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I've thrown together a Lock Day 2006 page which I will be updated. So far I still have some icons to make (pleeeease include icons with your submissions) and I intend to replace the title image. Expect to see a lot of Lock Legion submissions today!
I spent most of yesterday at my alma matter, Drexel University! Drexel has a growing program for game development, so I went to meet with the students, check out their projects and give a public talk. It was really impressive! When I was at Drexel just a few years ago, no one was making games. Now, there are labs full of students who eat, sleep and breath game development. I played a lot of great games, many made with Flash - hopefully we'll see some of them on NG some day! If you're in the Philadelphia area and want to pursue a career in game development, I would definitely look into Drexel's Digital Media program!
Every morning I come to the office, sit down and update the front page showcase. I never actually SAY anything in the process, so today I thought I would.
Good morning everyone!
We get so many great submissions nowadays, too many of them never make front page. Just this morning I got a kick out of Monkey Pee and Bransen Does the Dew. If anyone has any recent favorite submissions that have failed to be noticed, feel free to share them here!
The NG team continues to quietly grow at the office. Last week we were joined by Mike Welsh, who despite a lack of many submissions, is an amazing programmer! You may have seen him around the Flash and Programming forums.
When we launch the new site design, we'll finally have an updated staff page, so you can see just who is hanging around and what we've all been up to. I'm hopingto have staff blogs, possibly mandatory ones to keep everyone in the loop.
I'm spending most of tomorrow at Drexel, giving talks to several classes as well as meeting with students in DU's video game program! Any Drexel students out there reading this?
At 5/22/06 10:41 AM, Zendra wrote:
Tom, just a little question: since you're already telling people about the new ideas, why don't create a little page with detailed list of new features of NG's re-design?
Then people can go crazy and then it's also something to look forward to. Plus it's official for us as well. :)
It's a double-edged sword. I want to post about our ideas because 99% of the ideas people post about have already been in the works, in planning or under discussion for years now. It's annoying when we launch something we talked five years ago, only to have some user say "Hey, I posted that idea 6 months ago, gimme credit!"
The problem is, so many sites have stolen features from Newgrounds that I don't want to give them a head-start. So people will just have to wait and see what sort of stuff we are working on, as we finish it.
I finally finished prepping the prize packs for best of March, best of April and Pico Day! They will be shipping out on Monday!
Ever since we established the NG office, we've been working around the clock on all sorts of upcoming projects. It makes you realize that as your goals and dreams get bigger, so does the time it takes to implement them. Sometimes I miss the days when I could make a new game in a matter of days and a change to the site wasn't a big deal. There's endless excitement over all the projects we're working on, so it's just a matter of time before it all gets done. There's a new console game on the way, a total site redesign, some new web games and more new site features than we will ever have time to implement.
We'll be unveiling the latest demo of our new console game and hopefully the name at Comic-Con this July in San Diego!
The redesign will be a few more months, as we are trying to do the entire site all at once as well as add some new features! Expect to see PM before then, that's all I'll say. :)
Is he responsible for the header change? "Everything, by Everyone?" I say down with this...Bob.
Bob is purely implementing the new layout in CSS. We all talk about how the layout should work, Stamper handles the visualization and Bob handles the CSS implementation. It's part of the new assembly line process we have going on here!
At 5/18/06 04:38 PM, Evark wrote:
Hope this doesn't mean you're going to beautify the mod tools though. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to look at the purty new layout all over the mod tools, but for the purpose of faster page-loads... not doing that would probably be better.
Bob won't be touching the mod tools - just the text links that appear for mods when they are browsing public forum pages.
Bob has been working on the CSS redesign of Newgrounds, and since he needs to see the page layouts with mod tools included, we have set him up with mod priviledges. He won't actually be doing any moderating, he just needs to be able to implement the mod tools into the CSS layout.
At 5/16/06 09:57 AM, WadeFulp wrote:
I'm not saying I want every single one of our 600,000+ daily users to go to the main portal page, but even if a small percent of them do it would be a big help.
call me crazy, but wouldn't mailing everyone make a better impact?
Most of the people who visit the site on any given day aren't people with user accounts, so they wouldn't be on our mailing list. People on our mailing list have hopefully noticed how the site works by now.
The goal is to create a GORY and FUNNY game where you play the role of a knight in modern times, on a killing rampage (most likely in the woods). The best game will be featured on Stagknight.com and the winner will receive some fun movie memorabilia. Please read the official contest page for more info!
In other film news, my friend Pete's cousin (who happens to be an albino) has just released a short film spoof on The Da Vinci Code, called The Albino Code! It's a play on the albino assassin from The Da Vinci Code and brings to light some issues faced by those with albinism!
At 5/10/06 09:26 AM, Time_Traveler wrote:
Kind of a harsh trade-off, don't you think? I mean, it's E3...only happens once a year. Surley that intern could have worked on your projects instead?
Intern Tom has finished school and has pretty much wrapped up the internship. Even then, I have too many non-intern duties. :)
I was supposed to be at E3 right now, but I stayed home to work on all the 101 projects we have going on. On the downside, I didn't get to meet up with Shok in LA (see his post below - he just interviewed Ben Watkins of Juno Reactor fame last night!) but on the upside, I am here to post the winners for best of April!
The top five movies and top five games each win $250, an award certificate and a t-shirt!
The $100 user of the month prize goes to FightingSeraph! Anyone who votes on submissions becomes part of the monthly raffle.
Congrats to this month's winners! I have the BEST OF MARCH prize packs ready to send out. I got them together so late that I decided to wait until BEST OF APRIL was announced. Between two monthly prizes AND Pico Day, we have several authors who won multiple awards, so I'll be consolidating everything into one set of prize packs that I send out all at once.
I like it! The biggest problem is that we can't use a copyrighted song for our official intro, though. :(
We've been toying around with official themes for a while now... The one on the PSP movies is the closest thing to official at the moment. An intro like this would need something more drawn out. This has some great potential!!!
Thanks for the support... I feel bad about not improving the controls of Samurai Asshole, although the other part of me wanted to maintain the historic crappiness of Flash 4 keyboard input.
First off, thank you Evark for acknowledging that I do stuff! :)
I come to work between 7-8am every morning (sometimes even 5am when I can't sleep) and I don't leave until between 8-9pm. Newgrounds is an unhealthy obsession and pretty much consumes every part of my being. I know all that work doesn't always show on the front end of the site, but it keeps the site running and the results of the office won't be seen immediately - we have a lot of projects going on over here.
I'm also making a console game and a new game that I'll be submitting to NG in the near future.
Our ads pay low rates by industry standards due to the nature of our content and NG's long-time reputation for being "naughty", but the sheer volume of our traffic makes up for it and is able to support the growing staff and contests.
At 5/5/06 10:03 PM, idOcrEatING wrote:
Some time ago I sent an Email to Tom Fulp about how it would be cool to have a competition for the people of Newgrounds to design their own boss the Behemoth game, Ye old Sidescroller (as it is currently known, to my knowledge) with the idea of a prize being having your boss in the game. Unfortunately he never replied, or indeed probably never read it due to the masses of Emails he probably has.
Sorry for not getting back to you - the idea of a boss competition is very cool and it's very tempting to give it a shot. We're running into the same problems as most major studios at the moment - we have to decide whether to acknowledge ideas from fans, at the risk of people trying to claim ownership of ideas we already have. For example, we wouldn't want someone to say "You should have a giant dragon in the game." and then try to sue us when we have a giant dragon in the game and they don't get credit for it. So many people think they have an amazing unique idea, when it's something we've already thought of. Other people have amazing unique ideas that we could actually use... So maybe we just need to draft up some legal entry form that clearly states your ideas become our property once you submit them, and credit is up to our own discretion.
For example, we've already explored lots of ideas for enemies who "power up" and smaller enemies who ride on larger enemies. So you could see something in the new game that seems a derivative of your idea, when in fact it was our own original creation without any external suggestions.
I do want to get fans more involved in our game development, considering that was a big goal when this whole thing started!
It has been really tough to pick 10 winners for Pico Day, we received a ton of great submissions. The final decisions were partly based on user votes and partly based on how relevant the submissions were to the Pico story.
Due to the quality of the entries, I added a second grand prize for "Best Game" with an additional value of $2000. So with no further ado...
I wish we could just give prizes to everyone, but this is the list we came up with. Congratulations to the winners, and a BIG THANK YOU to everyone who participated! We'll have to do it again next year. :)
Edmund McMillen, creator of Gish and The Badlands recently sat down for an interview with Animation Magazine. Go read it! He said some stuff in there that totally made my day. :)
After almost three years of episodes without getting a front page nod until the end, Erik the Juiceman finally has a series page. I regret overlooking this series for so long, it makes me wonder how many other great series have been overlooked (I can already say there are a lot). Another classic but overlooked series, Zomborg Apocalypse, now has a series page as well!
Eligible users only have a few more days to vote on the BEST OF APRIL! Winners will be announced next week! I still need to send out prize packs for BEST OF MARCH, and I still need to decide on the winners for Pico Day and announce those as well. It's a HARD DECISION, we received a ton of great submissions!
