. We're removing the sounds though.

Is there a "Sound On" toggle for those of us that don't mind the occasional silly noise? ;P

So I was a fan of the 140x140 mock-up, but then again I enjoy as much visible data as "Fits", which I understand might not be part of the design goal at the moment. My only suggestion is, why not have the Genre/Rating/"Whatever you banish to the Mouse over" replace the Title/Author/"Whatever's left on Front", leaving more room for the Description. At the point that you've chosen to "Mouse Over" an Icon, you have already digested that information, and now you're looking for more. There's no reason to leave that static.

Oh, and one other idea. A "Backlog" option (Similar in Function to Favorites, but without the "Assumed" endorsement that comes from Favorites.). There are enough quality items on Newgrounds that I often don't have time to fairly check something out, but I would love to come back to it when I've got the time. What ends up happening is I have a "Tab Folder" full of "To Play / Watch" (Formed from a quick glance at the Home Page, "Pending", and sometimes items talked about on other forums, Etc.) it'd be nice to have this functionality on the site, so that any computer I log into has my Backlog.

A Half formed idea that stemmed as I was typing that out... a fleshed out "List System" integrated with "Favorites" that people could use to suggest other games/movies. It looks like Tags (Which I assume the author is currently responsible for?) could be tied into that system. Haven't considered the mechanics of this enough... but I like the initial sound. ;P

Okay, so "Overall" there is much to love. ;P I do agree that a single method of Reviews / Ratings would be an improvement.

Maybe have a Drop Down "Quick Review" box where you "Rate the Submission" with an option to leave an "Extended Review" which navigates to the current Review area where you can "Fine Tune" your score and leave a longer review. I'll admit that I don't know enough about the Back End Stats for each submission (How the "Ratings" and "Score" are measured for a submission) to understand how this would positively or negatively affect the scoring process. But tying these together sounds "Sound" and leaving the current "Setup" (Or some semblance of it) allows people to contribute evenly to the score without "Needing" to sit down and compose a review, while allowing (And ideally through this "Encouraging" ) people to provide at least "Some" Feedback.

One thing I miss already: The "Other Submissions by this Author" Drop Downs. There's room beneath the "Stats Info and More" (Or in, as that fits "More") Box for that, and it was a feature I used rather extensively. ;P

Heh, people are coming to a site known for it's open content policies, and then crying about "Insulting Ads" mocking them for using bandwidth and going out of their way to avoid contributing. ;? Someone please explain this logic to me. ;P

Heh, with all the Sprite "Soft Edging" going on, maybe I could have entered... ;P Seriously though, I truly hope that the one's that were actually drawn win. I mean this is an "Art Contest", and Blurring a Sprite is not Art... O.o </rant>