Super Chibi Knight is only $1.24 right now on Steam, the Soundtrack is only 79 cents! Get them before July 4th to take advantage of this great deal!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/283080/

In other news, I relocated my office this week to make room for my kids to not all be in the same room (now we have a girl room and boy room). As I was cleaning stuff out and throwing stuff away, I went on a nostalgia-filled reminiscing trip. I've been making games for a long time now (over 10 years) and it's been a wild ride!

Newgrounds was the first place to really encourage me and recognize a spark of talent in me (though my old stuff is really cringeworthy looking back). I've worked with a lot of talented people and made some legit friends. Sometimes I wish I could go back to the old days when people had a lot more free time and you could get by making smaller-sized experimental games to flex your creative muscles.

Some of my highlights were P.I.C.O., Nephi's Adventure, Aqua Slug, Black Sheep Acres, Ivan Drago: Justice Enforcer, BoM Beat Battle (Winning the "Rockout" contest) visiting Comic Con 3 years in a row. Terrascape. Trick or Treat Adventure Quest. Boss Bash. Going to Pico Day. Doing stuff for Wiggi World/Woogi World. Visiting Italy. Pico Blast. Castle Crashing the Beard. The Newgrounds Printed Calendar. Buccaneer Battle (winning the Max Games contest). Portal Defenders. Cave of Wonders. Chibi Knight. Madness: Premeditation. Abobo's Big Adventure (Winning a NG Tank Award). 3 kids along the way. Super Chibi Knight. Deterministic Dungeon. Time flies!

I wonder if my "peak" was some point in there or if it's still to come. I wonder if things will "click" monetarily soon with a bigger project. I can definitely see improvement in myself over that time period, but the market in-general has also gotten better and better with higher standards.

I made a spreadsheet of my games (since the NG API was launched and I began tracking stats across the web) to see if I could recognize any trends. Surprisingly, Pico Blast seems to have had the broadest appeal on the web for the longest time. It's a good fun "boss rush" game, with nice variety, but I wouldn't have chosen it as my "best game." 2008-2010 seems to be my most "successful" time period.

Also, I discovered that, just since starting to track stats in 2007, my top 20 games have been played over 100 million times. That means I've been entertaining 10 million+ players a year for 10 years! 

Johnny Carson, talking about why comedians do what they do said: 

"Everybody wants to be loved–no matter what they do. Everybody wants to feel that somebody likes them, they’re accepted. It’s an attention-getting thing. And that, in effect, is like saying, ‘Hey, look at me, folks. I’m getting your acceptance.’ So it is a form of love, I think, you’re looking for from the audience. And I’m sure that’s part of it, to any performer, is that, 'they like me’."

I've questioned my motivations for creating stuff a lot over the years. Money is ONE motivation, but there is also the desire for acceptance/love mentioned by Johnny Carson. It might be called "attention whoring" or whatever, but I can't deny there's some of that going on with me. I don't think it's shameful, it's just a part of any person's creative drive.

I honestly believe that, even if I had all the money in the world, I'd still be doing this, worrying about how popular my creations are, and enjoying it.

Updates on Boss Clash: I've been working on menus!

Do these make you excited for Boss Clash? If so, sign up to be a beta tester!

<3 Nick