I stopped regularly coming to Newgrounds a long time ago. I used to be such a frequent visitor, checking out submissions every day, voting on content, sending the links to mates... Newgrounds looked a lot different back then. They seemed to be much simpler days. Now, when I come here, geez, it's just so different! Not bad-different mind, though there certainly seems to be many more things you can click now than you could a few years back. I certainly don't recall being able to write my own little blog like this back in the day.
I remember back when the site went through a heavy redesign. I seem to recall Newgrounds once looking predominantly black and red - maybe I'm wrong - and then suddenly overnight there was a lot of yellow colour everywhere and it turned quite a few people off I think. Certainly turned me off at the time. I even remember writing to Tom Fulp expressing my opinion and it turns out that a lot of people shared similar feelings. Things settled a bit though and everyone seemed to enjoy that new look. I think it was also around that time I recall Newgrounds being an extremely slow site, or it had extremely slow 'spikes' quite often. Maybe that was what turned me off... back then, on a pretty slow connection... it wasn't cutting it anymore.

Let's fast forward a bit. Why'd I come here, discover I could write a blog post and start doing one? I figure, for those interested, I should maybe give a little update on what I'm doing now. I still receive e-mails after all these years to carry on with my stupid Flash animation series and I get the odd person contacting me on MSN about it too, so I figure there are some people that still care.

But no, the real reason I decided to write a News post was that a couple games have been submitted here recently by a certain user. This user is actually a company I work for as a Graphics Animator/Designer. Yes, you see, those games submitted under the (now removed from this post) name - while not personally submitted by myself - are in actuality mostly made by myself. Aside from the lack of original IP, I'm happy about them. When I started building those games, I had a vision of what I wanted to make and mostly hit the mark I wanted. I'm not too bothered about people being upset that they're basically just big adverts - I can fully understand - but I try to make a fun game anyway and at the very least, I walk away from the project with some new found knowledge in Actionscript (it's about time I started to learn!).

It feels a little strange though. It's been well over 5 years since I last submitted anything to Newgrounds, back when I was a student. Now, at 24 years old and making Flash content professionally, it seems kinda weird that the work I make now gets submitted to somewhere I once submitted stuff just for fun. Perhaps a part of me feels that this is even wrong. It's a strange circle to come round. Yes, certainly I would have liked to have submitted new content that was my own IP. Ah, but it wasn't me-me that submitted it though... what's going on? I'm kinda feeling at odds here. Some work I just made was submitted to this site and I feel like I'm not being fully credited. That sorta sucks. At the same time that work is just that - work. Paid work. It's not something someone has made in the spare time and given to the world for free. Hmm... am I not proud of that work? Maybe I'm even a little ashamed that after all these years of not having given anything to the community that kick started my whole interest in Flash, I come back with something I made at my day job.

Oh well, whatever the hell I'm feeling, I hope you enjoyed that little game all the same.

EDIT: Originally I mentioned the name of the user, but I've now removed it in case anyone gets the wrong impression that I'm trying to further advertise them on Newgrounds. This wasn't my intention and I hope I didn't step on too many peoples toes in this regard.