Let me show a screenshot of my /games page, sorted by score

What's wrong with this picture?

I'm not mad. But I do have an issue with this site, an issue I've had for a long time that is one of the reasons I stopped coming on years ago, and that is the lack of consistency with regard to how the community judges "quality".

A decade ago, I published Clock Button Masher, Missile Time Waster, Asteroid Hell, and HTML5 Snake. Something that all of these flash games have in common is that I made them in a couple hours and didn't know what I was doing (this was the late flash era of braden lore), whereas Free Rings has over a decade of experience behind it, I spent a week developing and polishing things (and I'm still developing it--I'm in talks with a friend to see about putting up a leaderboard server for the game), it is an improvement over the original, which I enjoyed playing enough to put my money where my mouth is and recreate it.

How is it that these games, which are objectively worse, janky, unpolished (and ugly, let's be honest)... how is it that these have a higher score than Free Rings? Based on the standards I thought NG held, how does Free Rings not have a low 4 or high 3 on the merit of its gameplay alone? Sure, it has no graphical assets (the rings and animations are done with math), no audio, no engine (I made the entire thing from scratch), but all of that is sugar. What really matters is gameplay, and on that metric, I know I hit the nail on the head, because I've playtested the game for over a hundred hours and not once did I get bored. Granted, the last time I published a game that could only be judged on the merit of its gameplay, it got blammed, hehe. (Yes, I'm talking about Impossimaze)

I have a theory: the game does not have medals. The game does not bribe players with fake internet points to make up for terrible gameplay. The game has no assets, no engine and no medals. What it does have is a tight gameplay-focused design that addresses all of the things I hated about the original game and (IMO) improves them. Yet not only do I get zero feedback other than a 2-star review saying "meh", but apparently NG likes a game that I put an hour of effort into more than a game I spent a week no-life'ing, developing, polishing and playtesting until I was happy with it. So what's the point? Why would I share another game when I could just shit out a low quality game in an hour and slap on some medals and get a 4 star rating from people who care more about eye candy and achievements than having fun?

What all this tells me is that there is no consistent critical voice on NewGrounds, and that my work would be better appreciated elsewhere.

I'll see y'all on itch. So long and thanks for all the fish.

In order:

Snatch the Wench

Fields of Rape*

Nina Aquila: Legal Eagle

High Stakes

Starting Point

Casting Call

C_R_A_M**

The Furry Disease

Nymble

Happy Happy Land

* get your mind out of the gutter

** there are two of these, which is kinda confusing.

Let me start by saying that this is legit, and not cheating.

I found two ways to farm for *Rai* in Phoenotopia. The first one is pretty slow, the second one is the quick one.

Method 1. You must have access to ~Atai City~.

1. Go to the ~Duri Forest~

2. Fill your inventory with *Duri Fruits* by knocking down the spiny fruits and whacking them. There's a small chance that it will drop a *Duri Fruit*. The rest of the time, it'll give you a seed that heals for 3.

3. Take the *Duri Fruits* to ~Atai City~, and give them to the *Duri Fruit Merchant*. Can't miss her, just go left. She'll buy them for 15 Rai a pop. You'll notice this is 5 Rai less than what she's selling them for, for obvious reasons.

This method takes a while, but when you need money, you need money.

Method 2. You must have access to ~Daea~ and the ~Wall~ (cross the ~Misty Gorge~ to get there), this will take a while to get, so get comfy.

1. Make sure you have a *floatation device thingy* (you can buy one at ~Misty Gorge S~ from the *Fisherman*)

2. Go to ~Duri Forest~, and bomb the entrance to the cave. Obviously, you have bombs by now. If you don't then you either glitched the game really bad, or cheated. Why are you bothering to get money legitimately?

3. Go through the cave, and at the end, you'll find a special orange fruit (*S.O.F*). I forget what it's called, but it's important, so grab one.

4. Make your way to ~Atai City~, and go into the building where the woman who sold you the *Truth Potion* resides

5. Talk to her a few times until she asks you to get the *S.O.F* you just got from ~Duri Forest~. You may have to exit and re-enter the building a few times to trigger this.

6. Give her the *S.O.F*, and then exit, and re-enter the building. A new potion will be available. Like, *Fragrance Potion* or something.

7. Buy said potion. If you don't have enough money, use method 1 to farm for some. You should be able to buy it with just 2 *Duri Fruits*, cause I think the potion costs 20 Rai.

8. Head over to ~Daea~, and buy a *Sandwich* from the upper level of the Shop. Easily found thanks to the sign that's right in front of the door that says: Shop.

9. Go to the ~Wall~, and find the save statue. Give the *Sandwich* to the guard to the right, then enter the room on the left, and give the *S.O.P* to the first guy you come across. The *Sandwich* is because the guy is hungry, and he'll reimburse you exactly what you paid for the sandwich. The *S.O.P* is a bug repellant, and the guy is having bed bug problems. I think he gives you a heart gem or a moon stone for it.

10. Exit the room, and go up the ladder to the left. Now talk to the guy to the right. He will have heard of the help you've been giving (see step 9), and ask you to send a *Letter*. A new location will be revealed on the map.

11. Go to the new location (~Farmer's Block~), and enter the first house, talk to the old man, and he'll ask you to exterminate something in the basement. Go down there and kill the frog, and return to the old man. He will give you...

* A Lucky Belt *

This item is also part of the "Most Dangerous Arsenal" Medal. So there's that.

12. Giving the letter to the mom in the next house is optional. You can get a few bucks out of it, though.

13. Go back to ~Atai City~, and find the Shop. It's easy to find, because the building is marked "Shop". Just like in Daea!

14. Make your way to the top level, and talk to the merchant, she will tell you about a "gold exchange"

15. Buy a *Gold Bar*.

16. Sell the *Gold Bar* back to the same merchant you just bought it from, and she'll buy it for, like, twice the price. The *Lucky Belt* is working its magic.

17. Spam and repeat until you're satisfied. I got 3000 Rai out of this, and could have easily gotten more if I was more patient.

No more money problems! You can also get the 999R blood ruby in the ~Hidden Village~ for the 'Most Dangerous Arsenal' Medal as well. To get to ~Hidden Village~, you have to collect 30 moon stones, and give them all to Fran at her laboratory. If you didn't save that Green-haired girl at the Atai Bridge, go save her! Talking to her after saving her reveals the location of her map, and after giving her 30 moonstones, and leaving, then coming back to ~Fran's Lab~, a teleporter inside her lab will be active, and it will take you to the top of the cliff in ~Forgotten Forest~. This area is rather difficult, and you must traverse it, as well as find three keys to get to the Village. Inside the village is a shop that contains said 999R item, as well as a 300 something Rai *Fairy Bottle* thingy that will act like a bottled fairy from Zelda: OoT. You can only carry one at a time, so make sure to get one before going into the pit / other extremely dangerous areas.

While I'm on tips, there's a secret move you can do that's basically a nerfed version of a glitch from earlier versions. What you do is charge up a hit, and then mash the attack button after releasing it. You'll get three Ki-charged hits in, doing a lot of damage. This helps tremendously with bosses, especially if you:

Go into the Well under ~Atai City~,  activate the two switches, use the spear to climb up the ledge in the next room, and go forward until you see a bunch of sentinel towers. Then go into the area where there's a bunch of rocks, blow them up, and go inside for an area similar to the final area of the game. Fight through the waves of golems to get a Ki bracelet thing at the end. It will makes your Ki charge much faster than before.

You can also make your spear explosive by getting a Duri Fruit, and a Chocolate Shake, and giving them to the memory-loss girl in ~Crossroads Inn~, followed by giving her your green bracelet (so you have to talk to Thomas to get that pesky golem head out of your inventory). She'll remember you, and return to ~Panselo Village~, but before she leaves, she'll give you an explosive spear scroll. You'll be able to charge up the spear, and it will do much more damage when charged. You can also use it like a bomb, by hitting the tool key again after throwing a charged spear--the spear will explode. Combine this with the previous tip(s), and you have a power house on your hands.

I have succeeded in writing the greatest novel of all time!

Read it here!

The best thing about this story is that it always changes. You will never grow bored with this book, unlike other books that always have the same story. The story is very easy-to-follow, with a few gripping mysteries and incredible puzzles appearing throughout. The English is fluent and perfect, with zero grammatical errors, perfect punctuation, and impeccable capitalization! The story also never ends!

What more could you ask for in a novel?

So I made a Github account, and I have to say, git is incredible!

Github is great, too, but it has its problems. Like its code editor and its commit editor. No thanks, I'd much rather do that in vim.

So this post will be two parts. The first is a useful tip, and the second is a plug.

Part 1: How to set up git and ssh access for a streamlined git workflow

Assuming you're using linux with a bash shell:

1. Enter the following commands:

$ git config --global user.name "your github username"

$ git config --global user.email "your email"

$ ssh-keygen

and hit enter three times

2. log into github, and go to settings>ssh keys

3. Title the key with something that adequately describes the machine you're on (e.g. The Dell, laptop, gaming-rig)

4. Copy the contents ot ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub into the next field

5. Save it, and enter your password to make it official

6. Back to the terminal:

$ ssh git@github.com

You should see a message confirming that you've been added

7. Now clone a repo via ssh:

$ git clone git@github.com:user/repo.git

8. And pushing is as easy as

$ git push

or, if you want to push to a specific branch:

$ git push origin branch

And just like that, no longer is there a need for a username and password

Part 2: Plug

I've open-sourced my Link Saver app, and now all versions are available. All the way back to the very first version.

You could contribute code, or you could download one and put it on your site, making it more ubiquitous.

See it here

Shit, I haven't posted music in over a year.

So, I found a way to record with decent quality using a shitty headset mic.

Thanks to the sound absorbing quality of cushions, the program Audacity, and a shitty headset mic that is for some reason missing the foamy part, I just made a decent quality recording of some piano improv. It's not great, but it's a start!

What I did, if you wanna know:

1) Get headset mic

2) Get good quality headphone (I have a pair of 64 ohm Sennheiser headphones)

3) Plug good headphones into piano keyboard

4) Place laptop, headphones, and headset on a surface that is cushiony, like a bed, couch, carpet, or ottoman.

5) Place the mic of the headset on top of the headphone speaker of the headphones plugged into the keyboard

6) Place a cushion above the headset/headphone rig so that it will absorb reverb and other such nonsense

7) Load up audacity

8) Press record

9) Wait 5 seconds

10) Start playing

11) Select the first 5 seconds of silence

12) Effects>Noise Removal

13) Get Noise Profile

14) select the whole thing

15) Effects>Noise Removal again

16) Preview it and raise the first bar until the noise is inaudible

17) apply

18) Remove the silence at the beginning

And bam! Sorta good quality recording! Just imagine what could be done with a mic that doesn't sound like ass!

Oh, and here's a link to the improv: http://www.newgrounds.com/projects/audio/718818/preview

The song is the theme from Barbouillageville. I half-assed it, sorry :/ I didn't know if the recording would come out good or not, and I'd been experimenting for a good two hours with different crazy setups prior to this recording, to try to get a recording that didn't sound, well, like it's being recorded in a closet made of bricks, lol.

I made a new project thingy! Check it out!

Well, I'm not really gonna publish this, as it's not really a game. It's an experiment with newgrounds' HTML5 game system.

Besides, the HTML5 demos that I included can be found on my jsfiddle.

And on the subject of newgrounds' HTML5 upload system...

To my surprise, it worked exactly as I wanted it to. I thought I was going to have to use some silly API or something.

Au contraire, you just organize the file(s) the same way you would on a live website, violently cram them into a .zip with no room to breathe, and upload it.

So it's pretty much "anything goes", which is great news, because I would NOT want to use some horrid IDE like the games factory, MMF2, or Yoyo Games to make something in HTML5 :/ No thanks, I'll write it myself.

Ever find yourself saving a shit ton of links into notepad or bookmarks?

I made this app to solve that problem and hold all your bookmarks in an easy-to-access interface.

I find it much more convenient than any text editor or bookmark system of any browser I've ever used.

The app is hosted here, and it is one of those apps that you have to signup to use.

If you are like me, and are resistant to signing up to a site unless you can try it out first, you can directly access the client part of the app here.

If you remember this post, that was the alpha version of this app.

You get 5MB worth of space to store your links. That's way more than you'll ever need.

No seriously, it took me spamming 400 links (to google) to even consume 1%.

A list of versions [alpha 0.1.0 - 1.1.0] can be found here

A list of 1.x versions [1.0.0 - 1.2.0] can be found here

Browser Compatability

Because I designed this app in Chrome, it works best in Chrome and other Webkit-based browsers. Here's a nice, long list of webkit browsers for your convenience.

Chrome/Webkit: Flawless

Firefox/Gecko: Some weird goofs in drag n' drop and visual alignment, but overall, it shouldn't be problematic

Opera/Presto: Flawless

Internet Explorer/Trident: There's a whole section for that below

Netscape: Lol

Elinks/Lynx/w3m/other text mode browsers: The lack of javascript support means no

Internet Explorer

I think the latest version of Internet Explorer 9 implements "standards mode" which is invoked by using the "<!DOCTYPE html>" tag.

I wouldn't recommend using Internet Explorer because I have no easy way of testing it to make sure it works (I have linux, lolol), so I can't guarantee functionality, but if you must use it:

IE 1 - 8: Don't bother. IE 8 and below are too below the HTML5 spec to even come close to working. As far as I've seen, there is no support for JSON and localStorage, which are the basic parts that make up the very heart of the app, don't know who in the right mind would even use these versions anyway.

IE 9: This is a weird one. I had access to IE 9 a few days ago and decided to test my app, and it worked. I tested IE 9 today on my old Windows 7 partition, and it didn't work at all. That's why I think there might be two versions of IE 9, an old one and a new one. Make sure you have the latest IE 9 if you're going to use that.

IE 10: I have not tested it, but according to multiple sources, IE10 has much better support for HTML5 AND basic JS and CSS standards, meaning it might work flawlessly. But I don't know for sure. Maybe someone could be so kind to boot up their windows 8 and let me know how it works.

EDIT: I just tested it on IE9 (again) and 10. IE 9 can load the client part flawlessy, but for some reason shits itself when loading the client from the server (the full version). IE 10 works great except for one flaw, which is that the Select and Remove paradigm pages, for no conceivable reason, do not render at all. So you can't use paradigms in IE10.

All in all, I suggest Chrome/Webkit, Firefox/Gecko, or Opera/Presto, those work great.

Tablets

I haven't tested it on a tablet to see how it works design-wise, but as long as the web browser can give a landscape layout, and not a portrait, it should work and look fine. I'm not sure how bookmarklets work on it, but all in all, I think it should work fine.

The closest I've gotten to testing it on a tablet is through this website, and it rendered fine.

Phones

Unless you can get your phone's browser to run in landscape (that means wider than it is tall), I wouldn't try to run the site, because the UI would probably be choked up from the narrow screen width. I mean--it would work as long as the device follows HTML5 standards, it just probably wouldn't look pretty. Remember what device I designed this on.

Versions

[Version 1.2.0].

This version implements PHP and MySQL for a user account system and a much more dynamic experience. If you don't want to sign up, and just want the client part of the app, go here. There's also some improvements in basic functionality.

As a recap: The full version saves links onto the cloud so you can access them anywhere. The client version just saves them onto your computer.

You get 5MB worth of space to store your links. Which as I've seen over months of using this, is far more than you'll ever need.

No seriously, I have over 400 links from all those notepad files, and they're only using 1.2% of that 5MB.

- - - - -

Version 1.1.0 [Hosted Version] [Downloadable Version (See end of post for setup instructions)]. Changes the window system to use dynamically generated Iframes

Version 1.0.0 [Use if 1.1.0 doesn't work]. Completely overhauls the previous designs and uses popup windows for the forms, allowing for the Auto Add Link feature to be possible. Since it was redesigned from the ground up, it is also more stable than previous versions.

All versions

How do I download the downloadable version?

I did a test run through the instructions, and one minor roadblock was that you get a "403 forbidden page".

The fix is super simple. Ready?

Click the URL bar (the thing that says "http://blahblahblah"), then hit Enter

The file will download

How do I run the downloadable version?

First of all, this is meant to be run on a server, so you need to get XAMPP.

* Linux Instructions.
* Mac Instructions
* Windows Instructions

Linux Instructions

Open a terminal, and navigate to the folder where the archive is. Assuming you didn't move it away from the Downloads folder, you can access it with this command: cd ~/Downloads

The file is supplied as a .tar.gz, and can be extracted in via the following commands:

1: tar xzf Link_Saver_110.tar.gz - this extracts the archive to the current directory

2: cd ./Users/b1kmusic/Sites/b1kmusic.koding.com/websi te/Misc/WebApps/ - this changes directory to the newly extracted archive

3: sudo mv Link_Saver_110 /opt/lampp/htdocs - this moves the folder of interest to the localhost directory of XAMPP

Mac Instructions

This is pretty much the same. Mac and Linux are both Unix Like and run a Bash terminal. Just make sure you are administrator, and modify the commands to reflect your case. I.e. remove instances of "sudo" if it isn't recognized, change the /opt/lampp/... paths to /Applications/XAMPP/..., etc.

Windows Instructions

I haven't actually done this on Windows (or OSX, for that matter), but you can easily find applications to extract .tar.gz files in Windows. After that, you can just drag and drop the relevant folder into C:\XAMPP\htdocs

To run...

Now, you can get to the link saver by starting XAMPP and navigating to: http://localhost/Link_Saver_110/

Of course, you can always just use the hosted version.