At 9/27/18 07:25 AM, HeadMistressSeven wrote:
As far as creators, I feel like we have just as much talent now as we ever had. We still have amazing artists, programmers, musicians, etc
Look at a Daily Feature from this past week, then look at a Daily Feature from 2012. The amount of talent has definitely gone down. A few great people are left, but there are fewer of them, so coming across great content is a lot harder.
At 9/27/18 11:15 PM, Pico wrote:
Edmund McMillen, Matt Roszak, Animator vs Animation, etc. Others seemingly vanished from the gamedev or animation scene or the internet altogether.
Amazingly enough, Afterbirth+ is still going strong all these years later and @noogai makes a pretty good career out of animating stick figures (including continuations of AvA.) It's really heartwarming to see when old habits can actually keep going.
The sad news is that @get-lost is putting Castle IV on hold (he left a message last December explaining this on his website.)
Anyway, to answer the OP, I feel like somewhere between '08-'12 was Newgrounds in its prime. I first watched The Ultimate Showdown on the site in 2004, but didn't make an account until 2007 when I went to a summer camp that taught Flash animation and basic ActionScript (mostly just play buttons.)
To clarify, there was a huge explosion of content in 2004. Tons of outstanding content overflowed from XGen Studios and Stickpage onto Newgrounds, and while the average quality of Flash back then might not have been as high, the few people that were good at it were AMAZING. I was only 10 at the time and didn't explore the site much, but when I look back at great games and animations on the site, I find that a disproportionate amount of my favorite content came from this year.
I feel like 2008 was the year that the average creator started really stepping their game up. I also have a bit of a personal bias, since this was also when Platform Racing 2 came out, a multiplayer game I spent nearly a decade playing every day (I got insanely good at that game and also created tons of emergent gameplay mechanics using the level editor.)
As far as other areas of the site, the audio portal has always had cliques that have come and gone, but I miss the hip hop scene from 2010-2013, including the battle rap competitions hosted by @BigRed. The forums used to be a lot more active as well, and while there were more trolls, the moderators took more initiative into banning them. It's probably easier to have a serious thread now, but when the site had more activity it was much, much more entertaining (I really miss Photoshop threads.)