Happy Cloud Bashers Day!

Cloud Bashers Art Contest

First off, I wanna say thank you to everyone that participated in the Cloud Bashers Art Contest! Today's the last day to submit, so we'll announce winners tomorrow or the day after most likely.

I honestly did not expect the amount of participants we got and I loved every single piece. We got so many different styles, and interpretations of all the characters. I had a great week constantly refreshing to see new ones! If you wanna see them all they're all tagged with Cloud-Bashers-Art-Contest (or click that).

Since this contest did so well, I'd love to do more events on Newgrounds! Art Contests, Game Jams, and whatever else I can think of. I'll try to space them out though so I'm not here every month with an event, and if Newgrounds is cool with them all haha.

Cloud Bashers History

This is the 4th anniversary of the original release of Cloud Bashers on Android and iOS! At the time, it wasn't really noticed by anyone except my friends, and it had a lot of problems. I've been making games since I was eight years old in Game Maker 8, and a lot concepts about game design didn't really click with me until college where they got bashed into my head. I just made stuff that I thought would be cool, or hadn't been done before! Skipping forward to now, I've worked on over 20 released games at this point, been graduated for a year now, and Cloud Bashers still has a special place in my heart.

For the original, I did all the programming and design. I had the idea and made most of the game, and then contracted Quesar42 to do the art! When I got to college I quickly met @illteteka who made the menu song and helped out with the game and boss songs!

I worked on it as a side project in the middle of high school, and released it a week or two into college. For all of my first year of college, it was the game everyone knew me for. A lot of people called me "Cloud Bashers Guy" since I repped it so hard. I put fliers anywhere I could on campus, went to tons of events and brought Cloud Bashers, I made a spin-off game for a jam called Kite Kyle Soars, and my next main project after it heavily involved clouds. I became known for being a guy who really likes clouds!

This year we wanted to port it over to Newgrounds, and it became a slightly bigger project, so we made it a deluxe version with balance fixes, bug fixes, quality of life fixes, and made it much more manageable to play/beat. So why was the original so hard? I was the only play tester, and I quickly learned most people couldn't casually beat Level 1 or 2, and people that really tried couldn't beat Level 5 or 6. I might be the only person that's actually beaten the original Cloud Bashers, but I've never beaten the 2 player mode!

Stratus Striker isn't in Cloud Bashers DX, she comes from the cancelled Super Cloud Bashers! It was for a jam from a couple years ago, and we didn't finish it, but still really liked the new character. I've been on the fence on finishing it for a while, but I don't think it adds much to the table, and since we already did DX this year, I think I'll wait a bit longer to make a new Cloud Bashers game. If there ever is a new game, she'll most likely be in it! She was designed by @Kindlsticks!

I've also put the Cloud Basher in a lot of my games! Cloud Basher will appear in Last Slice! If you get a perfect as Cumulo in Floaty Fighters, you turn into them for the results screen. There's also the cloud bat as a trinket upgrade in Super Raft Boat VR! If we wanna get even more obscure, the menu song in Super Burning Wood as part of the main medley of the game song in it. There might even be a Cloud Bashers reference in Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion, not sure if anyone's ever found it or noticed it!

I'm sure Cloud Bashers will appear in more of my games, and maybe one day I'll make a full on sequel or new game in the series! Either way, I'm glad Cloud Bashers has a new home on Newgrounds!

Here's some other news/stuff I wanted to talk about.

Roller Riot

Thanks to everyone that played Roller Riot! This was made during my internship at MassDigi's Summer Internship Program (SIP) with a team of seven, and alternating teams for two semesters of Live Ops. I was the lead programmer for all of development, and producer during it's Live Ops stage. One of the last things I did in college was finish porting Roller Riot to Steam. This summer I asked MassDigi if I could port it here, since I thought people would enjoy it, and it only took me half a week. Most games made in the internship are mobile games, as was Roller Riot, so it'd be cool if more MassDigi games came to Newgrounds, old or new ones, since I think they'd do well here, and get lots of feedback!

Unidentified Feline Obliterators

Not too much to say on this one, but it was a cool project for a small jam, the requirements being it had to be under 5 MB, be multiplayer. The theme was UFO, and we added cats!

Last Slice Demo

If there's anything I like as much as clouds, it's pizza and bananas, so stay tuned for when I make a banana game.

Last Slice has been my main project for quite a while, and we recently released a demo here! We've gotten positive reaction, and some good feedback from both the online demo and in person when we were at ConnectiCon a couple weeks ago. It's a little tricky working on the game, I wanna finish it and move forward to Section 2 and 3, but we keep getting valuable feedback and ideas to improve the base game. We're kinda doing both right now, working on stuff that'll appear later, and improving Section 1 of the game (Levels 1 - 5). And if you didn't know, this game started as a multiplayer game, so that's something on the back burner for now, but once we've got more of the campaign done we'll return to it. It's pretty much all working, but we just haven't touched it in a while since the focus shifted to single-player.

I wanna make sure it does release Early 2022 like we said, so if you wanna keep up to date with the game follow me or Shattered on the twitter or something (I'll post the big stuff here though, especially the launch). I MIGHT do a small update for the demo here with some quality of life fixes since it doesn't run too well on everyone's browser.

Life Stuff

So here's the deal. I wanna do indie and I wanna keep Shattered Journal Games going: I've wanted to make my own games since I've been making them, and I've made a ton. But now I need money to live and do stuff. We still have some plans for Shattered to make money, but right now they're not certain, so I'm gonna need to get some work on the side so I can start saving up some money. Shattered will continue at least until Last Slice is done, and I'm sure we'll have small games every now and then, either from Shattered or me and friends. It's kinda scary, but also exciting not knowing what the future holds!

Once Slice is over I'll have to play it by ear what the next path is in my life, but for right now my two objectives are finishing Slice and getting some money through contract work or a part time thing. This week I gotta update my resumé, and some other stuff. I've been trying to take a break from jams (which is extremely hard for me so we'll see how long that goes for).

Overall this year hasn't been too bad for me. I learned how to drive and got a car, I've been working on myself both physically and mentally, and started being active on Newgrounds! And there's still one more quarter left in the year! I ordered the Playdate and am super excited to make games for that, and the Steam Deck's coming soon and I have multiple games that it should run no problem. Also anyone read One Piece here? I've been freaking out after every new chapter.

That's probably enough for this update, thank you everyone for any and all support! Happy Cloud Bashers Day!!