I really started creating digital content once I got my first Mac, a now ancient PowerBook G4 (clocked slower than my current phone, imagine that). I first got into Flash games by creating stopmotion animation, and I got into that because I enjoyed video editing, thanks to in no small part by Apple’s focus on media creation with iLife and FireWire (an utter God-sent during the time of DV cameras).

So here’s to (as The Onion playfully puts it) the last American who knew what the heck he was doing.

Just my bit of thanks for those who didn’t come home, past and present.

Update: WOW.

click here to view the Flikr set

Lots of shots with some awesome guys from Newgrounds.com, including a few that I haven’t met in person before that I go way back with to my very beginning of my Flash tinkering days, way cool indeed.

and yes I’m wearing a TMNT shirt. I’m that awesome.

I’ll pass on any hatred you guys have for how hard his level is in World 2

Update:

http://twitter.com/afroninjadotcom

It’s true!

First off, there was a bit of progress made on World 3 that I announced earlier. I haven’t really had a chance to work on World 3 much since then, but development on World 3 will begin officially after Fairly and I get back from ComicCon at the end of this month. Hopefully there will be a whole bunch more updates once that starts, as I really want to keep everyone updated on World 3′s progress along the way, get feedback on the progression, and hopefully try to involve everyone out there in the development in some sort of way. Should be fun.

Click below to check out the rest of the post. Got a pic of the Newgrounds Tank Trophy in there!

So lately, in the bit of free time that I have had, I’ve beaten Shadow of the Colossus for the first time (didn’t have a ps2 ‘last gen’), and it’s a pretty amazing game. I really dig the emotion spun throughout the game, while in no way does the game ever have a forced emotional moment (*cough* Gears of War 2 *cough*). I think most games can learn a lot from SotC, and that sense of wonder and utter epic-ness is something I’d love to be able to work into World 3. Not saying I could ever create anything as grand and moving as SotC, but still…

Been making my way through Majora’s Mask also for the first time. Started it before SotC and I think I’m nearing the end. It’s interesting to compare both games, since the two games so phenomenal with such broad similarities, but take almost two completely opposite perspectives from one other. Interesting gameplay studies, to say the least.

Oh, right, the Newgrounds Tank trophy finally came in!

Beautiful, isn’t it? Check this thread for a quick bit of history regarding me and Newgrounds.

Let’s see… Anything else for now? Hmm, Swords and Soldiers on WiiWare is quite awesome, and the Viking’s story in that game is a lot like what I hope I can have in World 3: have a goofy, overarching story with far more cartoony characters this time around that runs through the entire game, not just the beginning.

And to end this post, songs current stuck in my head:

Lake of Silver Bells by Carbon Leaf
Paint the Silence by South
Kingdom of Rust by Doves

Hm, definitely going to have to find some new music to listen to while working on World 3…

Just a warning, this post might be a bit out of my specialty, and I hate listening to celebrities force their misguided and uninformed political sway as much as the next guy, but since getting into the games business, I’ve begun to keep an eye more and more on things like psychological studies on video game violence, and my ears perk up when politicians run their mouths off about censorship or any other attempts at controlling the markets out there.

So before I really get to it, if this is your first time on the site, you might want to check out the rest of the site, especially the last few posts in my 7 posts in 7 (business) days stunt. Also, I wouldn’t recommend this post for the younger viewers of the site, nothing obscene, but the content is fairly mature.

Game Developer’s Radio Podcast interview / Character reveal – 1/7

Jenna / ‘Fairly Obvious’ reviews de Blob – 2/7

If there’s going to be pirates… – 3/7

Music that I listen to when I’m working, music vs gameplay musings – 4/7

Fairly’s ‘Guilty Pleasure’ game – 5/7

So, today is April 15th, the dreaded Tax Day here in the USA, and with new mass amounts of government spending come new groups of angry Americans, watching the government pour money for reasons that they either consider to be bad policy, or that they’re straight up morally opposed to.

Now, like I said before, up until recently, the most I kept up with politics was whenever someone said something stupid about violent video games being out there. We’re getting a lot of it nowadays with the Wii, ‘it’s a family friendly system, so why should MadWorld be allowed on the system?’ Under that logic, parents should be screaming in horror whenever a new Disney Princess movie comes out on DVD.

The point is, when watching the dynamic between the video game industry and various special interests groups, the industry wants to make the sorts of games that they would want to play (they should be, at least), and the outside world refuses to believe that any person of the appropriate age would possibly want to play GTA or Halo or MadWorld etc. Obviously the only people out there who are trying to buy these video games are children lacking any sort of personal responsibility, so why are these games even being produced?

Nowadays, sadly, the ‘next big thing’ seems to be moving away from any sort of personal responsibility. Let the federal government take care of censorship, since parents have no sort of personal responsibility (not like games are clearly rated for the parents to see or anything, right?). Let the government take over the banks, the auto industry (though admittedly that’s a bit of a different situation, the video game industry isn’t being regulated to death, not yet, anyway).

So for awhile there, I watched various politicians tell gamers and parents that they had no sense of personal responsibility, and that alone severely angers me as a developer. But now we’re seeing the current administration’s goal of practically abolishing personal responsibility of any kind. The biggest example of this is Freedom of Choice Act, which, of all things, attempts to take out any sort of parental influence from a girl’s decision to abort or not. A breaking down of the family unit and undermining personal responsibility in one swoop. Nice. Not to mention the more recent push for the US to adopt the U.N. ‘Children’s Rights’ treaty, just one more excuse for the government to stick it’s nose where it doesn’t belong (except for, of course, in extreme circumstances).

But I digress, there’s very little I hate more in this world than special interest groups using tragedy to promote their agenda. Jack Thompson being the worst video game related offender, only it’s quite obvious that the only interest he looks out for is his own, constantly trying to shove himself in the limelight, and profiting heavily by masquerading as the voice of the families of the victims of tragedy. Not to mention that his entire case is based on the correlation that crazy people are drawn to violent games, not that violent video games create crazy people. Plus, some of his asserted correlations were later proven to not even be accurate.

Going off the video games path again, Jenna showed me this article lately, about a child hanging himself because he had been bullied to such a degree. Absolutely a terrible thing, but really gets to me is that the fact that the ‘anti-gay’ wording is what gets the headline. I have to point out here, I have nothing against people being gay, and there’s no way to excuse bullying of any sort, anti-gay, anti-heterosexual, whatever. The kid was 11, he was too young for any sort of sexual preference! That they even brought up another child who did openly identify himself as homosexual is appalling. This is not a story about gays being bullied in school! Kids get bullied, period. If the kid did not associate himself as gay, why is this tragedy being used to draw out sympathy for gays? Not saying that there’s anything wrong with declaring that gays shouldn’t be picked or anything, but this is the wrong article to do that in. Since when did a bully need a reason pick a kid? Are ‘your mother’s so fat’ jokes made only by bullies who have precise knowledge about what their victims’ moms’ weight is?

But why bother, right? News is news. I guess we should all go pick on video games without ever having played them. Or censoring them, because only psychopaths would ever want to shoot enemies, right? No wonder we got news articles online crying about some pirates getting shot.