It's even later, but it's here, and it's just as awkward as last year! All 5 (ahem) of this year's entries entries have been played and reviewed, with some stupid but hopefully insightful commentary from yours truly!

Developers/dev teams reviewed: @Beeetelgeuse, @Simoes1000, @Hoppio, @aapiarts/@Nebulate/@Creeperforce24, @beenibroh/@gymba/@YellowWest

Thanks to @AhWham for most of the editing magic and @EmsDeLaRoZ for the thumbnail!

Check out the playlist of entries in the video description or here!

In other news...

In preparation to possibly move the game jam to Itch.io in future years, I now have an account. First thing posted there will probably be an updated version of "I'm Not a Doll". I'm excited to do more gamedev and put up stuff there!

-Theta

All must bow before me.

Thank you to the random selection thingy that determines who is chosen. And thank you to whoever stops by to check my stuff out!

-Theta

Introduction

It has come to my attention that information about my split-up with whimsical-wife has been freely circulating around in public on Newgrounds and in some Discord servers. While I have tried my best to keep this private and move on, it seems that her intent is neither to keep it private nor to move on. I am therefore forced to publish my side of the events, to defend my reputation on Newgrounds and elsewhere.

You can choose whether to believe me or not at your own discretion. Hell, it's up to you whether you even read this. But I am putting it out there for those who want the answers.

People This Post Is About

• whimsical-wife
• Doumierstar
• Yosos
• EmsDeLaRoZ
• Creeperforce24

Timeline of Events

• December 13, 2023 - The beginning of the end. I announced the Pokémon Mystery Meat Collab, which had been my idea but would be co-hosted by whimsical-wife.
• December 2023 thru February 2024 - I tried programming a game to showcase the Pokémon Mystery Meat entries. The project I had in mind wound up being much too complex for my skills as a beginning game dev.
• March 2024 - Who’s That Pokémeat was published. The game was hurriedly put together by EmsDeLaRoZ and whimsical-wife. Effectively, I did nothing for this, as I was still trying to work on my larger game.
• March thru May 2024 - I kept trying to work on my larger Pokémon Mystery Meat game. It became increasingly clear that I wasn’t cut out for this, but whimsical-wife was creating a lore comic for the game, and as such, she freaked out every time I thought of quitting or altering the game project to something more doable. This led to quite a lot of stress and tension between us, on top of everything else that was going on.
• At the same time - Friendship with whimsical-wife and Doumierstar continued, mainly in a Discord group chat between the three of us. WW would unexpectedly get jumpy at things I said/did and I would be left scrambling to find out what was wrong, as she would clam up or run away, only making things worse. I became increasingly stressed about keeping her happy and preventing things like this. I noticed as well that the two of them were getting closer to each other than to me, calling each other “my evil twin” and similar things in front of me, and I felt like I had been shoved into a platonic third wheel position, if not casually vilified for the times I disagreed with her. This was all exacerbated by a role play we had going on at the time, in which I felt like I was being judged out-of-character for my actions as evil characters in the game.
• May 29, 2024 - The day before I started my summer job at Target, I knew I had to do something to clear my head so that I wouldn’t be stressed at work. At the time, I had joined both the Creature Collab and the Pokémon Gijinka Collab, and that morning I got into an argument with some people on the former server who were dunking on the latter collab. While not in a good headspace from that, I tried writing up a note saying that I wanted a temporary break from whimsical-wife’s group chat so I could feel better. My plan was to send the messages while WW was away, and then slip away to let her read them when she got back. However, in the middle of me doing so, she appeared and things quickly escalated into a fight. She called me something like “a sad little creature”, and I called her “fragile” and told her that she hadn’t allowed me to be myself, a statement I still stand by. She said something vague about “how you treat me”, declared things over, and kicked me out of the friend group’s server.
• Shortly afterwards - Because Doumier had taken whimsical-wife’s side in most of the arguments we had had, and because I saw them as prioritizing each other over me, I was afraid that Doumier would chew me out for arguing with WW, and so I also blocked her.
• Summer 2024 - I made the mistake of complaining about whimsical-wife behind her back a few times on Newgrounds. I have no excuse for this, it was done just out of petty anger. I like to think that I learned pretty quickly from that.
• Fall-Winter 2024 - Over time, I also noticed that more and more people I liked were becoming friends with whimsical-wife and sporting profile pictures she drew. Seeing as she had talked freely about her previous ex-friends to me, I couldn’t help but wonder how much these people had heard about me.
• October 30 2024 - whimsical-wife made a thread about the game Mouthwashing. This is seemingly unimportant, but it influenced the way she and Yosos presented themselves on Discord, and from there, how I reacted to it. The important thing about this game is that there is a supposedly absolute victim/perpetrator dynamic between the characters. My mental health started taking a nosedive the more and more I mentally associated the game and its fandom with her and what I thought she thought of me.
• November-December 2024 - Three separate mutual friends: EmsDeLaRoZ, Yosos, and Creeperforce24, all contacted me separately and put pressure on me to apologize and be friends again with whimsical-wife. I told each of them “no” and cited my reasons for believing the friendship wasn’t going to work, with varying levels of anger. They ferried screenshots of the conversation back and forth without permission from either me or whimsical-wife. All three have since been blocked because I cannot trust them to respect my privacy.
• December 4, 2024 - Another, more level-headed friend, who will remain anonymous to protect them, sent me a holiday fanart that whimsical-wife made of Theta without my permission. This is what made it clear to me that she had no intention of moving on from our split-up. I had a conversation with this friend about what happened, and they agreed not to take sides or send screenshots. I cannot stress enough how much I appreciate that.
• December 21, 2024 - With help from my therapist, I wrote up a note acknowledging WW's forgiveness of me, but also explaining why I didn’t believe the friendship was going to work. I apologized for the times I had talked about her behind her back, and urged her to find a therapist. I sent that note through the level-headed mutual friend, because Discord wouldn’t let me send it directly to her. I received a note back from her - in summary, she said that she had gotten medication for her anxiety, and that overall she had changed and was trying to be more honest with her friends instead of clamming up.
• Late December, 2024 - I took this response on the chin very badly, believing that I was morally in the wrong for still having harbored anger towards her. Friends noticed a distinct change in my behavior, including calling myself all kinds of horrible things and claiming that I deserved the worst to happen to me.
• December 27, 2024 - Yosos, still sporting the “Daisuke from Mouthwashing” moniker, seemed to sense the tension easing up, so he re-entered a server that I was in, which he had previously left because of me. This completely threw me for a loop, as I was still in the mindset that I was the worst person to walk the earth. I made an attempt to still be friends with him, though.
• December 28, 2024 - Yosos let slip in various vague ways, without ever saying it directly, that he and whimsical-wife are now in an online relationship. From my experience, couples, especially younger ones, will tell each other everything. I do not want to be spied on, regardless of whether it’s unintentional, so I left the server. This server, for the record, was one that I had built in the beginning as a community for my friends on NG, but I had early on given up the admin role because of how stressful it was.
• End of the Year, 2024 - I have been pinged in several “year in recap” posts that read to me as “whimsical-wife is a wonderful friend and can do no wrong, oh yeah and I was in Theta’s collab too.” I found this aggravating, as it felt like a reminder that I had lost several current and potential friends and was overall not as well-liked on Newgrounds as I used to be. I have turned off notifications for being pinged in news posts for this reason, further isolating myself for my peace of mind. WW’s own year in recap, I might add, also calls Doumier “my evil twin” yet again and implies that being friends with me was a traumatic experience for both of them.

Conclusion

[Edited to remove information that wasn’t public knowledge as previously thought.]

whimsical-wife isn't Jesus, or Anya, or N, or whoever else you think she is. She has too much time on her hands, and is spending that time hoping that I'll miraculously forgive her. She doesn't know what it's like to be juggling creative projects, school or a job, and emotional labor. She completely relies on a friend group of yes-men and a boyfriend who puts her on a pedestal. I doubt that she will ever understand how much I have lost in this fight while she prospers from it.

I am not going to run back to someone I had to do endless emotional labor to be friends with. I am not going to tolerate people who don't understand or believe my explanations and continue to pressure me to re-contact her.

This fight was supposed to be mine, hers, and Doumierstar's alone. But she can't keep her mouth shut, so I have to say my piece. I have turned off comments and would like it if no responses to this are sent my way.

I know this note will find you, [Redacted]. I would like you and your entourage to leave me alone. Let us continue with both of our lives, and may our paths not cross again.

-Theta

In my quest to get under the hoods of indie horror games I love and inside the heads of their developers, my next stop was a mysterious golf course that had already closed. Yep, this time the interviewee is @yatoimtop, and we're talking about his game Greener Grass Awaits! It's tense, it's surreal, it's even darkly comedic at a few points, and you will probably have no idea what's going on - but one thing is for sure, you must golf!

Just like the Mike Klubnika one, this will eventually be made into a YouTube video. (I haven't forgotten about the former, I just kept getting distracted and not working on the script. :o) )

Spoilers ahead for Greener Grass Awaits! (Go play the game first! It's free, only about an hour long, and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.)

Inspirations/Process

I see you make games, music, and animations. What got you into each of these creative media?

I got into video when I was 10 because I wanted to make animations, and started with stop motion stuff before I eventually found blender. For music, I'd always wanted to make some, but I only started during COVID. COVID was also when I also started really getting into game development with pearl grabber. I did dabble with gamedev in high school, making some point and clicks!

Where’d you get the idea for a golf horror game in general?

How hard was it to get the golf physics to work like you wanted them to? How about the enemy behavior? Was the staring response something you came up with from the beginning, or was it something you added to keep the player from becoming too powerful?

This has a half cynical answer- I knew I wanted to make a horror game because they were popular on itchio/YouTube but I wasn't quite sure what my angle would be. The golf inspiration came from my addiction to the mobile game Desert Golf, which I had discovered from reading Tevis Thompson's website.

On a whim I had decided to make a prototype in Godot of a golf setup based on Desert Golf, and found it surprisingly easy to make? At some point I started thinking about how I could make it a game when I remembered my goal of making a horror game. So I began thinking about how it'd work, planning out a bunch of holes and writing out the game mechanics and what would happen hole to hole. I got far more wrapped up in it then I had planned!

Initially, the game was going to be all on one map and have enemies that patrolled the course. You'd see them in the distance and have to hide. When I found that I couldn't make the game all on one map and I also didn't want to figure out how to make the NPCs work like I had wanted, I pivoted. I programmed the NPCs to do the only move when you look away thing and liked how it worked with putting. I eventually found it goofy how you could stare forever and they would just stand there without moving so the stare timer was added. I ended up liking what I had built far more than what I had initially imagined- it's more confrontational and ties in with the golf mechanics more directly.

My process is basically bumbling into something that works.

Greener Grass Awaits has a really distinctive style for its visuals and music. Some people call the graphics “PS1-style”, but I think there’s more to it than that. I really like the posterization with different color palettes. What influenced you in designing the look of the game?

I also wouldn't describe my game as PS1- I think of it as sort of lo-fi and fuzzy. Some of the reason I went with the posterized look was it sort of covered up the eh graphics, but also it helped scenes remain legible when it was dark. Keeping the game dark was one of my main priorities. I also just like the reduced color look! I'm pretty bad with picking visual inspirations, I just go for what looks right to me at the time.

The soundtrack is probably one of the game’s biggest strengths, it absolutely carries the atmosphere and the buildup of tension throughout. How did you come up with the music? (Also, what programs/plugins do you use :O )

Soundtracking things is something I love doing- it helps me pick a musical direction with much more clarity than my other music projects. I wanted to match the fuzzy visuals so I went with sounds that were dark and distorted. I had a lot of Aphex Twin and especially Boards of Canada in my mind.

I did a lot of slowing things down, lots of brushing random things against the mic, and a lot of shimmer delay. I also did a lot of singing and chanting for any forest bit.

My most used plugins for this project were Sketchcassette 2, Valhalla Delay and Valhalla VintageVerb, and Arturia Pigments. I also used an old Casio keyboard someone was giving away for free for the boss theme and some percussion on the Greener Grass Awaits song!

What about your art/music/animations in general, independent of the game?

If you're asking about software I use Godot, Blender, FL Studio, and Procreate. If you mean my process for coming up with things, usually I'm just randomly struck with some idea that captures my mind.

You did a very good job of making the antagonists feel like a part of the world, and making their presence feel justified by the story and environment instead of being solely there to make it a horror game. How did you come up with your antagonists and flesh them out? What made you choose to make the game’s main threat some kind of murder cult masquerading as a lawn care company?

I came up with most of the big ideas of the game in a day or two where all I could think about was how I'd make this golf horror game make sense. I'm not sure where the evil landscaper idea really came from, or where most of the ideas came from for that matter. My guess is that I asked myself "Why is a cult at this golf course and why do they only move when not looked at" and then started answering that question.

My overall goal was to know exactly what was happening and why, even if the player didn't.

Success

What was your initial reaction to seeing people and YouTubers start to pick up your game? How have you felt about it since?

It's fun but extremely nervewracking for me to watch people on YouTube play it. It's fun to see reactions but it's also a bummer to see problems I hadn't noticed in the game. I had a couple friends playtest the game, but seeing some playthoughs, I think I should've playtested more!

Based on the things some people who played it struggled with, is there anything you’d make differently about the game knowing what you know now?

I'd tone down the forest level a bit and add more signposting. I knew it had problems before I put it out, but the friends I saw play it didn't have that much trouble with it? So I let it be.

Can we get a sneak peek at any other projects that may be up your sleeve for the future?

I've been posting some pictures on my bluesky of a game I've been working on- the title right now is "apple seller supreme" but that might change.

I know you’ve got a lot of other projects. Here’s your chance to shill your other stuff. If you had to pick one to a few other works of yours that you really want people reading this interview to go check out, what would those be?

I put out a music video named LEAVE IT IN THE GROUND recently. Or the VIDEOPALOOZA series! (Editor's note: All of VIDEOPALOOZA can be found on his NG movies page, or YouTube!)

Misc/Silly Questions

How did you write the song for the Greener Grass advertisement? What does “dry and crispy like the thing in my head” even mean? Why does it sound like they’re using grass as a metaphor for a sense of purpose in life? (Is it because the people who lack that sense of purpose are most vulnerable to cult recruitment?)

I bumbled into the right thing while making the Greener Grass Awaits song. I was basing vibe/concept the song after another cult song I discovered off of a Redlettermedia video, SOS. I remember it being very catchy and upbeat while talking about how dissatisfied you were with life. It stuck out as a bizarre ideological Trojan horse, and a good fit for the game. I think I started with the synth riff and bass and just built it out from there.

There's an original version of the theme available on the soundtrack album- I canned it because it wasn't catchy enough and the distorted ending feels wrong for how the song is supposed to be used, in universe.

The dry and crispy line is referring to an unhappy brain!

Are you yourself any good at golf?

I had only ever played mini golf before making this game! But near GGA's completion, I went with some friends to a driving range where I nearly hit the person next to me in the head with a stray golf ball (twice)

What does your username mean, exactly/how’d you come up with it? What is yatoimtop?

I was in to making nonsense words when I was in middle school and that's what I happened to name my first instagram account. I've stuck with it since! Unfortunate -_-

So there you have it! This was a fun conversation and I enjoyed getting to hear Yatoimtop's thought processes!

Please go check out Greener Grass Awaits and Yatoimtop's other content on various platforms. It's all worth a look!

(I've been listening to this song in particular a bunch lately. It's very catchy and I can relate to the lyrics.)

Have a good night, everyone!

-Theta

Hey everyone!

As I said, nominally the deadline for Costume Jam entries is today, October 31st, at 11:59 PM EST.

However, due to changes in my IRL schedule, I will not be able to review the entries until November 9th at the earliest. That means you have extra time to finish up your games, or add updates and polish if you’ve already submitted them! My entry for the jam will likewise be finished in the grace period.

In other news…

PSA: I have a stalker here and on Discord. Ever since after last year’s jam, where we had an argument on the Costume Clash dev team and split up, Dieswyx has been making sporadic attempts to contact me or get around me blocking him for an entire year. I had to unblock him briefly to be in the Pokémon Gijinka Collab, thinking it was all over and he would be reasonable, but only got multiple other unwanted messages and friend requests - one while I was in the collab, one after I left it, and one more a day or two ago. I have put up with this for far too long. Don’t make efforts to witch hunt him necessarily, I’d rather let the admins handle this, but if you are someone he talks to, do not agree to contact me for him or relay any messages.

Next collab? @TheNorf has been planning an art collab that juxtaposes Christmas with horror themes. He is thinking of opening it in November to give enough time for artists to sign up, and I’ll be there to help with logistical stuff and possibly program an interactive gallery. More details will be available within the next month! (Also, if you have scary Christmas music you’d like to be in the gallery, DM me!)

Thanks, everyone!

-Theta

(Banner by @EmsDeLaRoZ! Can you identify all the characters?)

Here we are, last weekend before October begins. I wanted to do some quick housekeeping related to the jam.

I'm curious as to how many people are interested and have managed to start their projects for the jam. Let's do a headcount - if you're working on something for the jam, or planning on it, say so in the comments!

If there are any artists who can't find a programmer, I'd like to know if you'd be interested in using Meiker to make a game for the jam. Essentially, the website turns a PSD file into a functional dress-up game using tags in the layer names. While it will lack some functionality compared to coding something yourself, it might make it possible to participate. If there's enough interest, I could run interference between the admin and NG mods to see if it's acceptable for jam entries to be made off-site.

Thanks for checking in!

-Theta

(Banner by @EmsDeLaRoZ! Do you know who everyone here is?)

It's happening again. Another year of the Costume Jam is upon us, and I'm aiming to go bigger and better!

Once again, if you don't know me already, my name is Theta, and I'm the ghost with the posts! With Halloween coming, everyone’s thinking of a costume - which makes it a perfect time to resurrect a piece of internet history! Dollmakers and dress-up games were a staple of the early days of web games, but they’re still clinging to life even beyond the grave of Flash! So last year, I launched a jam to celebrate the spooky season with some old-school internet flair!

The basic premise of Costume Jam is this: Make a dress-up game with a twist in its game mechanics. It can be something as simple as having the character react to what you put them in, or something as complicated as a whole narrative game where dressing up is the main gameplay. Outfit challenges, minigames to get more clothes, selling to customers, the sky’s the limit! Here's a list of examples I collected for last year's jam.

This year, we have a second optional theme/prompt on top of the regular challenge! It's open-ended on purpose and you can come up with whatever you see fit to go with the theme.

The prompt is "More Like Me".

I'm excited to see how you interpret this for your collab entries! Halloween/horror themes are also encouraged as usual!

Other basic rules:

• Deadline: October 31st at 11:59 PM. Two months should be enough, I think!
• Rules: No shovelware, no hateful content, stick to the NG rules about AI art. Nudity is now allowed for artistic purposes, but no outright pornographic content. A-rated submissions will nonetheless be left out of the video review to keep it suitable for YouTube.
• How to participate: Tag your entry with costumejam2024, and I’ll look through the entries after the deadline has passed!

There is no contest/judging element to this jam, but just like last year, I will do a video review of the entries after the deadline! I'll also ideally be making my own entry again - this time, completely by myself. Last year's fiasco proved to be the kick in the pants I needed to finally start learning to code in an actual game engine.

Alright! Put any questions you have on this post! It’s showtime!

-Theta

After a lot of thinking, I have come to the conclusion that it's probably best to put an end to the Mystery Meat Collab and not pursue making a second, bigger game for it. The collab's basically already been dead for a while, and the ownership issue is messy, and at this point I've moved on emotionally from wanting to fight over it.

However: That being said, I still want to make this game project for its own sake. I just feel like having a looser theme would put less pressure on me to make it perfect, and to outperform my competition on this site.

Gameplay-wise, it will still be the same, except for the omission of planned story-related elements, collectibles, and NPCs, all of which would have made the project more complicated than it likely should've been for a first game. Gamedev is frickin' hard, and I wish I had known years and years ago that the right way to begin a first project is to isolate one aspect - whether it be doing the code first by making simple games with no story, or the story first by creating D&D modules or the like that don't require coding.

Theme-wise, we're also still keeping the dark comedy aspect, but expanding it outward to make horror spoofs of various types of kids' Flash games - not just the Pokémon ones that inspired the minigame approach in the first place. Expanding the theme opens up even more possibilities for minigames and aesthetics, too!

Working title is "The Forbidden Arcade". Perhaps I'll make a devlog of this, we'll have to see if I remember to post regularly about it. Either way, I'll see ya in the next news post!

-Theta

So over the past few days in the Art Forum, I've posted some art challenges that I'm calling "the hate series". The intent behind this is to drive artists into territory unfamiliar to them and test their commitment to the craft. Are Newgrounds Art Forum users willing to draw something they don't like, or spend time researching something they don't know, just as a chance to hone their skills? Will they possibly discover something that they do like buried in the rubbish, or at least a stronger knowledge of why they don't like those things? How will they even react to the very idea of doing so? I seek to find out!

Here's a list of the threads (will be continually updated as I do more of these):

• Draw yourself in a style you hate
• Do an art trend you hate
• Discover, draw, and describe an aesthetic
• Draw a design trope you hate
• Copy the style of someone you appreciate (it’s not hate related, but it definitely involves going out of your way to draw something you wouldn’t!)

I'll keep on adding new threads to keep the experiment going. In the meantime, it'd be fun if anyone else would like to join in! An experiment needs data, after all, and performance art needs an audience.

-Theta

(I kinda made this post for my own use, as a way to keep track of all these threads in one place, lol.)

You all have probably noticed that I logged off without warning a week or so ago. I apologize for my absence - especially to those I was going to help with their projects - but I had to take a break and take care of myself.

For your reading enjoyment, here's some of what I've been up to in the shadows. I can't do as much as I would've liked due to the job I'm working at this summer, but I'm determined to still be doing something.

Pokémon Mystery Meat is Not Dead

Yes, I'm going to make this "bigger game" I keep talking about real, and everything the project's been through has only added more fuel to the fire! Making a game of any size is difficult for a beginner like me, so I decided I needed to think smaller. So I revamped the entire concept, and will now be presenting the 37 entries and theme in a collection of minigames that I work on one by one to help me learn Game Maker.

Pokémon Gijinka Collab is Not What You Think

Yes, I am participating in the Pokémon Gijinka Collab hosted by @KittyhawkMontrose. I am aware that many people - be they minors, on the asexual spectrum, or those suffering from body dysmorphia - have very strong feelings about this. But many of us are more interested in the character design aspect of designing gijinkas than in the encouragement of sexual content. I know I am. It's been an enjoyable atmosphere in the collab server so far, where we lift each other up for our artwork and design choices. So if you fit in the age requirements and would like to give it a try, I'd highly recommend you apply to join in. And if you aren't interested... let us be.

I Am Not Stopping Now

Here's some of the other stuff on the horizon:

• Creature Collab participation - I've been having a great time in @Zfert's collab server! Everyone's monster ideas are so much fun, and I've been enjoying chipping in with my own iterations on theirs for the planned "evolution" mechanic. I can't wait to see how this comes out!
• Horror Comic - I am working with @awd91 to turn my original horror story "Rapunzel Tower" into a comic, and hopefully get it into the horror comic anthology that @Artist-Lost is putting together. We haven't heard a lot from the organizer, though, so if not, it'll just be posted to the Art Portal in multiple parts.
• Future Events? - When I get closer to releasing Mystery Meat in some capacity, hopefully by October, I'm hoping I can start another spooky event like last year's Costume Jam. I don't know yet whether I want it to be another Costume Jam or just a thematically appropriate event, but there's still time for me to decide.

But for now, I will be continuing my break from Newgrounds and focusing on my creative stuff until I've gotten myself sorted out.

Big thank you to everyone who's stuck by me and stayed supportive throughout all of this - including @Creeperforce24, @Billy-SuperSkullz, @TheGarbager619, @AlmyriganHero, @tarutrit, and @awd91. I can continue with confidence knowing I have people I can depend on.

I'm not dead. I'm not quitting. I'm not backing down.

-Theta