Support Goals
THANK YOU everyone who has come aboard as a Supporter this month, in addition to those who continue to support NG month after month, year after year!
Our goal for the early 20s is to transition Newgrounds completely off third-party ads. We’ve been wanting this for years now and it’s do or die time; we’re not gonna spend the next decade designing the site around ads and dwelling on evolving ad-tech.
We started January with 2,600 active supporters and set an aggressive goal of 3,000 by the end of the month. We’ve been on track to achieve that goal but this week momentum slipped a bit and we’re gonna need an uptick in support to make it happen.
3,000 active supporters would be a new record for NG and on a personal note, ads make me depressed and are a big distraction both for visitors and our ongoing site development. If you enjoy Newgrounds, this is the best $3 per month you could spend.
Flash Emulation Update
We quietly launched Ruffle support yesterday! Quietly because we’re still working some things out and Ruffle is still evolving.
Ruffle is an open-source, in-browser Flash emulator developed by @Mike and a bunch of other smart people in the open-source community. If you have an interest in Flash preservation and have some spare cash, I highly recommend becoming a Ruffle sponsor!
If you have Flash content on NG, go to the Preview page in your project and click the “Test with Ruffle” link below your content. If it works with Ruffle, check the “Works with Ruffle emulation” box under your SWF in the Project Details form. If your entry is a click-based game, you can also check “Touchscreen friendly” and it should work on mobile when we get that going. UPDATE: Ruffle content is now running on mobile! Go hunt some lamers on your phone:
We tried running all movies through Ruffle out the gate yesterday but that was too optimistic and we dialed it back. Some movies may still be running with Ruffle, though; if your movie is loading with Ruffle and NOT working, go to your Project Details and uncheck the “Works in Ruffle emulation” box.
Ruffle will soon be getting a big performance boost from a WebGL rendering update, after which I’ll likely share some showcase links. If you want to try something now, my old game UFA is running pretty well.
Audio Updates
Our projects system update introduced ratings to Audio submissions and they are now being applied to audio search. We’ve been updating existing submissions as we find them but be warned: there will still be audio that is improperly rated until someone updates it. The next area to utilize ratings will be the main Audio Portal hub!
Side note: if you need music for your game or animation, be sure to give the Audio Portal a look! Check underneath each song for info about licensing and/or use; a lot of songs in the Audio Portal are free to use.
Community News
Pixel Day is January 23rd! There are $100 prizes each in the categories of art, animation, game and chiptune. If you’ve made something special with pixel art, January 23rd would be a great day to share it!
The Original NG Character Animation Contest deadline is February 26th. There have already been winners in the script, character design, music and voice acting categories; now the goal is to create a trailer or teaser for what an episode might look like!
@Alvin-Earthworm could use our help! His friend has set up a GoFundMe to cover Alvin's therapy & medical bills.
@OrangePylon has released a free Abomi Nation demo on Steam! It’s a monster-collecting roguelike RPG. The music is by @Paranoidhumanoise, who OrangePylon found here on NG after making a listing in the Collabinator.
@DreamEater has released an album! You can listen to the songs here on NG or support him via Spotify and YouTube. For the album art, DreamEater commissioned @Kazukoto here on Newgrounds!
I think that's about all for now! Any big news I missed?