Super Chibi Knight's Kickstarter is still truckin' along, we're trying to reach a stretch goal (or "stretch quest" as I like to call them) to add some cool stuff! Will you join the cause and push us a little closer?

Luis and I are still picking away at the wrestling game for Pico Day. You can check the progress here!

I'm starting to understand why there aren't very many good wrestling games out there... there's a lot going on and lots of simultaneous things that can interfere with each other (running, rope bouncing, turnbuckle climbing, being inside/outside the ring, picking up chairs, punching, grappling, slamming, air maneuvers etc.) Dealing with different sized characters grappling with each other is also a challenge!

If you have someone nearby (or two someones) bring them over and try playing all at once and see if anything breaks!

P1 - ARROWS + Numpad 0, Numpad Del, Numpad Enter

P2 - AWSD + Z + X + C

P3 - IJKL + , + . + /

Yesterday was a fantastic day! First off, Steam finally Greenlit Super Chibi Knight!

This was after a 9-month-long campaign on Greenlight! Some games go much faster and some not at all. I'm just happy that it finally worked and ready to crunch down and get to work finishing the game. Hopefully this will be enough motivation to push me through to the end after a few more months of work.

Shortly after getting the news about the Greenlight, the Super Chibi Knight Kickstarter hit its goal! After 2 weeks on Kickstarter, we did it! Once again, THANKS to everyone who has helped out. The double-good news was such a good jolt of energy, my daughter and I were on a high all day long and we actually danced an Irish jig together when we heard it :-D

Now we're targeting some stretch goals with the Kickstarter campaign. I just posted an update with a new Reward Tier called "True Kickstarter" where, for a $17 pledge you get a CUSTOM version of the game exclusive to Kickstarter backers. It comes with:

• The DRM-Free digital game download (or Steam key, your choice)
• The AWESOME soundtrack by Brian Holmes with over 30 minutes of content [click here for a sample]
• The Kickstarter-exclusive "Kick-Saber" sword
• A Kickstarter-exclusive Splash Screen
• Your name in the credits for ALL versions of the game

Here's the 1st stretch goal we're aiming for:

High-fives to everyone for helping us out along the way!

First off, huge THANKS to everyone who has supported the Super Chibi Knight Kickstarter campaign!

After a week, we're already 75% of the way to the goal. I've felt lots of emotion as I've seen long-time "online friends" come out of the woodwork and help out (many making really generous pledges). Seriously, I know how hard it is to part with money, especially for online stuff, but so many of you have done just that, that it makes my "feel goods" feel good. In a way, many of you have treated me to a virtual drink or a dinner out with you over the last week, and who wouldn't feel great about that?

Pico Day is coming up! It may be the last Pico Day held at the NG office ever. I would really like to go, but finances are tight right now so I probably won't make it (unless the Kickstarter campaign explodes or something... hint hint)

However, I am really itching to make a game for Pico Day. I've never seen a really good Flash wrestling game, and I think it would be sweet to have it star some NG chars! Here's a prototype (it's 3 players in the demo, AWSD, ARROWS, and IJKL to move): http://pestoforce.com/picomania.html I think Luis is on-board for the art, so that should be something special!

Speaking of the me/Luis team, Luis just told me that today is the 5-year anniversary of the release of Portal Defenders. Wow how time flies! I just played through it again, and the ending is really great, Luis went way overboard on that. If you haven't played it in a while, check it out again for some memories.

One last piece of news, Super Chibi Knight finally broke 10,000 "YES" votes on Steam Greenlight! It's also currently #5 of over 1,500 games (down from #2 early last week) so hopefully there will be an announcement soon about the game being Greenlit. If you have Steam, please help us out with a YES vote here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=152710075

The day has finally arrived! I've been super nervous about this, but I feel like I prepared the best I could to make the Kickstarter the best it could be.

There is always a feeling of dread though with these things, where you invest a ton of time and then just have to trust that you'll get enough exposure/support to make it all worth it.

If you guys are at all excited about the prospect of a sequel to Chibi Knight, please consider tossing a few bucks my way to help fund the final stages of development for Super Chibi Knight.

Also, please help spread the link through the SOSHUL MEDIUZ! :-D

I'm SO grateful for the support!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pestoforce/super-chibi-knight-a-cute-spicy-rpg-adventure

P.S.

You could get this amazing art from Jouste on a t-shirt!  

Luis, Genclops, and I just released "Labyrinth: Secrets of ShadowHaven" here on NG!

Play it here!

It was a lot of fun to work on, was slightly experimental for me, and has been pretty well received. We've already started discussing some ideas to improve on it for a sequel... maybe something 16 bit????

I previously mentioned that I'm planning a Kickstarter campaign (coming soon) for Super Chibi Knight to help raise enough cash so I can focus on it full time for a couple months and finish it off. It's at the point where it needs a solid streak of dedicated work to push it to the finish line and I need some cash to be able to do that. I've been cobbling together a Kickstarter video and, as part of it, I did a new trailer for the game. Check it out here:

I also updated my main website to be more than just a landing page, to impress people who visit from the KS campaign ha ha!

http://www.pestoforce.com

So tell me:

1) What did you think of Labyrinth?

2) How is the new Super Chibi Knight video?

3) How does the new PestoForce site look?

I just released a new beatemup style game on NG!

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/633201

Drop me a 5 plx! :-D

Leave a review and tell me what you think. I made it a while ago to help some friends with the launch of their Steam game, and their sponsor (Adult Swim) just released the lock down on it so I could upload it here.

In other news, I decided to do a Kickstarter campaign for Super Chibi Knight! It's kind of scary, but I'm trying to be somewhat smart about it. Aiming for a small reasonable goal ($6,000), but have lots of stretch goals to shoot for beyond the base amount. I'm still working on it, but keep an eye out in the next week or so for the big KS launch.

My buddy from Flexicade is going to CNC-mill me some custom keychains as reward tiers, and I'm getting some help from talented artists like Jouste and Jeff to draw up some posters and t-shirts. There will also be some cool surprises thrown in at the higher tiers, like becoming an NPC in the game!

I've been struggling to find work lately... Basically I've been scraping by doing freelance stuff, but that's taking up all my time so I can't work on Super Chibi Knight (which is about 1/2 way done). I want to finish it and this KS campaign will give me the funds (I hope) so I can focus full-time for 2 months on finishing it. I really want to see this game get done and released on Steam, but I'll need lots of help once I get the KS campaign up an running.

So, be honest with me, do you think you'll toss a few bucks my way to help finance the final development stages of Super Chibi Knight?

Super Bowl Joke: I heard Peyton Manning tried to shoot himself after losing the Super Bowl... but somebody intercepted the bullet!

Here are a couple images I'm using in the KS campaign:

Here's an update for y'allz who care to know:

1. Me and Luis and Genclops released a new web game called "Labyrinth: Secrets of ShadowHaven" - It's playable on Armor Games right now, but will eventually be posted here on NG also. http://armorgames.com/play/15794/labyrinth-secrets-of-shadowhaven

2. Here's a review of it translated from Chinese:

"Long time no play decent action game, right? If you are very fond of playing the game typified heavier players, and that this "Labyrinth: Secrets of Shadowhaven Shadow Labyrinth" is absolutely right for you to play yo. In the game, players must play a cute little red dragon adventure in this vast maze of the castle! The main task of the game is to destroy the gems have demon blood, but there will be a lot of monsters on the road, while the gems are located in different locations, so players have to rack their brains but to find the whereabouts of the gems yo. Game control method is fairly simple, including attacks, jumping, seized materials. If you like simple and fun RPG game, then this "Labyrinth: Secrets of Shadowhaven Shadow Lost City", is absolutely the first choice players yo! Master great recommendation!"

3. It was a fun experimental game to make, but lots of people were reporting weird bugs that I'd never seen. I narrowed it down to some problem with Flash player on SOME computers using Google Chrome. It's been really frustrating because MY chrome works fine so it's been impossible for me to replicate what people were experiencing. It all stems from using "hittestpoint" in flash and the fact that it doesn't play nicely with camera movements. In Chrome apparently it skips frames and sends people teleporting through walls...  I re-wrote the basic engine to use true tile-based logic for the hit-testing (no hittest calls used at all!) and it runs great, but I don't have the time or energy to rewrite the whole game based on the new engine. So I guess I'll just chalk it up to experience and use the new improved methods for the next game. One cool thing about doing the hittesting this way is that you can scale the game up and down and apply other effects without messing anything up. Check out my experiment called "Barf Quest."

http://pestoforce.com/tanks/tiletest.html

4. I'm usually pretty slow to adapt to trends in the Flash scene because I figure "why change what works?" and I'm usually a little scared of new tech. But I decided to give FlashDevelop a try. After a few minutes of install and a helloworld tutorial, I think I've got the hang of it! Kind of kicking myself now for waiting so long... There are all kind of benefits to it, but the main one is that it compiles .swf files without Flash! That means you get everything you want for FREE! Of course, you still need Flash to efficiently draw and animate vector graphics for it, but it's a step in the right direction. Another huge benefit is that it organizes your project in a more modular way, so you can make MUCH bigger projects that are more demanding and not have to worry about Flash crashing or failing to compile... this will be important for future projects like Super Chibi Knight and Abobo's SUPER Adventure. It also has support for haxe which is supposed to target a lot more platforms than just .swf.

5. Oh, did I mention we're gathering forces and troops to do a sequel to Abobo's Big Adventure? :-D

I found myself using some code over and over and constantly visiting this one site to get as3 keycodes, so I thought maybe the code I wrote might be useful to others. I really hope there's not already a built-in way to do this in as3 :-P

Mapping key codes to text names:

http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1358795

EDIT: After some discussion in the forums, http://milchreis.newgrounds.com/ came up with a much more elegant solution.

Here's a .swf: http://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/9db15013684d6c22005bc9f3335935c8

And here's the .fla (cs5.5): http://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/d7d2f4bbb27686e35675e9bad8205cff

Also, the Labyrinth game is done, just waiting on the sponsor to launch it officially!

Hey guys, Luis and I need some beta testers for our latest game, if you're interested please PM me:

Here's my pre-holiday update! Merry Chrismakwanzzakah to you all!

I added a "Mech" as a beast mount to Super Chibi Knight, here's a sneak preview with some gameplay at the end:

I'm done working on the mobile game I've been mentioning. I was only doing the art on that, and now it's on hold until the coding is completed. It's looking tre bien, so I hope it all comes together and I can share the full scope here some day. Here's a look at some weapons for one of the main character options:

The little game Luis and I are working on is just about done! Hopefully it will be released on or shortly after Christmas! Some more info about it: I got a little obsessed with Spelunky so decided to try my hand at a "procedurally generated" game. That's just a fancy way of saying that, every time you play, the level, enemies and powerups are randomly organized so every playthrough is different. One challenge with that is being smart about not creating "no win" scenarios, but even in Spelunky that happens every once in a while. It has an 8-bit nes look, but runs at 60 fps! The main character is kind of cat-like so has some unique abilities you won't see in Spelunky. The levels are fully destructable too... Also, there are some crazy powerups thrown in for some cool mayhem :-D - Additionally, the boss is turning out SHWEEET. Here's a pic!  

Which of these looks most exciting to YOU?