WEEK OF 2023 / 07 / 19: WE ARE SO BACK EDITION

the friday night funking blog resumes... today!

GLENSIDE GAMERS PT 2

by ninja_muffin99

As eric mentioned in his blog post, we got more of the crew in PHILLY for workin at the end of june! The trip entailed NINJAMUFFIN99 (PROGRAMMER), KAWAISPRITE ( MUSIC), PHANTOMARCADE (ART/ANIM), and ELITEMASTERERIC ( also PROGRAMMING!).

At the end of my last visit to Philly, I brought the idea up to bring MORE of the crew to philly to see each other in person. While you TRULY can make a MEANINGFUL connection with someone online, I think it’s VERY enriching to meet people in real life, AND work with people in real life. You CAN spend more time with someone and talk more about things. It’s easier to “schedule” meetings, easier to get a conversation going. You definitely always can send a bit of a cold message to someone over discord, but they may miss it, ignore it, be scared to answer! In person, you can be on a walk, in the car, working next to someone, and have DISCUSSION about anything, and have it for much longer and more nuanced than over discord, even voice chat! SO with all that being said, I do feel many things HAVE been worked out for the better when we were in Philly, certain production questions were answered or have had thought put into. One such thing was GAME MUSIC and additional composers. To some people it may come as a genuine surprise to hear that we have a small handful of extra musicians helping us! Not just Kawaisprite! Things discussed is a bit of like… creative lead things. How do we keep the musical aesthetic reigned in so that it’s not just a billion random remix songs? How do we keep the musicians own autonomy and their STYLE? Along with DISCUSSIONS, some extra cute lil features have begun implementation work. SHIT LIKE DAT!!! There is nothin more blessed than seeing Isaac make the most delicious music u ever hear right in front of your eyes, and then seeing exactly what a feature should look like from Dave, and then cookin it up in game code all nice and dandy

FUNKIN CREW IN TORONTO

by ninja_muffin99

In 10 days (July 29th) there will be a NEWGROUNDS MEETUP in Toronto, Ontario! I want to try and organize them about yearly. Along with that I believe is a good time to have another FUNKIN IRL MEET AND WORK! So the week after we are aiming to work IRL together with a handful of our STAFF, including people who’ve been helping us with administrative work!!! Wahoo!!!!

If you’re near the Toronto area, you should come by!!!

PINS POSTERS, SHIPMENTS IN PROGRESS

by ninja_muffin99

PINS AND POSTERS ARE FINALLY BEING SHIPPED!!!! About last Monday is when the first batch of posters got picked up by the mailman, and I believe some people might already be getting posters in their hands! For all of our physical rewards, there are a LOT of people who need their rewards shipped. The people we work with are usually very small teams of people. We appreciate everyone and their patience! If you filled out the survey all good, you will get your rewards eventually!!!

Finally out of Q&A Hell, time to get the Beta Portal on the road!

by Shingi✨

Sup everyone! We're back from being out of existence for a while to bring you this special message!

I finally finished all the necessary renovations for me to move into my new place (still pretty jank but the most important things in life namely internet and plumbing are there so who cares) and the blogposts coincidentally are returning on the same day so double cheers from me!

Now onto the news that you actually want to hear: After being thoroughly vetted by the project manager and the rest of the team (shoutout to Kawa) as well as spending many days with the ever talented DevOps person on the team figuring out the intricacies of Automated deployment when your packages and database aren't playing nice (kudos to Ravy, you go girl!) - we're finally done cooking and ready to bring the Portal outta the oven and into Beta!

Before that though is a Test Run this week, with some of the first Backers ever to donate to the Kickstarter to test it out and make sure that it's the smoothest possible launch. Basically the equivalent of Early Access where you get to test the product out with the people who actually need to use it the most and see if there's anything that's wanted/needs fixing.

Also a slight update (that i'm sure Ninjamuffin will mention but just to be sure): pins and posters are finally getting into people's hands! Once the Portal is out you'll be able to check for yourself whether those are still awaiting shipment, or on their way to your doorstep (with tracking numbers ,yeay!). Needlejuice rewards on the Portal already supports this feature (and updates whenever something changes from their end) - which took quite some time and collaboration to finally figure out and intergrate and i'm proud i can make the wait for Rewards just a little bit more convenient for everyone.

One of the other things i've been doing on the side as part of the Backend work i've been doing is running weekly(ish) reports on Needlejuice rewards and roughly 60% of Rewards have been shipped at this point with calculated projections of 90+% percent shipped by the end of the year! I kinda know there's a lot of people worried on the Kickstarter page about that specifically and yeah, the backlog is slowly being shipped out every week until all the rewards make it into your hands so don't panic just yet - the team is working on it and it'll be on your doorstep hopefully sooner rather than later.

Also, getting T-Shirts out is probably the next item on our agenda and although i discussed that a while back with Ninjamuffin i'm pretty sure the Surveys for those will probably be through the Portal which has support for more specialised surveys (in this case being able to pick multiple different sizes and variants depending on how many tshirts you ordered!!)

yeah, i think that's it for anything Kickstarter related since i've seen a lot of questions about it lately. Anyways peace out for real this time

About the blog hiatus

by ninja_muffin99

hello there!! Many of you may be wondering where the blog went!!! Well I have a few reasons / excuses!! ha!!! For a while our blog posting system was actin buggy and whatnot. If anyone wants the tech details, first it was my github key expired (I created it in january, and set the expiration for 6 months… which is June!) and it was a bit fussy to figure out how to do that again… And then the deployment was acting all fussy as well!!! Somethin buggin with that so had to fix it up. In general it was a small handful of tech things that needed to be upgraded, which was a bit of backburner work since it was generally busyness of June.

Next is that I will admit I was a bitchass and felt a bit demotivated about it! Sometimes I can work on it and wonder what the whole point of it is. When we didn’t do it, we simply got people asking for more COMMUNICATION. Now when we DO the blogs, if we were late or missed a week, we would put MORE effort into things like that, but it felt like we still got the same amount of people unhappy with our COMMUNICATION. Double the stress!! That is a bit of a selfish reason though, but I think needed a smidge of a hiatus to refocus MYSELF on things. I am the broad LEAD of blog postings, I am the one that posts the most and pushes others to post the most, so I semi-intentionally decided to focus on other aspects of Funkin’ work! Is this work that a social media manager can and should do… probably!!! But I do THINK it’s good habit to get a TASTE of what it entails yourself for things like this. If we just hired someone BEFORE this little “experiment” of sorts, I might not know what I particularly WANT out of something like a FUNKIN BLOG. In any case, for now it sits in my brain, and for the forseeable future we are HOPEFULLY back to business in terms of blog postings. Sometimes may be late, sometimes on time, bwah!!!

Eric Visited Philly!

by Eric

Hi everyone! Long time since I posted a blog update.

At the end of June, I got to fly out to Philly! I got to meet and hang out with Cam, Dave, and Isaac, and meet a whole bunch of other Newgrounders at TooManyGames! All the people I met that week were awesome and chill peeple to hang out with.

In terms of dev work, I've been hard at work on bug fixes, I've finished fully retooling the input system, and did a bunch of work implementing some new animations Dave has cooked up. I also reworked how the game renders notes, which should result in better performance and a cleaner look (especially on hold notes). A bunch of the other stuff I've been working on (and will continue working on later) is secret though, so I can't really talk about it, sorry!

If you're in Toronto at the end of this month, be sure to stop by the Newgrounds meetup on July 29th! A bunch of us will be there. https://ninjamuffin99.newgrounds.com/news/post/1360856

Fanart of teh Week - ghospel

by phantomarcade

Fanart of the week? Absolutely gotta be Ghospel’s Flipnote FNF!

Just when I start to wonder if a mod could possibly be anymore charming, something like this rolls along. Sorry Rappets, but this one takes the cake. ( I’m pretty sure I animated in Flipnote before I ever even touched Adobe Flash…)

Maybe the mod will even have a secret Swapnote stage…. who knows!

Peep Ghospel’s arr on Newgrounds

Til next time! -PhantomArcade

closing thoughts for the week

by ninja_muffin99

again apologies for delay in blog!!! But our little blog posting bot is back working, and feel much more refreshed coming back to blogs! I still do WANT these to come out weekly definitely!! Although I feel like our own expectations of the blog can bog us down. I feel like each time I start writing, I want to go very in depth with details and topics, when really, I can also go as LITTLE detail and just make quick notes and whatnot about things. oh well

SONG OF WEEK!