Hi, this is EliteMasterEric, full-time Funkin' programmer, and guest author of today's blog post.

Absence

Writing these blog posts isn't super easy at the best of times. Creating a concise breakdown on the inner workings of something you spent a lot of time on, that's digestible for a wider audience. It gets exponentially harder if the thing you worked on is tied into something else that's secret. I could write a blog post about all the work I did on some waveform renderer, but it would be hard to talk about if it's intended for something that we intended to keep secret.

And sometimes the thing that's being worked on is something that's completely secret/under an NDA, or not even for this update, to where if the person could even say anything about what they worked on it would look like a bad SCP article, full of [REDACTED] and [DATA EXPUNGED] and ████████████.

Compound that over the entire team, and you get a situation where maybe one person has something they actually want to talk about, but we can't put out a tiny blog post that's like one paragraph long from one team member, so that ends up sitting around waiting for more people to make blog posts...

And then you get in a situation like "wait, it's been HOW long since somebody put out a blog post?" and people getting mad that we're not communicating and saying that we spent all the Kickstarter money on crack† even though you've been working full-time on this thing or even more and just want your work out there so people can appreciate that you're using their money and your time to create something with actual worth.

INHALE

Yeah.

I think the solution is to make a show of good faith. Bring something big out of the vault. Show off a little of what I've personally been developing on-and-off since... Git says September 7, 2022? Wow.

Frustration

Charting (i.e. the process of mapping out the notes players have to hit for each difficulty of a song) is an incredibly important step in the development pipeline. It's basically the level design for Funkin'! In order to make good levels, you need good tools in place to make them. Take for instance any Super Mario game. The game could have great graphics and interesting mechanics, but if the level designers can't quickly iterate and improve to create interesting experiences, it can't be fun, and they can't do that unless they have a tool which makes it easy, nay, FUN to build a level. Building your own level CAN be fun, that's why Super Mario Maker even exists.

During development, (this would have been shortly after I officially joined the Crew as a full-time employee, I had previously ), I specifically recall being in a call with Dave, and him asking me how to access the chart editor from that build of the game. At the time, that looked something like this:

You could only see one snippet of song at a time, and the best indication of where you were in the song was a little number in the top left. Your only controls were pressing Space to play and pause the song, and you had to use your mouse to place notes. The controls available on the right side required you to manipulate unlabelled fields in a little tabbed view on the right side. The player and opponent switched sides every few bars for no discernable reason. No selecting to move them around or copy-paste them, only placing and removing individual notes. Convenience features like waveforms and hitsounds were completely absent. If you needed to place a note between the grid squares you were out of luck. Placing hold notes involved placing a note and then fiddling with one of the aforementioned unlabelled fields. Saving the chart was a massive pain. Getting anything specific done was borderline torture.

Dave got REALLY upset about this, and began going on a tirade about this being one of the worst pieces of software ever made (no offense to Cam! He made this in a couple hours during a game jam and had only made a few usability tweaks since then). When Dave asked how to load a new song into the editor to start charting it (that's the neat part, you don't), we both knew that for something that would end up being a core pillar of our develpment workflow, something need to be used THREE times over, for EVERY song in the game, and EVERY remix for that song, in PERPETUITY, we needed a tool that was capable of making that process less of a chore.

Focus

As I looked at what other engines had done with charting at the time, and as I looked at our internal discussions of what we wanted from a "revised" chart editor, I knew for a fact that the chart editor would have to be an entirely new chunk of code, built completely from scratch, with these capabilites in mind from the get-go, and the rest of the game built around supporting those capabilities.

This ended up becoming my primary focus for more than a year. I'd get assigned to work on other things on and off (Redo the input system! Get cutscenes working! Redo scoring! Work on ████████████ (I told you about that NDA)! Fix issues with gamepad!) but once I was done I'd get back to work building, and iterating, and adding important features, and inserting little bits of convenience and flair.

As I worked, I drew inspiration from the tools I (and the coworkers I sought feedback from!) used and enjoyed every day. VSCode, Adobe Flash, Arrow Vortex, FL Studio, Project DIVA F 2nd, Mario Maker, and even Psych Engine all made their mark on what is now my single largest programming project to date.

Accompaniment

Oh, yeah, almost forgot, put this on in the background while you read.

Delight

Enough fanfare.

Where to start? All my biggest gripes with the old chart editor are gone. No more of weird logic that dividing the chart into sections, just one long scrolling view. No more having camera changes flip the chart; the opponent is always on the left and the player is always on the right. The waveform underneath character's icon (which can be clicked to switch character!), the measure ticks on the left side, the colored note preview on the far left, and the video-player-like controls at the bottom provide redundancy in the important task of making sure the player always knows exactly where in the song they're looking.

The UI is powered by HaxeUI, which is so much faster to develop for and much more powerful than the existing Flixel UI that I wonder why we even used it. HaxeUI provides a wide variety of components, automatic flowing layouts, menus, dropdowns, tooltips, dialogs, and more. This infrastructure allowed me to recreate something I loved from GIMP; toolbox windows. Many of the controls that used to be in one clunky immovable menu are now divided up into little dialogs that you can expand and collapse or rearrange to create your OWN layout.

Expand 'em! Collapse 'em! Rearrange 'em!

It also leaves space for neat tools that would never have fit in the old UI.

Here's a view which lets you set apply an audio offsets for the instrumental or individual vocal tracks.

The toolbar at the top is the kind you'd expect from other editors, and has menus packed with commands. File emphasizes that the editor handles charts like normal files now, with a New Chart button taking you to a wizard to import audio and the options for Open, Open Recent, Save, and Save As that you'd expect from a modern application. Edit includes features like Copy/Paste, a robust Undo/Redo system with unlimited history, select all, Note Snapping precision options, and toggles for Live Input mode. View is pretty bare and currently only houses a theme selector and a difficulty switcher (Easy/Normal/Hard are all in one chart now and you can switch between them with a hotkey). Audio includes a metronome, hitsounds, and volume sliders. Test lets you playtest a song, in either a minimal mode with faster loading times or in the full stage with all characters, stage props, and scripts in place. There's an option to start playtesting at the position of the playhead and buttons to time travel (those ones stopped working I gotta get around to that!). Window contains checkboxes to bring up any toolboxes you closed, and Help just has a dialog that lists all the keyboard shortcuts.

The Edit menu. Fun fact, copy/paste actually uses the system clipboard!

The Audio menu. Having custom controls in the dropdown is a little quirky but HaxeUI supports it just fine!

The Window menu. No the screenshot isn't cutting anything off you're imagining things.

For those wondering, FNFC files are our new standard for developing charts, created to simplify the process of saving and loading. It contains the chart data, along with all the audio files inside it so you don't need to fiddle around with telling the game which files to use every time you load it.

The "Renamed ZIP" technique is a tried-and-true method of creating new file formats in the software development world.

The grid area itself is divided up into measures and beats to help orient yourself while scrolling. The bright red playhead in the middle represents your actual position in the song and can be moved by clicking and dragging in the time ticks on the left side, or by holding ALT while scrolling. Pressing SPACE will smoothly scroll the grid as the song plays. With regards to keyboard shortcuts, there's probably several dozen, to where nearly every option has an associated keyboard shortcut, so you can navigate around and do work without having to move your hand constantly from the mouse to the keyboard. There is also an optional "Live Input" mode, which lets you place notes at the playhead with WASD/Up-Down-Left-Right. Notes placed this way (or with the mouse) will use the current snap setting you've defined, so you could easily chart a section of 24th notes by placing the playhead at the top, tapping out some notes, and then proofreading after.

Conveniences like dragging notes to move them and Ctrl-F to flip makes copying sections more intuitive.

A big feature I haven't talked about yet is the Song Events feature, which vastly improves how we create charts and will become even better in the future. Song Events are manipulated in the ninth column on the right side, and don't appear as notes on either player's strumline. Instead, an appropriate chunk of code gets run when the event is hit. The main thing it's used for right now is camera control; previously, camera movement was tied to specific sections, but you can now focus the camera on either character (or Girlfriend, or a specific position on the stage!) whenever you like. There's only a couple built-in events right now (such as one that triggers a character or stage prop to play an animation) but this system is very extensible and mods can add new ones, so I expect to see people implementing Blammed Lights with it very quickly.

The form under the dropdown is generated dynamically using data provided by the event type!

There's still a bunch of features I want to add in the future, from little things (I have some ideas on how to select notes with just your keyboard) to larger features (I had to cut an animation preview feature because character sprites weren't working in the little dialogs, it might come back eventually). The visuals could definitely use a bunch of work too, but the artists have simply been busy with other stuff, so the interface is mostly a mix of polished assets (like the cursor), default styling (like the dialogs), and programmer art (like the playhead and event icons).

I think I'll leave things there, I've covered large swaths of the editor's functionality and can go over some of the more specific stuff in the future, but the best feature of the chart editor is... the kind of thing you can't show in a screenshot, or a video. I think it's all the feedback from a large variety of people, the thorough quality control it's gone through, that makes it feel FUN to use. Dave in particular is probably the best at giving feedback that helps make things JUICY. It takes a programmer to come up with an undo/redo system, and an artist to suggest that holding Ctrl-Z should repeatedly undo actions and make a zesty little sound effect every time. It's all those things that make it feel like any member of the team has the ability to take charting into their own hands and make a fun level now.

Plus, it pretty much never crashes!

...except for when it does.

Creativity

We're finally done, and since this is MY blog post, I get to choose the fanart and song of the week!

I personally really like this Senpai art by IGJH! It just oozes charm it's so great.

As for the music, here's a taste of the kind of stuff I enjoy.

†Only most of the Kickstarter money was spent on crack.

funkin blog fo the week... . big announcement... FunkCoin. Yep you heard right. FunkCoin. Web3 is looking more... awesome!!

just joking, this week is just a week of Friday Night Funkin' development team blog posts!!! Mostly me this week derp! I need to get more people from crew to cook on blogs of where their brains are at.... this week we have Sunni who wrote her first blog post for us woohoo!!

Funkin' Spirit

by Sunni

Since it’s my first time posting to the blog, I figured I should write up a little intro for myself. Hello! I’m Sunni and I’m ½ of Windflower Games, a game development and publishing consultancy. I work with the Funkin’ Crew in areas such as production, biz dev, and general operations. Cam likes to refer to me as an “industry veteran”, which I guess means I’ve accumulated a bunch of valuable knowledge over the years that I am now able to provide advice and perspective to help the Funkin’ Crew steer the ship in sustainable and smart ways.

I must be doing all right by them because the Funkin’ Crew invited me to the Toronto on-site work trip a few weeks back. We not only got a lot done there, but we also learned more about how to work together and enjoyed fun shenanigans, too. Hopefully the success of this trip means more to come in the future. ^_^

A lot has been said about this trip already, so I’ll shine a spotlight on one of the less obvious aspects: the important task of decorating our shared work space.

Leading up the event, we were scrambling a bit to make sure a conveniently located coworking office was booked for our trip that didn’t cost a bajillion dollars. We were able to snag one just in time and it was the kind of modest and blah space you might expect from a room that didn’t cost a bajillion dollars. To be clear, functionally it was completely fine but it was missing some flavor, especially as a space for us to be working together in person for the first time.

So, thanks to ingenious use of the coworking space printer, we got to work infusing the space with the proper Funkin’ spirit: fresh fan art and Dave’s Very Nifty and Professional presentation deck went up on the walls to inspire and remind us of why we were there. Our “office” may have been temporary but it felt better once we put in some effort to make it our own.

Can’t share most of the wall decorations, unfortunately, since it’s full of secret stuff, so instead here’s a photo of whiteboard jokes.

The decorating wasn’t a big deal. It was just something that naturally fell into place. Of all the events of that week, of which there were many, this is one of those easygoing memories that manages to stick out in my mind more than most. Maybe because day-to-day thoughts and actions have a way of revealing more than grand gestures. So after spending a week working together in person, here’s what I’ve learned about how the Funkin’ Crew rolls:

1. The details matter a lot.
2. They put a great deal of care into their work
3. They care about the people they work with.

And that’s pretty darn impressive, from this industry veteran’s perspective

fanart of week - HeyIce

by ninja_muffin99

this week is a bit of a self indulgent pick... it's BF and GF and RITZ!!! from newgrounds game... RITZ

Ritz is a game I made at the beginning of 2020, the same year that we first made FNF! I did programming, and Kawaisprite did the music for it, it was the first project me and him worked on together! So the light headcanon is that Ritz is BF's brother since me and Isaac are his fathers lol. It's very self indulgent to share dis art... but also.... the artwork is very good and cute!!! MKMaffo (artist / Ritz' mama) was also working on Ritz mod WAAAAAAAAAAAAY back in 2020... before Funkin' modding was crazy!!! I used her sprites as fake leaks and whatnot for laughs and lols, so also shoutouts and lov to maf

I especially like Ritz hiding away when bf/gf are kissing... that bit is awesome...

gf meets bf's brother by HeyIce

go to HeyIce's newgrounds page NOW!!!!

lil tease

by ninja_muffin99

I'll debrief a smidge about some stuff we r close to wrapping up on without spoils

over past few months we've had some coding assistance with some very particular and specific visual work, and this week we are aiming to put a nice little bow on it!!! The person working on it, I stumbled across their work online, and found their stuff to be VERY impressive! Turns out, the super cool impressive work they did was made in Haxe! I ended up contacting them, and they were down to work with us on this lil venture! To give a smidge of specifics about their credentials, they are studying for some PhD level work, so you can be assured that the work they put into FNF is VERY delicious and tasty and awesome. Past few months has been on and off with them, as they balance their studies and other things, as well as learning their way around how certain things in HaxeFlixel work. What they worked on is something me and Dave wanted in the game since 2021... and damn does it feel good to finally see it in action, working and looking not just how we imagined it, but exceeding our expectations with it!! We are a noticable chunk closer to having our brains put into video game form and things. It's been very nice and pleasant to work with them, and hoping the next batch of work we toss at them can be implemented even faster with what they now know about haxeflixel!!! thats all I will tease for now about it, hopefully the vague details are enough to satiate and let people know that certain things we are working on with funkin is in MORE than capable hands, I like to hope that me and dave have a good eye at scouting out and picking people to work with!!!

this work hopefully is very visually impressive, so we are keeping it under wraps until either closer to update, or until the update itself!!! bwah!

blog brain

by ninja_muffin99

we started the FUNKIN blog about 9 months ago, and I like to hope have our brains starting to get wrapped around the postings, where it succeeds, where it fails, so now I like to hope we are starting to brew with where it goes from here!

of course one of the main things is to have a general revamp of the FUNKIN.ME website! I wrote it all solo when it started, and maintainted it heavily in the beginning when resources were stretched very thin, as well I like to hope it helped get me out of a work slump, where along with the weekly meetings we have, I also had a PURE weekly duty that I could reasonably achieve each week or so. NOW we have more resources to stretch, more people helping us with admin work, devops type work, etc. So we've been slowly brewing on how to go about SITE IMPROVEMENTS. Nothing concrete set in stone just yet, but ideas are cooking again with it all, to hopefully make it something that everyone keeps an eye on each and every damn time we post! that is all

outro text

by ninja_muffin99

another cute lil postings of blogs! I believe the last blog posting was about 2 weeks ago, and I feel that's definitely a muuuch easier distance of time to handle and do blog postings! I do generally handle most of the blog stuff on the day that it's due, rather than slowly build and accumulate blogs over the week, so it's same sorta saturation of work in the day, I suppose it not being on a hard week-by-week schedule is nice, nice to have a break week to have PURE focus on week of work rather than blog posting day, and lets people settle down to write if wanted/needed!

We will see how we feel in two weeks though, lol!

SONG OF WEEK:

we wrote a small handful of blogs about the funkin gang out here in Toronto earlier this month, but me and Dave have been so damn busy, that I never got around to working on blogs and writing up anything else! So here's a few blogs from earlier this month we wrote that we are finally getting out heheh.

Phantom Says: Workin in Toronto!

by phantomarcade

Yup, what the title says. Hung out w Kawa n Sunni n Eric n Cam, shit was cash money. Busy animating rn, ttyl

-PA

Funkin' In Toronto continued...

by ninja_muffin99

allo everyone. Last blog I believe we mentioend that we had a handful of our crewmates here in Toronto!!!

I will seperate it out into two sections.... how the OFFICE work turned out, and how it's turning out now! Dave is still at my apartment workin with me!!! Wahoo!!!

HOW DID THE OFFICES GO???

About at the beginning of August, we had some of our crew here, as mentioned. It was a smidge of the ADMINISTRATIVE crew / help, and also Eric! Towards the end of the week we ended up getting Dave to come from Philly too!! We had two offices during the week. For the Mon-Thurs, we had a small little room that juuuuust barely fit 5 of us by the end of the week. There was a cute little TV in the room, which we used to project up and have Notion up as a bit of a "digital whiteboard" of sorts, to organize our tasks. Through the week we all aimed to be there at about 9-10AM, which was VERY different for me, but a welcome change. It's weird to say, but it felt like.... an actual job.... in a good way!!! I've had two jobs my whole life, grocery store, and Friday Night Funkin'. Working from home has it's benefits for sure, but it does take a certain discipline to have a normal schedule for yourself in your day, that I don't seem to have just yet! It felt very refreshing, and after the theatre meetup, I was really in the mood to get back into FNF work.

We got a LOT of our biz and administrative internals reorganized and whatnot, along with a decent handful of programming work outta the way and bug fixxins and whatnot.

It was fun showing the team around TORONTO and was nice broad.... TEAM BUILDING WAHOOOO!!!!! That may seem cringe to say... but it really does damn matter WHO you work with, and if you are happy to work with 'em.

ANYWAYS the funkin CREW toronto meet was all nice and lovely and at the end of the week we all got matching purple shirts from UNIQLO, the funkin crew uniform begins...

CLASSIC PHANTOMARCADE AND NINJAMUFFIN99 GRINDS

Once the smoke cleared, it ended up being just me and Dave working in my apartment now. We kept the 9-5 habit... except now we are on the 9PM-5AM schedule! HOWEVER we are getting a DAMN lot of work done. One of our major features of the update is almost wrapped, which was REALLY on our todo list for a long ass time. It truly feels like a large block of what we have left is closer and closer. monster energy, la croix, nicotine gum, and tim hortons double doubles keep this damn game afloat. During the day me and dave will hit the sunlight a bit, and do some chores, etc. etc. Life been upside down!!! There's a few DDR machines in Toronto that we've been hunting down, and those are our R&D missions.

FAN ART OF WEEK - Mimyko

by ninja_muffin99

this week I am picking da pic of the week... and I pick..... PICO MAID!! by Mimyko

idk where the origin of Pico maid comes from but everytime I see it, it just feels correct. Mimyko has made this particular Pico very cute and awesome and lovely! I was actually looking at Mimyko's stuff from another art piece on Newgrounds, and then saw Pico maid in sidebar and had to toss it some rep this week.

Pico maid...ah by Mimyko

Head to Mimyko's page on Newgrounds for more awesom art!

a few things about toronto

by procgenkawa

• I was too shy to say hi to anyone at the Newgrounds meetup but it was really cool to watch happen! everyone is so creative and cool as hell!
• i will never view pigeons the same way again though, thanks for nothing /j
• Streetcars are very cool and the service is pretty good! Support your local public transit!!
• I thrifted a very good shirt in Kensington Market, and in general I recommend hanging out in that neighborhood a whole lot! There was lots of good food and crafts and thrifting, exactly the kind of stuff I like!
• it was neat to run into big festivals about immigrant/diaspora communities, and that happened a lot!

tickets, please

by procgenkawa

The thing about a big project is that there's just...a lot to do! It's so easy to get lost in the sauce of what's in the air and who's waiting on you for what, or to spend too much time focusing on something that wasn't even that important! It's really easy for something to stall because you don't know what needs to happen next to make it real, etc.

Wise sage Sakurai [1] presents a quick overview of the solution most PROFESSIONAL GAME STUDIOS use: a ticket system!

Funkin has tried this a few times in the past, but if no one is tending to the ticket list, it's easy to forget to move them forward and track them as you go. There can also be random mental hurdles to using a tracking tool, because all our brains are funky like that. Luckily, they have me now, and since I'm usually not directly touching game content creation [2] I can be the one making sure this is all up to speed as one of my major responsibilities!

We're using Notion for this, as ninjamuffin mentioned - it works well for my brain, and I like that I can also make general pages-full-of-notes (for things like documenting how to test the game) and calendars (for holidays and time off) that are really trivial to link inside each individual ticket.

Sunni [3] and I jammed on making the Notion board for the team while the others cranked out content and programming improvements, making it easy to use and pulling together information that had been scattered to the winds and hard to find before, and I'm so hype to see how it'll help everything else go way smoother!

[1] If you're interested in the world of professional game design and development at all, we at Funkin can't recommend Masahiro Sakurai's channel of bite-sized gamedev wisdom enough!! We refer to it a lot around here! [2] Remember, I'm not musician extraordinaire kawaisprite! I'm Kawa, an employee who got here at the start of the year to iron out stuff like this! [3] Sunni is one of the wise sages at Windflower Games https://windflowergames.com - bizdev and production experts for hire!

outro text

by ninja_muffin99

here is the funkin blog about toronto! as im writing this, me and dave are likely nearing the end of the Toronto work hustle. We did a lotta crazy work and all shoutouts to hatsune miku shoutouts shoutouts we got da gooncave setup and shiiiiit we (I) am getting obsessed with lil miku toys and art prints, there was FanExpo here in toronto last week so I gooned out and got some nice lil miku art and figures heheh

SONG OF WEEK:

Hello everyone welcome to Funkin' WEEKLY-ish blog!!! Bit light blog this week since there's a busy week ahead of us! But wanted to share some words and thoughts of what we're up to this week!!! zoo wee mama!!!

Quick Update on Portal

by Shingi✨

So over the past week there were roughly 55 more Backers added to the Portal, and nothing broke which is pretty fun.

This week though we plan on adding 20x the number of Backers spread throughout the week so if you're checking your emails one of these days, don't be surprised to see an email from Funkin Kickstarter about your credentials and access details!

Anyways, sleep deprived as usual so time to take a quick nap and wake up bright and early to make sure the rest of the Portal onboarding is a success!

FUNKIN' IN TORONTO

by ninja_muffin99

WE HAVE SOME CREW HERE IN TORONTO!!!

We have

• ME
• ERIC
• KAWA (NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH KAWAISPRITE... LOL)
• SUNNI

hopefully in next few days we can get dave out here

we spent a smidge of coin to rent out a little shared office wework type office space, and the benefits are already pretty damn fruitful, ESPECIALLY with kawa and sunni here to help organize things in person! When me and Dave are in real life, we often spend time on working on GAME THINGS that benefit from realtime communication and chatting with each other in real life. With Sunni and Kawa, there's a LOT of very fruitful organization things that we've put off / neglected that are already being sorted out immediately and nicely. It's very nice....

Starting the day really felt like going to a real ass job. Maybe to others it may seem tiresome and eye rolling, but for me, I've worked from home all my life, and over past year I've just worked in my little basement apartment with just myself! It's very nice to have a schedule of work, with people who show up and talk to and whatnot. Nice to go to lunch with each other!! Maybe one day we will have Funkin' HQ somewhere.... Funkin' North branch downtown Toronto....

Progress for the week is already going pretty damn well though!! There's an arcade around the corner a bit and it has DDR, so you all better believe that we are having a company evening there for research!!! bwahahaa!!!

Fanart of teh Week

by phantomarcade

Now this one is only FNF loosely, but this just really grabbed my eye recently.

Creamjuicer69's Pico's School piece is just so awesome. So chunky and stylized, I just adore these kinds of works where you know the artist was goonin imaging and daydreaming about the scenario.

Being a huge fan of NG growing up, I was always immersed in fan-made Pico stuff, yet never played the OG game until around the time I nabbed Pico for the 3rd level I was planning for FNF to make w the team. After that, I feel super in love with it as the one Tom Fulp game I never played and day dreamed about it non stop.

BASICALLY, I just really adore when I can notice someone else has that deep autism for something, and it results in bringing a world to life. I dunno how else I can really say it, ya know?

CreamJuicer69

They've been posting a lot of goodies lately, so be sure to peep the sauce that makes the meal delicious. -PhantomArcade

closing thoughts for the week

by ninja_muffin99

As mentioned before we're light on blogs this week, today I have big pile of real life work ahead of me lolol!!!! Hopefully a small blog is better than no blog!!! But as I watch Eric get coding next to me, and Kawa and Sunni organize our INTERNALS and all that.... it makes me thirst to get real ass work done!!! Not that writing blogs is NOT real work.... but do need to get into work brain!!! We have an office this week!!! Gotta make all the use I can outta this for the week!!! wahoooooo!!!

SONG OF THE WEEK:

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!

hello everyone... apologies for missing blog from last week!!! Last monday I was spending a lot of the day travelling, I'm in Philly at the Newgrounds office with PhantomArcade! Trading back the work trip together after he came to Canada. As of writing, I have another week left here, but I will hop back over soon, since I have some personal things to take care of back home!!! But then I also want to aim to be back in philly in a few weeks!!

anyways.. here is bloggs

in philly

by ninja_muffin

(written may 23 2023) hello everyone... this weeks blog post is intentionally delayed!!! On Monday I had a flight and travels from Toronto to Philly to work physically with PhantomArcade!

We even delayed our weekly Monday meetings into today, Tuesday! So today we got all updated on each others work, so that's why we waited til today to post blogs!!!

Anyways enough cope. Trip went alright and we are generally hitting the ground running. I went through a bunch of mail that Dave has had lying around addressed to the company that he didn't want to open... bwah!!! Payroll mischief!!! Healthcare bullshit! Taxes! Dental!! Just a buncho dipshit paperwork like that, but we got a cute little scanner and archived em, so that we can use the Newgrounds office industrial paper shredder and watched it eat a lot of paper. Anyways, looking forward to the next few weeks of work for us, me and Dave's work towards the end of his Canada trip, really hoping to pick up some of that momentum and get cookin pretty much immediately! Unfortunately the AC at the Newgrounds office is busted... and it's been gettin sweaty here... but work shall continue....

Phantom Says: Tame the Wilderness

by Phantom Arcade

Hello NEW YORK!!!!! ARE YOU READY TO ROCK?????

Nah im just kiddin, no concerts here. Not yet anyway. Just another friday night blog post. Been a minute since my last one, but I'm not too into giving updates often since I want to avoid talking too much about the art that should be speaking for itself. However, the blog is here so we can reach the die enthusiasts of the project in these dark, update-less times, and shine a bit of hope in the long wait. So, let's dig into what we can.

In general, it feels like the wind finally fills our wings. The pace of late has been brisk, and consistent. That's not to say there aren't shortcomings we'd still like to fix, but I think I just look around lately and I see that there's an entire ecosystem that's just running, and I like it. I see that every bit of planning, every bit of direction, and generally every bit of non-art work I did to get things where they are has paid off. Funkin is a team effort brought to life, and MANAGED by a swath of people. And really as a director, I may know what I want in a creation, or a scene, or a vibe or atmosphere or gameplay... but I think it's really shone through lately how Newgrounders arm n arm keep each other afloat.

When I told Cam long ago I felt like things could be more orderly, it was him who self-actualized on finding a project manager. And now I can't imagine life without Kawa helping us out. I'm able to request what I need and see it come to life through the pipelines we've created in ways that're more satisfying and sustainable than they were even just a few months ago. Yet we're still small enough of a team and the work is manageable enough to where there's still infinite room for rogue ideas and randomness. Every ounce of the project is still able to feel personalized on a larger scale thanks to the management, and that makes me look around and just love our staff more everyday.

It feels so fucking weird to call people 'staff'. Though I guess that's the word? I'd say friends but like, I'd take a bullet for my friends. But these guys, I mean I like em a lot, but I wouldn't take a bullet for em.

Honestly though if a barrel was pointed at me, I'm not even sure I'd take a bullet for my friends. I feel like human reaction would be to chicken out. I mean like, I'm skin n bones from drawin all day, the bullet would pass through me anyway. I guess I could slow it down? I mean I guess it really depends on the thickness of the friend....

But hey, just because I wouldn't take a 12 gauge to the brain doesn't mean these dudes aren't the dopest fucks in the world. Everyone here is chill, real recognizes real.

Anway... Catch you next time! -Phantom

Oh also

Breath of the Wild is fucking amazing, it's the ultimate after-work game. There's so much shit to do in it that while you could play it all day, it just makes for such a great unwind after a long ass day. My contrarian ass clowned on it when it came out since it looked mid, and people were gassing it so hard. People saying it was better than Ocarina drove me insane, but I've learned the error of my hater ways.

People always bitched about no-dungeons, but like... even though it sounds like a cop out, the overworld really is the dungeon... It just doesn't feel that way since there's billions of solutions to every issue you can face. People also bitch about weapon degradation, but that too I've found makes it so you use a HUGE variety of weapons, so combat ends up feeling super varied. Plus it plays into the scavenging / survival aspect where you're constantly trying to live off the land.

The combat too, holy fuck. The game essentially have WITCH TIME in it??? WHat the fuck? No one told me that!!!! And the game has contextual dialogue?? Like, if you discover a village at night, they'll acknowledge you're new + it's night. People even react to if you're carrying certain shit or not.... it's fucking awesome.

blog fixings

by ninja_muffin

last night (as of may 24th) i was trying to fix up and create a few new features for our funkin blog bot. Unfortunately that sucked up my night, and I ended up falling asleep on the newgrounds office couch for a few hours until we all went home at 6AM.... I will keep banging my head onto the wall.... also yesterday I fixed the lights in the conference room.... pico shines bright once again...

KICKSTARTER PINS / POSTERS INCOMING

by ninja_muffin

a few days ago, me and dave met with our boy COBY who is handling the fulfillment for us for our kickstarter PINS and POSTERS tiers!!! We already seen the posters print final... and now he came by the Newgrounds Office to show us and give us a big bag of finished samples of the PINS!!!! They look and feel pretty damn perfect... so with the finals in his hands, it should all be out the door and begin shipping in a week or two!!! People are finally getting their pins!!!

Very soon we also want to have our kickstarter shirts begin manufacturing and all that, will keep you all updated!!!

Fanart of teh Week - HighwayBlues

by Phantom Arcade

Fanart pick of the week, for me, gotta be HighwayBlues

Chillin with pals is what's up, any piece that shows off the characters hangin out as though it's just every day as usual, that's a fav.

Plus, HighwayBlues has been chillin out on NG pretty consistently since '21, ya love to see a familiar face.

HighwayBlues.newgrounds.com

We're always peepin' through art on NG, so if you're postin, especially with tags... we'll prob see it!

closing thots fo week

by ninja_muffin

here's another lil blog for the week.... sorry about the delay!!! But keep in mind that when we miss blog posts.... it's usually out of being crazy busy with other things!!! Rather than us being lazy!!! Keep in mind that other companies often have people dedicated to social media... blog postings... sharing fanarts... all of that!!! On top of the work we do we try our best to keep up with a Funkin' blog!!! I don't wanna feel like a cuck and apologize over blog all the time though, we know that we are workin' !!! And that the blog is fun!!! Anyways I'm still in Philly for another week, and I'm looking to FINALLY finish up the lil part of the project that I've been on and off working on since 2021.... things are going nicely...!!!!

SONG OF WEEK

I couldn't figure out what to title this blog post. I got a tiny lil infection or somethin on my insides and the doctors gave me antibiotics, so that's why this one is called pills edition. (nothing dire btw thanks for asking)

blog is day late... but it's nicer than when the blogs were on Friday when they would slip friday, and be released on monday, a whole 3 days later!!! Now they are just a day late when I slip on them teehee

philly upcoming

by ninja_muffin

cant remember if i mentioned it or not, but next week I will be pullin up to philly to meet with dave and work with him out of the newgrounds office for two weeks or so. we r trying to shout at isaac kawaisprite to come thru also... lol!!!

more math....

by ninja_muffin

im at the point with this lil feature where da math is juuuuuuuuuuuust slightly over my head... but juuuuuuuust slightly within my reach.... it's all a matter of banging my head against the wall with it, and then the feature will be COOKED. Along with that, I do want this feature to be NICELY INTEGRATED into the game's code and all that, so that modders and whoever can easily look at it, and understand how to use it and customize it however pleased, since WE will definitely want the same thing for base game itself! We want to be able to customize and use this feature!

Kickstarter backend + t-shirt stuff

by ninja_muffin

the little kickstarter backend cooked up by Shingi seems to be making pretty damn good progress!!! I believe we aimed to be done before the end of May, and I think it's looking to be the case! I think what we are going to do is slowly roll things out to people, specifically t-shirt backers!!! Then slowly roll it out to all the other backers!!! So finally T shirt surveys will go out!!! Wahoo!!! Apologies for long ass delay... but it does finally feel like we are getting all of our shit together. Again, this also accomodates for things like NAME CHANGES!!! SO for anyone asking about that, it will come in this nice fancy system!!!

Kickstarter simply does NOT accommodate for things like this, and there WILL be future indie game developers who run into the same exact issues as we do, but will be left with either dealing with it themselves, or going to something like backerkit. According to backerkit pricing (https://www.backerkit.com/pricings), a campaign like ours which raised a little over $2,000,000 with 58,000+ backers, their fee is $27,850! So we would much prefer to use that money we saved by NOT going with them, and creating a system that hopefully any Kickstarter campaign in the future can use, absolutely free of charge. That is the IDEA at least. BackerKit is all nice with their wording, but we will flat out say it. Kickstarter's system is pretty shit, and straight up needs fixing. Things like BackerKit should not need to exist! They should be built right into damn Kickstarter!! But oh well. I will continue to trigger their DDOS protection every time I want to export the backer list. Rant over...

the kawa situation....

by ninja_muffin

the title is purposefully more ominous than it actually is lmao

just wanted to clear up something i see ON-LINE!!

KAWA is our PRODUCER / PROJECT MANAGER for The Funkin' Crew!!! They help us with a billion things administrative related, and REALLY help oil the whole machine and keep it going NICER THAN EVER BEFORE!

KAWAISPRITE is Isaac Garcia, the musician for Friday Night Funkin' !!! He is awesome and makes the best music you have ever heard!

They are NOT the same people!!!! I see on twitter some people get confused a bit about it when Kawa writes a small little blog post or something like that! Just wanted to clear air a bit lol

fanart of da week - BePixel

by ninja_muffin

da fanart this week is by BePixel

they been around da block wit FNF related things... but I knew of em way back when they just joined Newgrounds in mid 2021!!! It's very cool to see them improve how they have!!!

this art is 'senpai blasted' and it's pretty damn awesome and stylish piece. I am a sucker for well done glitch effects like that too. Nothing overdone... damn class act that BePixel....

follow them on Newgrounds BePixel.newgrounds.com

if you want your art featured, post it on Newgrounds with the tags fnf or friday-night-funkin, and we will hunt em down!

closing thots

by ninja_muffin

closing thots for the week is that it has been a week where mostly everyone has been pretty heads down and working, nothing too crazy or scandalous but that's okay. There will never be a creative project where every single week there's something awesome and crazy epiphany that happens each week. Everyone is doing their work nicely and making good progress teehee

to end it off, i will recommend the movie BLACKBERRY! Matt Johnson is one of my fav people ever and he makes all my fav things ever.... specifically Nirvanna The Band... It's extremely well done, and I really hope it makes it's money back and all that and is very nice success for them! I saw it on Saturday, and Matt did a QNA afterward in the theater I saw it at here in Toronto! The actual company Blackberry / Research In Motion was created in Waterloo, which is basically the same city as Kitchener, which is where I lived for the early days of FNF development! As Canadian... it's always nice to get some rep lol...

anyways GO WATCH BLACKBERRY IN THEATERS NOW!!!

SONG OF THE WEEK

HELLO EVERYONE, over the weekend... was Pico Day on Newgrounds!!! I hope everyone had fun lil weekend, there's a lotta damn awesome contributions... so go check em out NOW.

Upcoming trip stuff

by ninja_muffin

Dave had a good time in Toronto, and we got a lotta damn good work done I feel and got good MOMENTUM for ourselves going. Now it's back to my turn to travel over to Philly so I can work outta the Newgrounds office with all those fellas and hopefully... go even FASTER!!! That's all on that front though heheh. Need to book tickets and all that, and also want to try and help Kawaisprite get to philly too... his ass needs outta Arizona NOW

math stuff

by ninja_muffin

past week+ I been doing a lotta damn math.... soon you all will see the fruits of labour.... it's work that I've wanted to do since late 2021, and finally I'm getting it cooked up and it's coming along nicely.... I'm still unsure if any mod has implemented a similar feature, but once the update is out, 100% its like... every mod WILL implement what I've been working on heheh

thats all for now

new day for weekly blog posts... MONDAY!!!

by ninja_muffin

I feel like each time I neglect weekly blog posts on the Friday, it eventually always slips into the Monday, since that's both when we have our weekly crew meetings where we all update each other on our work, and since it's after the weekend, which most of the time I spend with my gf!

SO

I think the NEW official day of week for weekly blog posts... IS MONDAY!!! I think it's easier for me to get cookin on it, and easier for me to stay consistent with it, although we will see how that goes hehe. Already we have a lotta damn work in the week!!! Buuuut I try to look at it as an exercise in discipline in a way, to try and slowly get more and more consistent with it and how it goes, as well as nicely keeping track for ourselves at what we get up to!

Funkin on a Monday night

by Shingi✨

Uhh, happy belated Pico Day everyone?

Soo, it's been a busy week as you can expect from these blog posts happening super late haha. My week was personally spent mostly working with the new person on the team on getting the Deployment for the Kickstarter portal up (finally!) It's been a long time coming and finally seeing it up has been a pretty cool sight (as i before the DevOps person prepares to kick my ass for my scuffed deployment scripts lol)

One thing that i've been thinking a lot about though is ARGs and interactive content outside of the medium it's in, and Friday Night Funkin'. I remember enjoying the Deltarune Sweepstakes a lot and how much fun the community had with that and I even remember mentioning wanting to do something similar for the Kickstarter Portal (with a couple of Funkin' Crew approved teasers of course) Something i've noticed though is that the community is already active and interacting outside the game in their own way through things like the (super active) Modding scene, the Roblox stuff (lol at that one roblox game though) and stuff like that. I'm still considering doing it later on, but i dunno. I did try making a slightly cryptic tweet to gauge interest on whether mysteries and stuff like that would be something people are interested in but the reception was mild at best so i guess we'll see?

Anyways see y'all later!

thumbs up in progress

by ninja_muffin

for one of our upcoming levels (something that ISN'T coming out next update btw lol!) we laid out some groundwork. For this we are working with outside musicians of some sort.... top secret..... they are people we really damn love and respect, and we tossed them what we have so far, and they really loved it :3 essentially getting thumbs up from them that we are on the right track with it! There's a tale for another day with this level / music, that will likely be told by someone another day... but for now.... that awesome ass level is slowly moving along, on the backburner as we work on current update things!

funkin for the people

by Kawa

Something we've been thinking a lot about lately is like...what does it mean for Funkin to keep its underground, for-the-people vibes, but not let people with Bad Intent try to rip people off using the assets we've made? What things are open for people to riff on, what things are cool with fanworks-but-not-serious-profits? How do we spread the wealth amongst our collaborators while also having enough in the war chest to make all the ambitious things we wanna do?

Lots of stuff here i can't talk about in detail, but i wanna shout out the rest of the crew for being hella thoughtful about this stuff - it's hard, and it's always awkward as hell to talk money. but we're all aligned on wanting to see the cool shit y'all make while not letting gross people microtransact your fandom to death!

fanart of da week - BenzBT

by ninja_muffin

this week gon show off awesome little artwork from da iconic BenzBT!

they are required viewing for not just FNF fans, but art work appreciators in general!!! This one is awesome as fuk and cute af baby gf artwork.... we all lov benzbt in dis house... this is awesom....

follow them on Newgrounds BenzBT.newgrounds.com

if you want your art featured, post it on Newgrounds with the tags fnf or friday-night-funkin, and we will hunt em down!

closing blog thots fo week

by ninja_muffin

closing thoughts for the blog... I feel like I'm always apologizing for a late blog! I'm partially hard on myself with blogs, and other people can be too. For the most part, it really is trying to squeeze in extra work into an already overloaded brain for ALL of us. There was a time when we didn't even do blogs at all!!! I like to hope that no one holds it against us when we slip on blogs here and there. We are programmers, animators, and musicians... not writers!!! If it makes you all feel better about blog slippin or being lackluster... just know that on the weeks when we seem to skimp on blog posts... it means we either have had a super productive week, or very lazy slow week... and this week... was very productive!! bwah!!!! I'm rambling now!!!

SONG OF WEEK (AS CHOSEN BY KAWA!):

hello everyone welcome to da funkin weekly again!!!! Apologies for the mischief and posting on the Sunday today!!! I need a better habit for myself to write first thing on Friday morning to write a buncho blog posts!!! I got busy later in the day!!!

In anycase, it's been a pretty damn solid week of work I like to think!!! This blog will simply recount it... as always!!!

One thing I want to try to start doing is small lil community highlights, whether it's sharing a cool piece of fanart, or funny posts or memes or interesting videos.... I will share em below!

cross-class XP

by Kawa

yeah, there's a lot of stuff I've done directly for funkin this week - chatting with various wise sages, nudging admin things along, testing stuff for the kickstarter portal - but in my downtime, I've also been trying to learn a lil haxeflixel myself!! just slowly working through the dungeon crawler tutorial on the website with my own comments, nothing really even worth showing off. i hope after finishing the tutorial i can work on a very silly project for myself, and i'll let y'all know when that happens but don't hold ya breath!!!!

i don't view myself as a programmer per se - i'll never replace ninjamuffin or eric, they're real great! but i've done bits and pieces - my own projects in Twine, contributing to a big Typescript online event space, some database/SQL stuff in a past life. it's fun to occasionally gain the cross-class XP, get a bit more insight into how otherl mfs are thinking and doing, and just generally learn more and not get stuck in a rut!! i recommend it to everyone!

contractors refixin

by ninja_muffin

last week I mentioned getting contractors sorted out, and i have generally (with help of kawa filling out some paperwork for me cuz im lazy with paperwork) we are back on track with 2 of our programming contractors!!!

One of them is Shingi, who is continuing / finishing his work on the KICKSTARTER BACKEND!!! We are aiming to have that FINISHED at the end of May by the LATEST! Shingi is doing pretty dang good work on it!!!

The other is the person who was working on a bit of a secret task relating to the next update... they are Ravy! She has been re-contracted for various crazy devops type work, since we WILL need that infrastructure in place and working all good. I am complete noob with all that shit. She knows damn near everything about hosting and deployment and all that crazy fuss.... god bless em.... anyways as mentioned there's definitely a lot of work cut out for her, and she is damn good at it!!!! The current task they are working on to ease into things will be helping Shingi with DEPLOYMENT and all that, and helping us with some backend TESTING WORKFLOW work. Maybe Ravy will elaborate on how and what they will work on at a later date, but for now, thems the plans!!! Looking forward to having Ravy help with GAME related things for the people, whether it's helping figure out online multiplayer infrastructure, sharing network tech, leaderboards, or any other damn crazy task we need!!!

Over the past few years I personally have been on GAME PROGRAMMING, so all this other world of networking, hosting, and whatnot very much intrigues me!!! And it makes me happy to have these other programmer people around me that are super smart with it all and be able to work wit em hehe 🙂

On Cleaning Up After Yourself

by Eric

A lot of the work I spent developing over the past few months was focused on getting NEW features into the engine, and refactoring old stuff to be more extensible, but last month I looked behind me and realized I had left behind a mess, and almost all of the original game was basically unplayable, doh! I had to spend up until now going through and fixing shit! Then last week, when I was cleaning up and sending things to Cam, I realized I basically had gotten tunnel vision on the actual fixes, and should have been merging them into the main branch piece-wise, and now Cam has to review a month's worth of changes, double doh!

My mom gave me some good advice recently, the basic gist being to "Look for things you can do now to lessen the load on your future self." I've been trying to improve myself in this regard, in life and in my work. I keep hyperfocusing on the task in front of me, and I need to take the time to do those tasks that aren't necessarily fun to do, but are important and necessary to being an adult. Like this pile of dishes sitting on my desk, triple doh!

My main task for this week is pivoting back to the input system! I've got a friend helping me do playtesting and initial bugtesting (hi FoguDragon!) and you should hear more from us on that soon.

On Priorities and Developing Stuff

by Shingi✨

Dev work is one of those funny things where the creation of any functional software is a minor miracle, and game dev is probably even worse in that regards.

I remember when i used to pour through tons of books on software development, engineering and the dev process and hearing the adage that "95% of Software projects fail" and i'd always scoff at that notion. I mean I could make myself a cute lil app in a week or 2 by myself, why can't 5 people make a software in a year?

Then i started going out and making projects for friends and small businesses as a student. Oh boy, was that a trainwreck X-D (although to be fair it taught me a lot about working with other people and valuable lessons like being able to speak the language of the people you're working with - and not constantly spitting the latest jargon and technical crap that nobody except you really understands)

I think part of the reason why software (and especially games!) end up taking so long to complete and make work is due to priorities. Like the first thing is figuring out the difference between what you want to do and what you need to do to ship X product and that's just the start of it! Like a perfect example of this is current FNF - we actually have weekly dev related meetings and there's always this constant battle of being like "Okay, so there's this cool thing that if we do will make the Engine work better or make the dev work for Week ▇ easy as pie, but does that take priority over this scuffed Boyfriend glitch that's been there since week 5?". Stuff like this doesn't really have a correct answer because everything would be great to do, but when it comes to shipping an update certain compromises have to be made between balancing new stuff and fixing old stuff.

Also to close this off and show even i'm a dumbass: I had this vision for the Portal to do with certain Logistics stuff that i spent a long-ass time working on just to realize that it's better done manually! Doh!

tools thoughts

by ninja_muffin

over the past few months, I would even say over the past year, I think a LOT about WORKFLOW and TOOLS. Haxe is the coding language we use for the game, and support for it feels very grassroots and community oriented. It's very likely that if you write Haxe, you know a few people in the Haxe community. Maybe it attracts me a bit for that reason, reminds me of Newgrounds in a way! Similar to Newgrounds though, it simply won't have all the bells and whistles as the shiny popular kid on the block. I think about both a lot!

For any sort of work, the tools you use affect the quality and output you have. If you have a dull kitchen knife, then even simple things like chopping veggies can become tedious, and an unpleasant experience. Unfortunately Haxe has some of these dull edges, but it has sorta felt hopeless up until recently. It has felt like recently it's been within reach to change workflows however needed or pleased in terms of coding. It does feel like if something starts to get in the way, there's a solution of some kind.

One recent example is that the haxe vscode autocomplete has been acting fuckie for..... a long ass time.... at least a year or so. Eric coded up some crazy macro code for polymod stuff, but that makes the autocomplete for vscode shit itself. So now what is essentially one of the base essentials is... gone.... as if we're writing code in notepad. It was pretty painful to write code, not even tab completion! Eric got me woke on Github Copilot though (this is not an ad fuk you github !!!) and it has made programming... tolerable!!! Sometimes copilot can nail pretty much exactly what I planned to write, in which case, it can even work BETTER than autocomplete!!! So it balances itself out nicely. This example shouldn't be seen as an example of a solution, moreso a bit of an example of having something feel out of your control, and doing some jank bullshit workaround. We don't have the bandwidth to fix whatever crazy thing is going on in the Haxe language server for VS Code, we aren't smart enough for that!! I barely understand macros!!! But having little things like this able to be solved, it makes my brain feel good.

on blog writing

by ninja_muffin

ideally blogs CAN be short snippets, but there's definitely an expectation of them to be thorough and packed with info or thoughtfulness. Likely just an expectation from ourselves and what WE want out of not only OUR blog, but game blogs in general! We like it when game creators express themselves in more than a thread on twitter! But also it can seem daunting!

fanart of da week - Kor0kke

by ninja_muffin

this art is by Kor0kke on Newgrounds!!!

ever since they've joined Newgrounds I've always enjoyed seeing their work pop up in my feed! Very colorful and cute and awesome

Go toss them a follow on Newgrounds!!! https://kor0kke.newgrounds.com

If you want ur art featured... post it on Newgrounds!!! that's mainly where I personally will be browsing for art! (although sometimes I will stumble across somethin on twitter here and there hehe)

Phantom Says: Bye Bye Toronto!

by Phantom Arcade

Hello everyone.

Here in Toronto in the dead of night... there's some bittersweet news...

I'm outta here, fellas!

It's been an amazing time here with Ninjamuffin, Cam's been a great host. We got a decent amount done work wise, and even better than that... I think in this odd era of Funkin as we navigate a large scale multi-staff game production we're coming to find there's a lot of work that's beyond the normal "draw now code now". Don't get me wrong, daddy likey the draw now code now, but as much as it pains me to admit it.... thinking critically is important. I know, I know, tragic.

Jokes aside though, there really is more to running all of this than just hammering away. I think having a lot of discussions about the project irl, late night musings on various factors... it really does help. Maybe because the human element of being in person makes the follow and understanding of conversations different, or maybe because the proximity of each other means better focus.... I'm not entirely sure. But I think understanding your team well is good, and I feel like even though he was already a good friend, I understand Cam even more having basically lived with him for a month and a half.

Ideally, this could mean things like being able to work faster now that we have a clearer idea of each other's concepts, and using that info we gained in person even when we're remote again. Maybe it means with lingering ideas from one n other we're able to continue work remotely with a stronger idea of goals. Maybe odd end discussions now will end up having relevance when remote, and we'll already have answers and clarity we need. Basically, understanding someone better = good.

But honestly, fuck all that shit man. At the end of the day (or month n half lol) I had a fuck ton of fun. I wasn't cramped in a room all day, I wasn't ever bored, and I wasn't ever scrolling social media too long. Getting out, seeing a new country, playing games with a friend, working on art, discussing game design, cookin food, 3am walks, trying new stuff... it's everything I ever wished life could be since I started animating. Life in PA at Newgrounds has been a blessing since day 1 of animation giving me friends and fulfillment, and now I have trips like these offering the same feeling. It's everything a man could ever want....

Except for like 2 weeks ago when I fell off an electric bike n broke my ankle, that's kinda sucked. I miss being able to walk normal n like, go to Tim Horton's n shit. Or play 3DS / Vita on the street car. But ah, that's whatever. If a wizard said he could rewind time and I could either do this entire trip or NOT do it and my foot wouldn't be broken.... no question man, I'd do the trip a million times over.

Now it's back to PA, back to Newgrounds! Back to the lab again! Bye Toronto, bye CN tower! Bye Cam! -Dave

P.S. oh yeah and we got a lot of work done and focused on putting art assets in this week pog

closing thots

by ninja_muffin

I'll let dave sing us out with that one, aiming to have Friday be a blog day!!!!

SONG OF WEEK (chosen by Kawa!)

earlier today i participated in a local smash melee tourney for the first time ever and i didnt win any damn matches!! but it was an awesome time!! shoutouts da greenhouse in toronto!

more payday stuff and also taxes

by ninja_muffin

this week also got payroll sorted for 3 of our EMPLOYEES!! wahoo!!

and also everyone do ur taxes!!! we are doing ours!!

polish and playin

by ninja_muffin

hello everyone im doing my homework roght before class starts once again

this week was gettin things sorted out with dave again, i polished and FINISHED the puece of work i was on last week, i will call that a W and now i am onto fixins and shit!! work goin good and today i woke up at damn 6am, real hustlin hours

Sleep deprived on a Friday Night (Portal Stuff though, Yeay!)

by Shingi✨

It's already Friday? Again??? Sometimes i feel like time was designed just so that people can constantly be in a state of freaking out when it comes to deadlines.

On that note, this week is probably what i would call the calm before the storm: where everyone has been in their own little bubble working away on this and that in preparation for the final stretch. Although my own week productivity wise actually started late due to holidays and let's just say an incident with some "exotic food" that ended with me fighting for my life in the bathroom...don't worry, i'm still going to eat whatever weird dishes i see lol

That said, catching up on work using the remainder of the week i had on some Auth stuff i've been cooking and the general fixes and bugs for the system has left me sleep deprived AF. I'm actually not sure whether i'm actually typing this or dreaming that i'm working so let me cut this post short (with info and probably the actual soft launch details of the Portal next week?)

But before i go, enjoy some screenshots of the Portal. And for the Backer i picked to show off what the Info and Rewards looks like, you're a madlad for having 9 different FULL COMBO MEAL add-ons! Salute on that one!

Senpai in the featureless black void, what will he say

by Eric

The last week of March was really productive, but I don't know how to feel about this week. I've been trying to bring Week 6 up to snuff, which means reworking the dialogue system, and getting it to a place where I'm happy has been a slog. I was having various issues getting the cutscenes to display the way I wanted, and I ended up rewriting a big chunk of it. I simultaneously feel like I got a lot done and not a lot done at the same time. I know the work to make this code nice will make things easier to maintain in the long run, and that the modders will be happy to have this in place, but I just want to get it done so I can go back to fixing other stuff.

A new version of Haxe came out with a bunch of new features in it, and that's really fun. I really like safe navigation and null coalescing, it will make the code for handling json SO much cleaner. Shameless plug, if you are a programmer, check out my personal blog post about it.

contractor rush

by ninja_muffin

some of da contractors been finishing they programmin work.... so i been on and off trying to get their stuff sorted out!!!! nothin too glamourous just showbiz baby!!! im scared of paperwork!!!

closing thoghts for the week

by ninja_muffin

closing thoughts hermmmm.... lil bit of light week, dave was planning on heading back to philly but he is still in canada!!!! that mfer!!! but people like kawa have been on the grind this week as always. it is very relieving to be able to take a breather but still have things moving forward on the game!!

SONG OF THE WEEK: DO YOUR TAXES EDITION

hello everyone... welcome to the funkin blog for..... Friday!!! Actually posted on a damn friday!!! Yeehaw!!! Good handful of blogs... mostly written by me!!! bwahahah!!

fnf kickstarter / rewards roadmap

by ninja_muffin

back in 2021 I drafted up (and pretty much completed) a cute little trello page for all the FNF Kickstarter Rewards / Survey progress

it's easy to post updates to keep people informed, but as well as that it's also good to have a CENTRAL place where people can reference to each other, and point towards, as well as for US to reference and point towards!!!!

it's updated as of now, and alongside working on general updates and kickstarter things, we will keep this up to date as well and make sure to reference this in newsposts when we can!!!

the reason I didn't mention it before? i simply forgot!!! I whipped it up closer to the end of 2021, and things were getting damn hectic at that time. We were setting up company things, bank accounts, lawyer stuff, and kickstarter fulfillment fell to the wayside a bit unfortunately!

In any case, if you are a Kickstarter backer and want an easy to see visual roadmap of where things are at, take a peak here! There's details with each thing also!!!

Kickstarter Reward / Survey Progress

pin progress

by ninja_muffin

the pin / poster progress had to be halted for a week or two, but we're back on track now. The recent progress update is that we have "proofs" of the mass manufactured ones I believe!!! Before we've only had essentially "test pressings" type ones, but these ones are getting closer to the mass manufacturing!!

it does feel like damn inches away from being able to ship these and the posters... I do hope soon we are able to also begin shipping of posters which are produced domestically, opposed to the pins which are made in da big overseas factories!!! Hopefully by next progress update there's news on posters and such!!!

pet taxes

by Kawa

Buttertart (fluffy cat, she/her) and Winston (leggy dog, he/him) say hello from my girlfriend's family's house, even as I'm sneezing all the damn time!!!!

the dave and cam toronto report

by ninja_muffin

this week me and dave worked on some POLISH things for funzies, getting closer to the tail end of his visit to Canada, we are trying to get nice little routine together and working same times and whatnot. Not to sell him out too much, but he don't wake up til like 5PM! Bwah!!! That's okay though it gives me a bit of time in the afternoon to do lil errands and take time to MYSELF and whatnot. It's nice!!!

Making progress on things all the time, what we worked on this week was a bit of implementing things, and trying to get consistent work out of ourselves, and always on the grind to optimize our workflows and how we work. Lately I've been reading the book "Atomic Habits". There's a lotta self help books that either state the obvious, or give you some pseado bullshit that you don't care about or doesn't apply to you. So far this book is decent and good I will say!!! It's all about the tiny 1% improvements to things, that build up into large change as time goes on. And that feels like it's been the case over the past half year I'd say. Feels like the way we work slowly gets shifted via small changes, but comparing our work input/output from now vs. 6 months ago? Feels like different world! When I say WE I really do mean the whole crew around us. It's one thing to have talented people working on something, but it's another to be able to FULLY utilize them, and let them reach their potential as well. That's the showbiz with TEAM MANAGEMENT and shiiiiit. COLLABORATION. There's shit that's intuition, and shit that you gotta shove into your brain.

May sound like a broken record, but we really do try to keep an eye on how to improve our own workflows! Reading Atomic Habits is very reassuring and feels like we are on the right path of things.

As me and Dave are together in PERSON, and as we we pretty much the only people we talk to IRL for the past week or so, we've gotten our brains together on many topics especially relating to FNF and shiiiiit. It might not sound too meaningful, but making sure everyone is on the same damn page is VERY worthwhile. Often when you are working with friends it can come naturally, but as more complexities come into play, people start to see things differently, and if those things aren't kept in check, things get mismanaged and disorganized!!

the blog is for the team

by ninja_muffin

one of the thing with this blog is that IDEALLY there should be a wide variety of authorship going on in these blogs. Every once in a while Kawa or Eric or Shingi will post a blog about what they've been up to... but i want MORE.... I PERSONALLY want to see what their thoughts and opinions of their week of work, as well as just what topics interest them to write about. The first aspect of that is to have blogs be easily accessible to write which I think is checkmark emoji ✅

Another piece (which falls on me) is to get blogs posted consistently. It might be unpleasant to write a blog, only for it to be delayed for the planned weekly blog post!!! People like instant gratification!!! So getting blogs for the week out and released ON TIME I think is where I come into play. HOWEVER I think to kill two birds one stone, I think making it easy enough for ANYONE on the crew to essentially take the RESPONSIBILITY of the weekly blog. Maybe next week it can be Dave's turn to wrangle up everyone's posts! Maybe the week after, Eric can! And then each of them go through the PUBLISHING STEPS. In which case, I also need to make the PUBLISHING STEPS as easy and accessible as possible. Right now the workflow is:

• People write their blogs
• If they don't, I give a bit of a rollcall for blogs, IF anyone wants to write them
• On Friday, I get them all posted to the "queue" which is basically spitting the selected blogs from our discord channel into github via a discord bot (shoutouts discordeno)
• Close the github issues, so that it gets put into the ACTUAL queue.
• When the blog is ready, run the github action to post the blog!!!

It's a bit more fussy and complicated than that, such as writing the BASE post / intro to the blog. I need to get things like that sorted.

In any case, I DO want EVERYONE on the team to write blogs, and it takes more than just willpower and team spirit to get people to do it. Can't shove a square peg into a round hole! I think we can get there though. If you are on the team reading this.... I look forward to your future blog posts!!!

Phantom Says: Chiggin Newdle Shoop... sluuuuuurrrrrppppp

by Phantom Arcade

Hello, one and all! Each and everyone of you, yup, even you!

It's hard to believe my time in Canada is almost over, though that's probably from how it's been broken up. Between visiting San Fran and then this past week, I suppose the time skip feeling makes sense. This past week was the most unfun, the most dreadful... bed ridden sick as fuck.

An unfortunate risk travelling a bunch in densely populated spots; dirty nasty stupid ass sickness stuck it's claws in my body and ravaged my anus. Basically, it sucked. It was one of those good ol' fashion classic sicknesses. Just pure agony, waking up for medicine only, and back to sleep. No games, no movies. Just a haze of pain and sleep. Been a damn minute since I been through that typa deal, a sobering refresher lol. Tho, sarcasm aside, I suppose it's not the worst price to pay for having had a very nice and blessed trip seeing so many Newgrounders.

That being said, unfortunately it's really accelerated Toronto trip since it pretty much straight up deleted a full week of life. I'm not too happy about how it's messed up me n Cam's flow of sleep times, and general focus honestly, but even if this trip serves as setting a foundation for understanding Toronto rather than being a hardcore grind... I can accept that.

All n all, I think in general traveling is just good for the brain, no two ways about it. Traveling pulls you away from your usual routines, and especially if you're staying with a friend, you get to live in the shoes of someone else. Honestly, even with the money to technically facilitate nicer traveling, I've still been opting to just stay with pals, no matter how cramped it is or how much agency it deprives me. One on hand, I'm too lazy to book hotels and figure out transportation, and on the other hand it really is just good to have that closeness to people. You really get to live when you have no option but to just BE with someone, have them show you around, travel w em. Almost form a small temporary new life just planning your days around what you and your host will do together. It can really open up new ways of looking at a lot of things you've probably never thought of.

I always really loathe having to travel, and usually put it off as much as I can... but when I finally bite the bullet (or am straight up forced lol) I always am super thankful, and usually don't want the trips to end. I'd really recommend to any artists reading this, especially if you're 19 or 20, try gathering up juuuuuust enough cash to visit a good friend you trust and see a new city. Rough it, spend frugally and enjoy the city together, or wilderness! Whereever!

The other fun part of travelling: limited games. It's a good opportunity to focus on select titles! Teeheehee.... This trip, what's the focus been? A last minute e-shop grab: Pushmo! Though I played Stretchmo years ago when it was new unaware it was the last in the trilogy, I'm returning to the origins now to complete Pushmo. And honestly, it's crazy how far the mechanics advanced between games. But, just as I felt like Pushmo was too simple, the late game has really been fucking my ass. By the veeeeeery end, you begin to miss the mid-challenge puzzles. The very very end game Pushmo puzzles are a good insight into how far you can push a mechanic in a game, they're fucking devious... one puzzle can take an hour or more if you get stuck... and the solutions sometimes come from an hour of pulling your hair out and moving a piece into a spot you only accidentally tried after nearly slamming the 3DS against the wall...

Though maybe playing that after work when Cam's asleep is contributing to mishmash work hours.... yaarrrhhggg!! -Dave

P.S. THE MARIO MOVIE FUCKING ROCKS!!!

closin thots fo week

by ninja_muffin

cute lil closing thoughts for the week.. hrm hummm.... i am glad this is finally being posted on a friday again... i don't want to jinx it bwah hahah!!! it's about 11PM friday night and me and dave are just chippin away at workin and last minute blogging!! looking forward to next week where we 100% will post exactly on friday right guys!

SONG OF THE WEEK

HELLO FUNKER FREAKERS!!!

As I am writing this late post on monday night west coast NA time.... me and dave are waiting for our flight back to canada!!! it was rainy for the for the first few days of GDC, with a pretty nasty storm on the way home, but afterwards it was the california i damn expected to see, nice sunny days wahoo!!! I live in a basement apartment in toronto, so i get very little sunlight unless I'm heading out to work out of the local Toronto Public LIbraries... it can be rough out here!!! Gotta eat up my vitamin Ds like candy when I'm in canada!!! The sun is nice and is very rejuvenating... anyways here is the post!!!

Of Backend codes, balancing loads and creative modes

by Shingi✨

Hi hi everyone! It's ya anxiety riddled gremlin Shingi, barely surviving to write this update.

This past week or so has been like challenging one Superboss after another for me personally, although I did manage to wrangle it towards the end and actually did a couple of productive things towards the Backend!

The Big One: Status of shipping on the Music tiers should be more or less up and running by the time you might be reading this, so you'll get to spend less time bothering all of us and NeedleJuice records on where your stuff's at! Other tiers are still in the pipeline pending more collaboration with the funky suppliers we're working with, but those should be on the system sooner rather than later.

Other stuffs: the Backer portal will pretty much move from Dev to Testing on the first week of April, and once I manage to polish the system off a lil bit more and make it public we'll be going live! Hopefully it won't be like the launch of every MMO ever! So if you see an email from Funkin Kickstarter in the near future, that's probably your invite to access da Portal.

March and April sure seem like they're going to be a busy period for the whole team, whew! Hopefully you'll enjoy what we're cooking.

This week has tuckered me out so no crazy rants from me (even though I want to), but I'll totally say this one thing I probs will expand on in the future: Make stuff and publish it! Even if you think you're young or nobody will like your stuff it's even more important!!! Like I know Ninjamuffin and PhantomArcade shill Newgrounds a lot but it's totally for a reason! Whether Mods, music, art, writing, YouTube videos or even posting kawaii edits of you spinning a pen - that's shit's powerful and you never know when or how it will open doors for you.

Okay, rant over. I need to sleep and regain enough energy to freak out and stress all day. Peace out!

gdc lil recap stuff

by ninja_muffin

this week me and dave and kawa went to game developers conference and it was pretty fun wahoo!

the rundown was we have some new biz people we r gonna be workin with, so figured itd be nice to see em in person! as well as seeing kawa in person and some of the other people we work with!! i find it very enriching to meet people and talk to them in real life. as time goes on i feel im becoming less of a dweeb that can barely talk to someone who can at least hold a conversation…. big moves!!!

my official gdc rankings kawa: shorter in person than I though our lawyer man: longer hair than I thought and also taller than I thought da biz people we are working with: very blessed and very nice.... cute lil story, in jest I said "we are scared of people" and very genuinely and concerned one of them asked me what made me so scared, like a damn mother would. God bless their souls, very much looking forward to working with them :3 distance from san jose to san fran: longer than I thought. we was drivin 1+hr there and back every damn day... puffballs united: met that mf and he got the jokes!!! he's going places!!!

overall recap is that GDC was success, part work, and part refreshing break a bit. the vitamin D will very much help as me and dave go back to my canadian dungeon and work away on the game for the next few weeks, before he goes back to philly!!!

the other extras of the week

by ninja_muffin

when the blog is late from friday, instead of working on it through the weekend, I try to wait til monday when we have our weekly meetings, so that I can try to catch up on other peoples happenins!!! I will post a few of em here!!!

Secret contractor

One of our contractors that are working on part of the game is pretty much done their work, and has a few days left of their contract!!! Can't say what exactly they worked on, but my hint is that it's one of the KS stretch goals!!!

correction: what they worked on was a very core game feature... but NOT a stretch goal per se... i was mistaken and thought it was something on that initial stretch goals list!! once it's revealed maybe you all will understand how I got myself confused heheh

What they've done has been mostly prototyping phase and whatnot, but we more or less have working proof of concept for ourselves, and they did pretty damn good work!!! They have been very pleasant to work with, and I will definitely find more contract work with em for Funkin stuff... bwahahaha!!!

Eric stuff

Maybe Eric can elaborate a bit more on bug fixings and whatnot he did... but that's mostly what he's been up to in the past week!!! Things like the story mode menu and generally playing through story mode has been busted up, so I think he's been cleanin up that fuss!!! It's lookin good heheh!!!

youtube testing thingie

by ninja_muffin

this is merely a funny test to see if the youtube embed stuff works nicely... lol!

here is stickerbush symphony!

this is a nice lil feature that makes it easier to link youtube videos... it automatically gets the youtube link via regex and then converts it to the proper shortcode type shit all ez ez, just a blog update!!!

should make it easier / more pleasant to write / update blogs and stuff!!!

closin thoughts fo tha week

by ninja_muffin

closing thoughts for the week is that blog stuff been a bit back in my mind for funzies, each week that goes by where I miss our little arbitrary "friday deadline" makes my bones ache and quake!!! so it's feeling more and more pleasant to get all the stuff figured out where it's easier to make these blogs now!!!

SONG FOR THE WEEK

the wip title for this post was "basically springtime" but those of you who noticed.... we missed a blog post or two!! Apologies for that, things have just been a bit hectic for past few weeks!!! Blogs have been written in the weeks.... just haven't gotten to posting or anything like that.... I need to super streamline the blog posting process.... Right now there's a lotta manual busywork I gotta do whenever a blog gets posted... so making it so that I can just post everyones blogs...dats da dream... anyways... here's all the blogs you fools!!!

I keep the lights on

by Kawa

I support a Minneapolis-based indie record label, called Doomtree Records. Primarily, this means that if there's a Dessa show where I am, I move heaven and earth to go - but I also toss a few bucks to its Patreon every month. This means that I have a shirt with the phrase "I keep the lights on at Doomtree Records" on it.

I tell y'all this because it feels like my role at Funkin' is also about keeping the lights on. There's a weirdly large amount of just...stuff, that goes into running a business, into treating your collaborators right. A lot of bureaucracy as I alluded to with last week's BDG video, but also just...getting in touch with people, individually. Checking they're okay, supporting them, clearing the pathway for them to get the nonsense out of the way and do more of what they're best at and love.

Like electricity and Internet access, utilities that you don't necessarily think about until they're gone - I want to enable the rest of the crew, on a person by person level. And sometimes that means hounding someone to fill out a form - and sometimes that means having a heart to heart about how we show up for each other and support each other's badass art.

funkin in toronto

by ninja_muffin

this week PhantomArcade is visiting me in Toronto! After me making the trip to Philly a few times now, it's his turn to hop on plane so that we can physically co-work together and beat each other when we slack. This week was a smidge on the chill side as we get ourselves settled and I show him around the city a bit, but there's always damn good progress that gets made when we are together. I can't say what exactly we worked on... secret features!!! But I can say that it reminds me that Funkin' is one of my fav games visually and I feel blessed to work on it!! I love adding in all the crazy animated ideas that dave comes up with, and makes the game feel especially closer to a polished state.

and u know i hooked dave up wit da tims on the daily !!!!

Eric's Squashing Bugs!

by Eric

My current project is doing playthroughs of the whole game and trying to locate bugs. This is sadly really easy to do right now, Story Mode is practically held together with twine and duct tape right now.

I've succeeded in cleaning up a bunch of stuff but I'm dreading the prospect of touching Week 6, I think it legitimately hasn't been looked at in over a year and the dialogs are probably super fucked up.

I swear I'll work on inputs again soon(tm) I want a wide range of people to playtest it before it goes into the final game.

the redacted post

by ninja_muffin

a lil handful of the work I've done this week is lil secret teehee for secret features teehee. But I will still run down what I've been up to a bit

first few days of the week was to fix up somethin REDACTED related for one of our contractors. It was easy quick work so it was nice lil W for the beginning of the week heheh.

Then through the rest of the week was slowly poking around some of the code that Eric wrote related to REDACTED. He codes in a different way than me, and in general it's the classic thing of code being easier to write than it is to read. But anyways, I was parsing all the code into my brain to get to working on it and adding small lil (but essential) feature to it. I'm almost done that aspect, just need to finish up REDACTED part of it!

Since it's in my brain, once I end up doing more feature work on it, should be a bit easier for me to add and change things how I please, as well as have better understanding of how Eric codes heheh

funkin in san fran

by ninja_muffin

just as we get ourselves settled in toronto... me, dave, and kawa are heading over to san fran for GDC.... the punk days are over when me and dave would rebel against GDC and despise anyone who would even think of going.... those days are long gone.... life is different now.... BUUUUUUUUUUUUUUT I will say I'm at least lookin forward to it. All that talk about working with dave and how enriching it can be will apply to kawa too!!! it's a good excuse to go over and meet kawa!!! and as we find ourselves getting more legit™️ with our work, we are finding more and more people in the industry who go to these sorts of events. and as I personally become less and less of an anti-social basement dweller and finding myself becoming at least somewhat of a more normal human... I think I appreciate talking to people more :3 I think the magic that you get from talking to like minded people ONLINE can be even more powerful when it is transferred to REAL LIFE!!! So I am very optimistic about my first time going... even our damn lawyers are going!!! lol!!!

gdc plans we keepin a bit lowkey, nothin to big and dazzling but if ur at the event and happen to see me and/or dave say hi!!!!

Phantom Says: It's Fucking Cold in Canada!

by Phantom Arcade

Hello all u guys, been a minute, huh?

This week, I'm writing this update from Ninjamuffin's couch here in Canada! The time finally came to return the favor of Cam visiting, which meant for me to roll on up to Toronto and jam out some work. Though it's mostly been a week of settling in, we've been off to a good start of diving into what needs to be done.

It's pretty odd being outside the US for the first time ever, but it's been super nice already. The vibe is like if Philly was less harsh, essentially. Somehow, everything feels a bit relaxed on these streets. Maybe it's all the weed smoked out in the open? Who knows, but as we walk around with the CN Tower always partially in view in someway like the fucking Erdtree, it's a fun way to turn even more work into more of an adventure.

I suppose to sum up what the week's worth of work has entailed, it's been a matter of oversight on various aspects, even IRL. Being able to work with Cam and instruct what I need in-person is always much easier than over the internet. I guess right now for art, I'm mostly handling... how to say it.... hmmm... well, special art this week. And probably a few more weeks beyond his, lol. I just can't bring myself to reveal any secrets!

That being said, one thing in Toronto is there's quite a few retro game shops, and they all seem to carry cheap second hand Nintendo Power issues. It's been pretty exciting to read the upcoming game previews for games I remember beating, as well as seeing the layouts using special art from the production teams. Reading those makes me want to draw even MORE! I really hope eventually we have a nice huge stockpile of art that if we ever get a cool magazine feature, or make our own, that we can have a really sick display of art that excites fans.

Honestly, even seeing famous pieces of art kinda re-contextualized into the pop-art way the magazine organizes the pages gives art I've seen a billion times a fresh spin that feels so juicy. It's hard to describe, but it's a very fun and good feeling to see it. Being steeped in that kind of graphic design, while also being in the graffiti heavy Toronto definitely is exactly a big part of what I want FNF to feel like.

Basically, it's good to be here in Toronto; Tim Hortons for breakfast every day, wouldn't have it any other way.

Til next time, cock, balls, penis.... and cum! -PhantomArcade

closing thots for the wek!!

by ninja_muffin

as me and dave are doing last minute prep for a lil flight... i am doing last minute to finish this blog!!! I really do hope we are able to get these blogs out on a more consistent basis!!! we were on a streak for a while, but then things started piling up and I never fixed em woops!!! I will try to get em sorted!!! things like whenever I post a blog, I'd have to format a lotta things, and redo some dates, etc. etc.

SONGS OF THE WEEK (MULTIPLE!!!):

https://youtu.be/H7HmzwI67ec https://youtu.be/dTVebUPyQqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TeMpnr3F8k

ANOTHER WEEK ANOTHER SLIGHTLY LATE BLOG POST!!!

apologies.... was partly waiting for some things on Friday, but then the weekend rolled around, and figured I'd just wait til Monday!!!

This week has a nice handful of mini contributions from people here about what they've been up to, and as always, how progress in general has been going with the game!!!

POSTERS INCOMING SOON

by ninjamuffin99

A few days ago, the shipment of POSTERS arrived! As mentioned in last week's post, it's a small batch, but we should be able to get started with shipping posters out to people soon, along with having people be able to update their addresses and all that!!

Within the next week or two, posters shipments should start coming out and being sent to people!! Similar with the physical OST stuff (and pretty much all other rewards) to get through EVERY reward to be fully shipped, it will take time!! It's a whole lotta damn orders!!!

the testing shenanigans

by ninjamuffin99

over the past while, I like to hope we've been a lot more mindful of our WORKFLOWS. A major aspect that we've been neglecting a biiiiiiit has been TESTING the game. While we feel like there's a bit of a light at the end of the tunnel on the work we are doing, it's ALWAYS good to be constantly testing with not just yourself, but with OTHERS especially if they're on the team with you.

For a long while, it was really just me and Eric, the two programmers, alongside PhantomArcade, who would be testing the game and playing around with builds. Even with JUST that, things caused snafus!!!! Having more than one programmer working in a codebase requires a LOT more coordination. They both need to be able to understand each other, and understand what the goal of the project and code is. Know where to put complexity, and where to simplify shit. Basically, there have been a good handful of times when either me or Eric do something to code, and it busts up for the other!!!

plural programmers, singular source code

As what you can call the "lead programmer" I do let this fall into my territory of responsibility. I've never had a full software job or anything like that, I've only ever made small games where I was pretty much the sole programmer! I've always been cautious and a bit wary of working with other programmers. The classic saying of "what one programmer can do in one month, two programmers will do in two months." or someshit like that. Basically, adding more people onto code doesn't exactly means things get done faster!!! One thing however that I always feel haunted by is the bit of the cautionary tale of Yandere Simulator. This isn't hate post or anything lol, I really have nothing against him or his game. BUT when I was a teenager when he got a deal of sort with the publisher TinyBuild, where one part of the deal was to get a programmer to help him rewrite the codebase. But that lead to development issues it seemed, and they went their separate ways. ALSO DISCLAIMER, MAYBE THAT STORY IS ALL BULLSHIT LOLOL but anyways I always looked at it as a bit of a cautionary tale. Software is very delicate, and more cooks in the kitchen doesn't always lead to the best stew. However, after spending a lot of time on Newgrounds and working with people like artists, musicians, animators, AND on the rare occasion... another programmer... I've learned that collaboration IS a skill, and of course, collaboration between PROGRAMMERS is a skill as well (as seen by like... every major tech company obviously working decently well with more than one coder, lol).

So I think working with another programmer and getting through some of the growing pains will be good for not just the game, but me and Eric too. To get back on track with the point of this all, we are slowly making workflow strides together. Learning how to work WITH each other. One thing we've been doing (that really, we shoulda been doing FULLY from the start) is having the main github branch be protected, and having each others work need to be approved by each other. Working just 1:1 with another programmer it's nice, we both need each other and work closer with code that way, or I at least hope so! This week we merely started it though, the plan could be a dud, but I think it's always worth keeping an eye on these things, and trying out different strategies of like.... development workflows and shiiiiit. Code gotta be clean!!!

testing pipelines

this ones a bit less verbose than the previous part of testing workflow. To get test builds for the game, we use Github Actions to compile the game, and spit it out to private itch page. That was busted for a while tho!!! I did some research into lix, but it ended up bein a dud, so I just fixed the busted shit (and by that i mean a new haxelib version came out that fixed my issue, lol) SO now we have auto builds again yahoo!!!! also github gave us beta for the 64bit action runners and god damn those r fast.... lol

Here's Eric's Update!

by Eric

I haven't posted an update in a while! Cam got into a lot of the stuff I was going to say, but I do feel like we work well together, especially when we divide up tasks based on our skill sets (for instance, Cam is good at getting features off the ground quickly, while I tend to be more interested in architecting systems and thinking through what may need to be added in the long-term).

Most of what I've been doing in the past couple weeks is fixing bugs related to the game itself, as well as implementing stuff for cutscene and animation playback. We've got a lot of spicy stuff coming that would melt your computer if we tried to play them as a frame-by-frame spritesheet, so using a combination of videos and piecewise texture atlases is the solution to that. Further changes to how assets get loaded, cached, and unloaded will be needed too. Did you know that the web build of the game downloads EVERY character sprite before loading any song?

This week in particular has been heavily focused on a pet project of mine. I've been keeping it fairly secret since I started, but it's been going through months of development on-and-off and I'm really proud of how far it's come. Let's just say that a particular subset of the FNF community that has been starving for a while will be absolutely FEASTING after the update.

Input survey has been delayed because of the above work, but I'll be certain to get it out to people fairly soon.

Also since Shinji went on a rant about games here's my rant I heard Bloodborne was really good and I was like "I'm gonna go buy it and try it out" but then I learned it was one of those dumb shit console exclusives that I can't play and now I'm upset

About Changing Name in Credits

by Shingi

Yes - you will be able to change your credits once the new Backer Portal is done. (ETA for that is roughly a month from now)

In less interesting news, i just started Stardew Valley after being a long time fan of Harvest Moon (Friends of Mineral Town on the GBA to be more specific). Is it just me or do the newer HM/Story of Season titles not feel as interesting to play as that one? I think i might end up ranting about games one of these posts...

bdg is my best friend, reply if bdg is your best friend too

by Kawa

I have done many things recently, most of which are secrets or too boring to share. I did, however, make PhantomArcade watch this Brian David Gilbert video.

As far as my Thoughts About Video Games, either you want all of my opinions about Like a Dragon: Ishin and thus get stuck in a very long ramble, or you don't. Maybe next week, or if the people demand they want my feelings about "what if Yakuza, but Victorian-ish samurai with guns?"

Phantom Says: Testing, Testing, 1 - 2 - 3

by Phantom Arcade

Hello, one and all! Phantom Arcade here, for another Friday update. (I'm writing this at like 11:59pm on Friday night... it counts!)

I'll keep this one relatively short, so here we go! As I even write this at this very moment, Eric is breathing heavily into his mic, not realizing how close to his face it is, and how hard he breathes when flustered trying to solve a bug. Each breath is the breath of a man knee deep in hard work, I won't lie, I'm charmed. This week I wasn't even really drawing so much as I've been on a testing binge with some changes to the game's underlying foundations. One of the fun things about being a director is you get to visualize what you want and work with a team to bring it to fruition, wahoo! One of the bad things? Well, if things aren't right, you need to be on top of it to make sure it's all working as intended. When it comes to how the actual game plays and presents, if anything is wrong in that department, I take it as a personal failure.

Now that being said, if there's any issues it's often not really a matter of fault. No one's a mind reader, so it's just a process to make sure the things you build are implemented right. And we're not a large enough team to have a planner who's drafting down the ideas for a programmer, it's a matter of me sitting down one of one with everyone who's needed. This is usually done at the start of an idea, then people go and create that work with pretty much full autonomy, and then it's back to me to make sure it passes what's needed, and then worked into the game itself. So in instances like now, where grand changes have been made as we beef up to a stronger larger game, it means moooooore testing! But everyone on this team is a charmer, so these late night cram sessions are always chill.

That aside, all my creative work this week has been on the graphic design side, and I've had fun noodling around with fun new designs and banners that'll christen the return of Funkin, so while I'm excited to be back to drawing, this week of boots on the ground w the team definitely is satisfying seeing in-game progress move by leaps n bounds.

But importantly, while I haven't had much time for video games due to these things lately.... hah... well....

Demon Slayer season 3 premiered in America today, *IN THEATERS!!!

They showed off the final 2 episodes of season 2, the jaw dropping conclusion to tale of the Oiran, and then we got to see episode 1 of season 3... and wow! It was just as amazing as it was when I saw it during it's initial airing, maybe even better! The theater added so much to it all, and they had the sound in that bitch cranked up to fucking 11, some of that shit was makin me go deaf, but it was soooooooo juicy and satisfying. Season 3 seems to be off to a seriously crazy start, and having a full theater to hear and be apart of the reactions with, made it such a blast. It was just what I needed after a long week, and it helped get my mind off how sad I am we won't get a Puss N Boots Last Wish sequel for years to come... Oh lord, the theater's really had some good shit lately, not long ago Shin Ultraman was playing, and right before that was Shin Evangelion... what a time to be alive! In my greatest hopes and prayers, just like Demon Slayer coming back fills me with whimsy, I hope Funkin's return makes all fans eyes glow and shoot loads 10 miles high. That's my goal every time I sit down to work!

So much for keepin it short, lol. Enjoy the weekend! -PhantomArcade

closing thots fo the week

by ninjamuffin99

does feel like we are slowly and slowly making progress towards an end goal of not only getting a new lil update out, but also feels like we can somewhat see our path forward on working on the FULL GAME from here. Feels like our processes are getting smoothed out and all that. Only has taken a few years... but not bad for our first ambitious commercial game that most of us have worked on!!! We are really appreciative of the fact we have the chance to make this game, not just for THE PEOPLE but for OURSELVES. This is a game that we do want to work on, with people that we really enjoy working with, and doing it generally HOW we want to do it. The full independent dream... Does feel like despite the stumbling of working ourselves to this point, we are grateful to be able to do this for everyone. I look forward to not just the game coming out and being done, but also where I will be personally at that point in time. The experience and know how we all will get by the time that happens.... It's a lot to look forward to!!!

SONG OF THE WEEK (chosen by Shingi)

HELLO EVERYONE welcome back to the WEEKLY FRIDAY NIGHT FREAKING blog web channel.... i hope everyone's friday is going well heheh

this week is a bit light on person by person blogs! But I'll try my best to round up what everyone's been up to this week!

music mischief

by ninjamuffin99

one of the tasks that producer kawa has been takin care of has been helping with organization of the CONTRACT musicians we have. We r gonna have a lotta dang music... and sorting it out requires workin with a small handful of lil additional musicians to help out with remixes, vocals, etc. the processes are slowly smoothing themselves out, with kawa, and our other lil helpers for management on that side of things!!! getting contracts, payments, and sorta an "approval" process for ourselves is all going pretty good it seems!!!

kickstarter backend shenanigans

by ninjamuffin99

our contractor SHINGI has been in the process of working with some of our nice lil fulfillment homies (Needlejuice for physical OST, Coby Win for Posters/Pins, and soon Sharkrobot) to flesh out more of the backend work needed for THEM to start poking around and using the backend. Things like figuring out API keys so that eventually USERS would be able to log into OUR backend to see things like shipment progress and all that!!! And then along with that, working and sorting out things like proper formatting, so it could essentially work the other way around, on our fulfillment homies backends, THEY can get all the info they need as well. I believe once it's alllll fleshed out for the FULFILLMENT side of things, we should be able to start work on the USER side of things, and even slowly start tossing tests to people to try out and whatnot!!! It's coming along very nicely!!! Lov dat shingi!!!!!

KICKSTARTER POSTERS INCOMING

by ninjamuffin99

quick lil one, posters and pins are still in the manufacturing process!!!

Posters

A shipment of POSTERS should arrive sometime this week, Monday at the EARLIEST, and then they would be ready to pack up and start shipping to backers who have posters as a reward or addon!!!

Pins + Posters

People who have posters AND a pin would have to wait until pin manufacturing is done however, which will be in mid-March for the first batch, then they'll go through QC, and then shipped to America to be distributed to all the backers!!!

LIL Kickstarter SHIRT UPDATE

Forgot to make an update about shirts one of the previous blog posts when I talked about Kickstarter, but those people should get their "surveys" essentially once we have our Kickstarter backend all sorted out for ourselves, so that backers can change or modify their reward info! So within about a month or two at the LATEST before that aspect is ready! And then the manufacturing turnaround is a few weeks I believe. Then it'd be the distribution and all daaaaaaat showbiz

blogs i like and are inspirations for funkblog

by ninjamuffin99

despite everyone shouting at us for BETTER COMMUNICATION and whatnot, I will be a punk and say the inspiration behind the blog is.... NOT that LOL!!!

I lov video games and readin about stuff, i love the people who work on games to talk about how their brain works, and what they work on, what they like, what their IDEAS are, all that shit

and I like writing about stuff. the funkin kickstarter page updates have pretty damn extensive updates about merch and where things are at, but it being on kickstarter is a bit restricting. most people didnt even read it, and then would shout at us for not updating them on progress!!!

anyways my baby bitch ranting aside, imma just share a few nice blogs that I love that I will always read away at

Factorio Friday Facts

factorio.com/blog/

I fukin love Factorio. I am a programmer it is in my blood to be a factorio freak. Through the development of Factorio, they've written weekly blogposts that would come out on FRIDAY (remind u of anyone teehee), and different members of the development team would write various things about their early access game, FACTORIO. Anything from programming anecdotes, to art style thoughts, or even how their merch was going! At the end of each post, they highlight a community post of the week! I think that's cute

one of my favorite posts:

factorio.com/blog/post/fff-356

Dolphin Emulator Blog

dolphin-emu.org/blog

Dolphin emulator is one of da best pieces of software ever made.... and I love reading and hearing about the development of it, even if I understand only 5% of how all the crazy graphics programming and debugging works!!! I think anyone who writes technical blogs should be keeping an eye on it, as well as anyone who just has a general interest in how software works!

S&Box

sbox.facepunch.com/news

From the studio that brought you RUST (the game, not the lang!) and GARRY'S MOD, Facepunch studios also has a nice little devlog that I like to poke through and keep an eye on, especially since I'm very much anticipating S&box!!! It's another devlog that has the concept of having multiple different authors aggregated into one monthly-ish post, so it's a bit of an inspiration of the FUNK BLOG too. Some of the blogs just have someone writing a quick little twitter post-esque sentence about what they've been up to, and I think that is very much inspiration with FunkBLOG

Joel On Software

joelonsoftware.com

ex-Microsoft programmer, co-founder of Stack Overflow, Joel Spolsky has a pretty damn essential series of blogs from 2000 up until today. If you are a software developer of some kind, take a poke through his posts. On the homepage he has a list of his Top 10 posts, and other various recommendations from himself, I would recommend starting there!!

Discord Engineering Blog

discord.com/category/engineering

Discord's ENGINEERING and DESIGN blog! You probably have Discord open right now. You probably have some unread notifications on your phone. You are probably in servers that you don't check. How does all that stuff damn work? With PROGRAMMING! That shit is magic.... There's something very fascinating to learn the in's and out's of what is at this point, ESSENTIAL EVERY DAY SOFTWARE. It's like learning how cotton is spun. It makes you think "wait... there's a LOT of effort that goes into this shit". Say what you want about Discord and how it functions, I think it functions pretty damn good!

Their blog has a good handful of posts about Go, Elixir, and Rust programming languages, those are especially the ones I like to read about heheh. I have always been a Haxe mfer, but as the years go by I find myself more and more curious with the OTHER SIDE of programming / software development.

Phantom Says: Life When Up is Down and Left is Right

by phantomarcade

Hello goons, what's cookin.

For this week, the largest uphill battle has been busted sleep and fighting off the agony of a small writer's block. Writing for game story? Nope! That's never tough. Writing for gameplay? Nope, that one's never hard to cook either, only hard to implement!

In particular, this week for me was mostly trying to cook up a special new interface design, that honestly I only just really cracked before writing this post. It's not huge, but there's something extra punishing about taking something small and mundane, and then figuring out how to spice it up to make it.... well, not lame! Funkin borrows a lot of things scene in other games, but I take pride in that I feel like Funkin offers small twists on things just enough to spice it all up. Even if we do take cues from pre-existing media, it's always important to add a small twist you think will elevate something above what you're inspired by. Or even if you can't elevate it, taking it in a slightly different direction.

Don't edge yourself too hard, it's really nothing that crazy, but the small details are important to me all the same. I won't lie that on top of some small management, company biz, a busted sleep schedule, etc, it's not been the most exciting week.

To elaborate on a post from our very own gorgeous Cameron Ninjamuffin, it's been nice having the larger team come together. The pieces are all getting pretty multi-layered, so making sure things don't fall through the cracks has been pretty stressful until recently with more people forming a net. And there's no facet more evident then how the music's coming together. A while while back, I asked Isaac if he'd be able to get started on Erect Mixes while we work on building up the pipelines and company, since Funkin is being made chapter by chapter with only portions in advance, this was the best move to make sure everyone was still on the go. And here we are all this time later, with a NICE selection of music from not just Isaac, but an entire team he gathered to help make it happen.

Now naturally, this would have been a hellscape to navigate without more team members to help organize this all and make sure in terms of legalities and payments it all went smooth. It's all a bit much for a guy who used to just make funny Newgrounds parodies to take in sometimes, but I'm almost surprised how naturally myself and Cam have fallen into the roll. It's sorta draining to be away from drawing when other responsibilities demand my attention, but seeing this larger unit come together to make something so much larger than a 2 minute cartoon... it kinda does feel like an evolution of making the NG collabs with Ivan n Cory... like the next step in scope.

It may not always be moving at lightning speed, but the skills me and Cam are learning definitely are fascinating and I really think will change the trajectory of how we work for the rest of our lives. Provided neither of us kill ourselves, I'm sure the future will hold many exciting possibilities! ❤️

Summary of last week's funkin-resources additions!

by github-actions[bot]

• PR FunkinCrew/funkin-resources#97, "BSENGINE - ports" by MateuzinhoX02 merged at 2023-02-21T20:21:50Z, added:
  • 1 line:
    • BS Engine Mobile - A port of FNF' that work in Android with optimizations. One of the most famous android FNF' engines.
• PR FunkinCrew/funkin-resources#93, "Add Meme1079's Psych Engine Wiki" by CaptainBaldi merged at 2023-02-21T20:21:25Z, added:
  • 1 line:
    • Another alternative wiki for Psych Engine - Made by Meme1079 and contributors.
• PR FunkinCrew/funkin-resources#87, "grammar mistake numba 2" by Burgerballs merged at 2023-02-21T20:20:56Z, added:

closing thots fo tha week

by ninjamuffin99

cute lil blog posts and decent lil workflow.... i take breaks on weekends, but as monday rolls around I always look forward to seeing the new progress and changes to workflow we make that turn gamework from a chore into a pleasant job where it gets easier and easier to see progress!!!!

ALSO GO PRE ORDER FNF BOYFRIEND NENDO, STILL AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER BAYBEEEE!!!!

goodsmile.info/en/product/13980/Nendoroid+Boyfriend

goodsmile.info/en/product/13980/Nendoroid+Boyfriend

goodsmile.info/en/product/13980/Nendoroid+Boyfriend

** SONG OF THA WEEK ** (I need to fix this busted ass embed to fill out the page better... lol)

HELLO FIRST AND FOREMOST WE HAVE FRIDAY NIGHT FUNKIN' NENDOROID BOYFRIEND FIGURE FOR PRE-ORDER BY GOOD SMILE!!!

PRE-ORDER ON GOODSMILE WEBSITE PRE-ORDER ON GOODSMILE WEBSITE PRE-ORDER ON GOODSMILE WEBSITE PRE-ORDER ON GOODSMILE WEBSITE

dave talks about more of it later in the post go read dat fools post!!!

as well as various mischief, our producer KAWA introduces themselves in the post!!!! go read about em and see how they r helpin funkiiiiin (they meant to post their blog last week but missed it, lol!)

Hello Funkin', this is Kawa

by kawa-kitsuragi

Hi there! I'm Kawa Teaño, the newest part of the Funkin' crew. I've joined as the producer of this outfit!

What is production, anyway?

The thing about games - and especially games as ambitious as Friday Night Funkin' - is that there's a lot of moving pieces at any given moment over the course of its development.

Is that one feature implemented? Should we prioritize bugfixing or a new mechanic? What's the status of that new song, and which of the five saved versions is the most current one? How about that one animation?

In smaller projects, smaller teams, it's mostly feasible to have the people that do the work also own this kind of management work - but it's very quickly overwhelming! It's my job to be the central point of knowledge, knowing the status of things and keeping it moving without getting too distracted by any other responsibilities. And on top of that, figuring out how to responsibly manage all of your trust - your money and your expectations! - is part of the work too:

What's the status on that one piece of merch we promised? Can we find someone who'll make that thing who's willing to communicate our way? Where's this one legal contract?

It might sound boring - and to a lot of other people it maybe is! But I love this kinda thing - getting to touch bits of every part of a game, learn how a bunch of lovely nerdy specialists work, while also making sure it actually exists in the world instead of just half-formed ideas, encouraging the best in everyone - it's extremely my jam.

If you wanna learn more about this role in the industry, here's a community that's mentored me a lot and here's a surprisingly insightful panel from a bunch of production vets

Other stuff I've done

This ain't my first rodeo helping rad people make games happen, though Funkin' is definitely the most ambitious. For the last year and change, I've been helping out at Strange Scaffold, a studio making lots of little indie games across PC and console, including things like Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, which is as weird a game as it sounds.

I also help make a really cool virtual conference happen, and enable a bunch of weird fake sports nerds to make data crimes. Indeed, for the latter I maintain a chatty, relaxed tool directory, which says a lot about how I do production as a whole!

What all this should tell you is: despite being the most organized nerd in the room, I come by my weirdness honestly.

Get hype for the future of Funkin'

I'm so excited for y'all to see what we have in store for you! We've got a great update in the oven and merch in store, and overall I've banked a lot on helping make sure y'all get the rad game you all deserve. See you around!

payroll mischief

by ninjamuffin99

this week i had a bit of a fever for most of it, so sitting down at my computer to code was pretty light until the end of the week (past few days as of writing lol)

SO i decided to spend some time getting my mind sorted with some administration stuff. Getting KAWA on payroll I definitely wanted done this week, since it's about the time when they should get payroll anyways!

payroll for us entails sending EMPLOYMENT OFFER LETTERS and all that to whoever we are hiring, and then once all hands get shook, we harass them for a W4 tax file, and bank info. We then simply toss that to our accountants, and they handle mostly the rest with the payroll processing company! Glamourous! One thing about being a REMOTE-ish company is that you need to register tax bullshit on a PER STATE basis. You have an employee in Nevada? Gotta send some documents to the STATE OF NEVADA and get all those taxes bullshit in order. Got someone in Washington? Gotta go through that process all over again. Most of this is handled by our nice lil accountants though, ur mileage may vary and also THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE OR ACCOUNTING ADVICE OR EVEN A HOW-TO

BUT ANYWAYS every once in a while, the lawyers will need us to send something back or fill out an extra form, each state has slightly different rules and requirements.

New York state requires you to sign an extra document, but also you need that shit mf NOTARIZED! I never got anything notarized before the fuk! Basically though that just entails hunting down a notary place in ur local area, and payin them some coin to NOTARIZE it and give you an extra stamp of approval. We got the documents on Monday or so, and it took us a day to catch our bearings (even if I had fever!). Had to make an appointment for WEDNESDAY at around noon.... the payroll company processes the weekly payments later in the afternoon the wednesday before the payment... so we really wanted to make it before then so Kawa could be paid this week!!

I woke up relatively early for myself (10AM) and took the classic Tylenol + Ibuprofen combo, and biked to the notary place, since it was mostly downhill to there... and also because I missed the damn bus!!! Anyways to end off this boring ass progress update, got that shit notarized, scanned it in at the local library (who tf owns a scanner themselves) and got it all sent. Got back to my girlfriend who was dying in bed all alone for the day from fever, woops! We got payroll to figure out sorry! It all got processed all nicely and now producer Kawa is now a PAYROLLED EMPLOYEE!!!!

TIME TO DO THAT WITH THE STATE OF ARIZONA AND THE STATE OF PENNSYLVANIA AND ALSO HOW TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO GET MYSELF ON PAYROLL AND ALSO FIGURE OUT HEALTHCARE AND MORE ADMINISTRATIVE BULLSHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT

but anyways thats my major contribution for the week towards FUNKIN CREW stuuuuuuuf

Phantom Says: Boyfriend Nendoroid is Out! 19 Page Comic Special Launch!

by phantomarcade

Well, it's a bit after Friday, isn't it? Heeheehehee, ahhh... yeah. This week has moved my sleep schedule all around, as usual.

But screw all that!!! Boyfriend! GoodSmile! Nendoroids! We've kept the secret for so long, but finally, the Boyfriend Nendo has been shown to the world! And it's also finally on pre-order!

Adorable lil guy, huh? When GoodSmile reached out a while back, it had us all pretty excited! Over months I helped greenlight this and get all the designs polished up to make it as much of a treat for fans as possible. And in the mean time, I felt I couldn't let the opportunity pass to write up a story that coincides with just such an event. So today I put out the 19 page FNF Nendo Comic Special: Smile Good, Boyfriend! While Boyfriend is over at GF's house to play horror games, the real horrors are the fucked up plans Daddy Dearest has in store for him, involving a special new cursed relic daddy is using....

Check it out here!

Twitter: https://twitter.com/PhantomArcade3K/status/1626780743660630016

Newgrounds: https://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/phantomarcade/fnf-nendo-comic-special

Lemme tell ya, I'm beat! This comic was in the works alongside normal game development ever since I knew the pre-order was coming, I had always wanted to do a longer form comic, and finally a worthy chance to celebrate seemed to be a good reason. But god damn, the final hours of wrapping this were a lot, so please enjoy it! I have a new found respect for manga artists, I seriously can't believe they do shit like this every single week....

Truth be told, there's 2 other long form stories I had in mind, but... only time will tell! As for now, this is the most tired I've been in a while, and there's still assets the team needs atm, yipes! Our newly hired project manager Kawa has been reminding me every few hours each day how much has piled up since the last few days were dedicated to wrapping this big project up. Haha, well that's life out here sailing the 7 seas of being an artist!

Each and every FNF related thing I can possibly make, like this comic, I'll continue to do so with my entire heart in it, so please, continue to look forward to the many other fun surprises coming this year. As for me, I think that about wraps it. There's a lot left to do tonight, good thing I've still got a good amount of coffee left....

-PhantomArcade

Splatoon 3 Salmon run.... All Grizzco weapons this weekend? Hmmmm.....

blog bot shenanigans

by ninjamuffin99

another effect of my fever based couple day vacation was it gave me a smiiiidge of an excuse to work and focus on the other aspect of the funkin blog…. THE BLOG BOT.

funk blogbot is a discord bot made with DENO and discordeno deno lib. deno is a bit of a new kid on the block, but its juuuust different enough from what i know and juuuuust familiar enough to really let me damn sink my teeth into it. got to coding away and learnin how it all works, and ive gotta say… pretty slick and fun! discord bots r good excuses to work on something small in a new language and get sum exp

got it all configured, even got that dipshit DOCKER stuff figured out too

While trying to make sure I don’t get too derailed with work, I think it’s healthy to poke around with different things like this, different languages, developer workflows, etc. the package management is pretty nice, altho haven’t used it on big project yet…. but nevertheless its still inspiring to see the other side. I don’t imagine myself ever creating a programming language or the sorts, but it’s starting to get fun to imagine things like “oh I want this feature from this language, this feature from this one, etc”. Basically I want haxelib to work good...

its all on github, I'll move it to the FunkinCrew github repo eventually, for now it lives right here

github.com/ninjamuffin99/blogBot

CLOSING THOTS

by ninjamuffin99

we got nendo for preorder... been a minute since we had MERCH for sale.... or really... since we had something releasing all nice!!! Shoutouts to crew of GoodSmile, they reached out ages ago, and slowly they toiled away at it and whatnot, and it turned out pretty damn good!!!! And as far as I know..... goodsmile isn't evil.... so it feels good to work with crew like that teehee... we hate evil people!!!!!

SONG OF THE WEEK

welcome to funkblog episode 4. i think i will use this beginning space of the blog to talk about the STATE of the blog, in terms of TECH, and where everything is headed with it in general!

but in this intro blurb i will also give rundown on blog... posts about kickstarter mischief and lil writings by phantomarcade ensue!!!

In terms of TECH, I added a cool lil table of contents to each page, nice lil copy paste from the zola website heheh. As well as that, i added a cute lil retro "hit counter" to the bottom of the site lol. At some point though I will probably setup better analytics tooling, moreso for funzies. Might be fun to have a "X amount of people reading now!" thing heheh. One thing about analytics is it def will be ANONYMIZED and whatnot, no cookies no bullshit like that. Pure and simple analytics! We don't give a shit about your data, we just wanna track views and whatnot! We won't market to you or any bullshit like that we promise!!!

The next step for the blog I think is to get a small discord bot setup so that we can write articles / posts easier. At the very least, can draft up posts in discord, or even write smaller little snippets of posts or thoughts on our minds! The idea behind a discord bot is that everyone has discord on their phone.... so whenever and wherever we are.... we can write articles/ posts for the blog, whenever ideas or thoughts come to our mind!

I've been dabbling with elixir, which I took notice of from one of our contract programmers we have workin on some secret sauce (for now). She is a super brain on that crazy functional coding stuff, and she also has experience with discord bot development, BUT I think for this little bot I will use it as a fun little side project hehe. And as always... source code will be open!!!

anyways... here's the blog post!!!

Quick Update on Missing Surveys

by Shamwayne

Sup everyone, quick update on everyone who's got missing surveys and stuff.

THE PHYSICAL OST COMBO MEAL and Vol 1: OST COMBO MEAL addons

These are coming out to you as one big package with all the CDs, Cassettes etc. in it. Checked with Needlejuice and Cam and those are juuuuuuust about to ship so expect to see an email soon from needlejuice with those

T-Shirts, Posters and Enamel Pins

Ninjamuffin already posted an update, but those aren't out yet. Expect to see surveys on those in the near future.

Everyone else

You should have received an email by now from the kickstarter email. If you haven't that means either the Backer Names in the system and on the Kickstarter platform aren't matching (recent name changes could probably do that) or so reach out with your backer ID instead.

There might be a quick lil update on KS about the blog soon (and some other neat stuff) so look forward to that!

more fnf kickstarter mischief in progress: VINYL SHIPPING and PINS / POSTERS IN PROGRESS

by ninjamuffin99

its a bit intimidating to write a big ass chunky ass kickstarter update (especially after everyone be shoutin at me and it's been put off a bit long... yeowch!) so over next few weeks I'll try to at least draft up posts that would otherwise be included in a traditional Friday Night Funkin' kickstarter post to shake my brain a bit and make it less intimidating for myself!!

Vinyl SHIPPING

After about 6 months or so (as of January) the the Friday Night Funkin' KICKSTARTER exclusive vinyl is finally being shipped! It has taken this long because vinyl manufacturing nowadays takes a long damn time. As mentioned many times in previous KICKSTARTER posts, there's a shortage of vinyl PVC or somethin like that! BUT finally we ended up getting em all produced! They are all in NASHVILLE, where Needlejuice Records HQ is! Needlejuice has been pretty damn close to us and really super has helped us out with all of the physical media stuff! In Nashville, they have a veeerrry small crew of 5 people who are shipping out everything, so if you have a vinyl, it may take an extra month or two before you actually get your vinyl! They need to ship over 9000 (no meme intended) orders ! BUT I think in Q1 2023, everyone who has PHYSICAL OST stuff SHOULD have those rewards for themselves!

If you need to change your address, contact needlejuice email! contact@needlejuicerecords.com

and take a peak at this twitter thread by them for more lil tidbits and info!

Yes! We have the Friday Night Funkin Kickstarter vinyl. It arrived yesterday. We are beginning to ship it out. This is by far the biggest project we've ever taken on. It will take a long time to ship them all, so there are some things that may be useful for people to know. 🧵 pic.twitter.com/K0sXPOlf8S

— Needlejuice Records (@needlejuicerec) December 17, 2022

Pins / Posters IN PROGRESS / MANUFACTURING BEGIN

the pins and posters are back on the damn menu, we are doing the first run of manufacturing them so that we can get em faster to our homie who's been handlin that! I sent the wire transfer to him as of 10 minutes ago for the first batch of em to BEGIN MANUFACTURING

for POSTERS the first batch should finish production in 1-2 weeks!

for PINS the first batch should finish production in about 1.5-2 months!

So poster only backers should start potentially seeing them out in the wild around the end of this month and early march!

Shingi's kickstarter update

Shingi is the dude who is working on our kickstarter backend system, he wanted to write a lil update for backers and whatnot, and i told him to go for it! As well as this, I am still workin on big main post of MORE in-depth update stuuufff of where everything is at, just tying up a lotta damn loose ends!

written by Shingi / Shamwayne

Sup to all the awesome FNF Backers! It's been a while, sorry about that haha..... This is going to a special Kickstarter update since part of it is going to be done by yours truly, Shingi (aka Shamwayne on github)! Normally Ninjamuffin works on the Kickstarter updates himself (and he's been working on a massive blogpost detailing everything that's been happening the past several months) but this is just a special update to introduce myself and our all new...Funkin Blog! (insert hype music here)

Wait, who are you?

So everyone who's checked out the Blog already might be a little familiar with my name already, but lemme just introduce myself again. Hi, i'm Shingi - the Kickstarter Backend dev who's existence is this dimension is only maintained through the power of coffee and energy drinks. What's this "Kickstarter Backend" i'm working on you ask? Well...it's basically going to be a portal where all the Backers can manage their profiles, view their rewards (and potentially track their shipment/delivery progress, still working on that one) as well as answer surveys and get updates on everything FNF! Part of the check for missing surveys that happened last week actually went smoothly thanks to the new features from the KS Backend Portal we're working on! Expect an update and the beta test for that in the upcoming months.

Also just to let people know: Although my dev work for the Crew is mainly focused on Kickstarter stuff, i'm NOT the Community Manager or anything like that so don't expect to see my wonderful face and messages all too much. I do check the Kickstarter comments a lot though so if you do have any thoughts or comments just post them there and i'll probably see it and bring it up to the team. I mean, that's how this Blog post update exists!

Speaking of which.....

So what's this FNF Blog All about?

The Blog is mostly designed for weekly updates with news, devlogs and overall fun lil articles from all the members of the Funkin Crew (that includes me too!). There's currently already 3 (probably 4 by the time this is out) updates from everyone including stuff like new Input System survey, my really awesome post on Kickstarter Backend stuff plus missing survey info as well the really awesome Funkin resources Github page.

I know the big question though is why make an entire blog instead of Kickstarter updates? Well, the first and easiest answer to that is allowing the entire Crew to post updates easily without first asking someone like Cam (Ninjamuffin) for access to post a Kickstarter update! Like this semi update actually took a bit of co-ordination to set up: imagine instead of 2 people, it was 5 people who wanted to post their own mini update as well instead (shudders)

Secondly, most of the posts in the blog right now are quite long, (coz it's the first time and most of them are intros, duh) but a lot of the times updates are probably going to be not much longer than a normal tweet or two. Now we could just use Twitter and post our updates there (like we were doing before), but it's already been proven how annoying an idea that is. Nobody wants to follow 10 different twitter accounts and sift through cat photos and memes just so they can get an update for the game! I used to be that guy and trust me, it wasn't fun. Shoutouts to all the various twitter FNF news accounts (although a lot of them include mods so it was hard to filter for vanilla stuff), fans in the comments and qrts and people like Lendon on Youtube for keeping people posted in the meantime - we gotchu now (although please keep saving and posting about the twitch vods lol)

Last but not least, i think having the more mundane and less critical devlogs be separate from the actual Kickstarter posts makes things less cluttered. Imagine if all of our lil blog posts and tweets were a separate Kickstarter post and there were practically daily or even hourly updates: it would be kiiiinda chaotic for most people. Having the last Kickstarter post be 6 months ago is pretty wild (and i'll try to bug everyone to make sure it doesn't happen again, no promises though) but it's all but guaranteed at this point that everyone has read that post and knows what it's about. The plan with Kickstarter has always been to keep the update frequency at roughly a monthly pace so that any important updates and Survey/Rewards info doesn't get lost in the sauce, but is still regular enough to prevent massive walls of texts per update (oops!)

Of course it's not perfect (nothing in gamedev ever is unfortunately) but i think it's a pretty decent compromise. Plus, it's weekly so you always have something to look forward to reading every Friday/Saturday (depending on your timezone)!

Obligatory "when Game update?" (slightly spicy but NDA edition)

So...I know this is the part everyone really wants to know (I've totally been there as well desperately pining for some delicious FNF news). Unfortunately...my lips are sealed tight when it comes to any surprises or really cool stuff (bummer!)

What I can tell you though is everything that's already been mentioned within a tweet or an AMA: there's a lot that's been revealed already, and with a little extra context from being part of the Crew (plus the perspective of coming in as a fan of the base game waiting for the updates as well) I hope that's going to be satisfactory for a lot of people.

First thing's first, the game and update is REAL. Although between the things the team is currently up to - biz meetings in the morning, coordination and strategy/content meeting and work in the afternoon and purely productive game work in the evening up to the late hours of the morning (I honestly don't know how they do it, I can't function as a human being without 6+ hours of sleep) setting a release date is kinda of daunting with all the other stuff that needs our attention. Actually, I need to explain something first before we get to that:

Tha V-Slice

Yup, the next FNF update is going to be more like a V-Slice(Vertical Slice) of the Full Ass Game than just an update. Well, V-Slice is the closest thing that describes what we're doing because if you use the definition it's described as: "a fully-playable portion of a game that shows its developer’s intended player experience. This means its key features and systems are all working together properly, complete with assets that represent – and this is important – final quality". This is completely different from a prototype (FNF Ludum Dare) or even the demo (the FNF Week's up to 7) in that it's representative of what you'd expect from the full game as a whole.

That means whatever systems, mechanics, UI Interfaces and tools the full game will launch with have to be almost fully done or as close to final quality and polish as possible (some articles say it's the equivalent of making more than 70% of the entire game!). I won't bore you with a game dev lesson, there's plenty of articles on it like the one i already referenced, this one as well as this one and one that highlights the difference between a prototype and a v-slice. With that out of the way...

So...V-Slices. They're cool right? Like i said though that's just the closest definition i can think of since we've already been funded (lol) and most V-Slices are designed as pitches to publishers. But there's one other thing they're good for: testing your production pipeline end to end. Right now I know a lot of people (and myself before) were expecting the next update to be more or less the same as all the previous FNF updates from before Kickstarter: A couple of Erect mode remixes plus 1 or 2 new Weeks to play added to the already existing game. Nah, not really. Sure the update might kinda have that stuff in it, but it's quite a bit more complicated than just "new levels lol".

The previous engine, although pretty cool, was made with sweat, tears and quite a lot of ducktape to hold everything together. As the game keeps expanding and the game became more and more ambitious, it became a hassle just to add new content without everything breaking apart at the seams and crashing. So the engine's been pretty much rewritten from the ground up to be more efficient, faster and support extra content that was planned but couldn't be added to the previous weeks due to engine limitations. Yup, that's right! I'd personally recommend you to play the game starting from Week 1 again, although my lips are sealed as to what specifically I mean by that hehe. Those "specific things" also took up development time to implement and that's just a footnote compared to the current production pipeline.

Accessibility pipeline

PhantomArcade's talked and showcased this one on stream so it's probably cool to talk about - FNF as a game is currently pretty restrictive in that it's literally only in English and the accessibility options were extremely limited before. Not really a big deal in a demo, but for a "professional full game" that's not very good. Getting translations though for all the text in the game means exporting and formatting all the text in a translation friendly way, sending and getting it back (or if you're using online tools, setting those up for everyone involved) and even when you get it back, coding a system for choosing the correct text and/or audio to display/play when someone chooses a particular language. Yup, that's how much co-ordination and work is needed just to get languages in the game. Although the whole team would agree it's totally worth adding that in.

Assets, Music Pipeline

Not going to talk about this too much before the FNF Ninjas track me down and put a pipebomb in my mailbox, but there's a LOT of work and polish going into this section. Although that's to be expected from a rhythm game, right? In related stuff:

UI, UX and Mechanics stuff

FNF pre Kickstarter was pretty barebones in that regard. In fact, i can think of stuff like A, B and C most rhythm games have by default which FNF didn't have until the upcoming update. That's also stuff that needs co-ordination from across all the various departments of the team which makes it super hard to get right!

I think the stuff i can mention without getting assassinated is pretty much that, although there's plenty of more things that i either forgot to mention or are straight up surprises that even i would feel bad for even hinting about. Like i said though, the coming update is more like a nicely sampled slice of content inside of a shiny new engine to showcase what you can expect from the actual game when it does come out.

Final thoughts on the "When game update?"

Having the next update transition from a basic content update to more of a V-Slice approach is normally considered an incredibly expensive process time and effort wise - which the recent delays for the update can attest to lol. But it was extremely necessary to get all of the pipelines and team co-ordination in order. There's a lot of pipeline processes which if done correctly at this stage, will make things that used to take several days take just a few hours to do instead! Why is that important? Well, as ambitions increased Weeks started taking significantly more time to develop which overall sucks for everyone. By streamlining and optimizing all of our processes upfront, it's the difference between being able to make 3 things a year vs something like 10-15 things. There definitely will be new content in the next update, don't worry about that (yep, even the people who played the leaks!). In fact, the biggest misconception everyone has is that "new content" is the biggest hurdle right now (it's not, next update content is mostly there rn). But the priority right now is elevating FNF into a real game and not just a fancy little prototype with a few levels that come out here and there. Like we promised: Cartoon rhythm gaming excellence

And if Cam doesn't delete this last part: who says this next update is even the only update coming out ;-)

Phantom Says: Cold Winter Nights & Warm LCD Screens

by phantomarcade3k

Hello all you guys, Phantom Arcade here!

Well, would you look at that... a development update? Crazy none of of the fans have ever asked for something like these. Hahaha... aahhh.... anyway.

My section of work probably contains the MOST amount of secrets of anyone on the team! Where it's levels far off, or even just concepts in my mind that may never see the light of day, there's a lot I can't talk about. BUT, I feel like I'd be missing an opportunity to try and find stuff to talk about for fans hungry enough to check these updates, so I'll gather up a bit of what I'm up to that can be shared.

This past week especially, I've been grinding to finish a special comic for everyone. It should come out on 2/16, but dates and Funkin team don't vibe well, lol. There's still a ways to go with the update since the scope has grown, but at the very least this comic should be enjoyable. 18 pages, can you believe it? My ass is stupified that mangaka do this weekly, I've been grinding for a bit and with 6 days left I'm nervous as to whether I'll make it or not! But ngl, it's still been pretty fun, and contains a type of goofy ass story that I feel like can't fit into the game itself.

Putting time n effort into making all of the (important) extended media feel nice is important to me, so whether it's CDs, comics, etc, I hope they all offer a savory flavor that complements the game itself. I design everything that way, so that standard is important to me!

Speaking of extended media, there are a good few very small scale Funkin projects that have given me a chance to work with other artists that have yielded fun results! I mean, the CD was one of them. I meant for it to launch alongside the update so people could enjoy reading the special booklet made with Hellkat while enjoying new in-game content, but oops! Not everything works out 100% of the time, right? Regardless, there's a few others besides that CD + booklet combo, small fun things, that definitely will exist alongside the update and I'm excited to create a small bubble of time where there's lots for a fan to enjoy. FNF fans are passionate, so I'm convinced it'll really be a treat so long as it can all wrap up before we're all skeletons in the ground. lol

On the game end itself, art is everywhere lately. Directing a large scale project is no small task, so often times lately when it comes to game work it's easy to feel like I spent more time organizing and checking over the work of others than drawing. When I finally do sit down to draw, it can range from necessary art, to autism fueled rabbit holes creating obscure easter eggs. I won't lie, sometimes it's easy to spend hours and hours giving instructions and checking work to the point where it feels like I'm accomplished enough important work that creating asinine extras feels deserved! Though with the team expanding, and our beloved Co-Director Ninjamuffin running his programmers on requests I've made as well as their own crack head quantum theory code shit I know nothing about, things are starting to feel more streamlined than ever before.

Especially with the addition of Kawa, our new project manager, slowly administrative tasks are being lifted off me and Cam's shoulders, since it's been me n him basically doing all the legal shit completely alone until now. So along with getting more organized, and off the business shit, it's been an interesting time streamlining our processes. Ninjamuffin's interest in 'productivity' has yielded decent results, along with me occasionally getting pissed at how stupid our engine is and freaking out until the programmers build easier ways to implement assets, I'd say we're on a good track lately! Sometimes you don't even realize how busted it is building stuff sometimes until you're just so pissed you dedicate months to fixing it, hahaha!

Anyway, that should be enough for now. Sakurai mentions things like this should be short n sweet, and I think I've passed that marker by a good bit now, lol.

Til next time, bitches! -PhantomArcade / Dave

Summary of last week's funkin-resources additions!

by github-actions[bot]

• PR FunkinCrew/funkin-resources#72, "chimmie" by epicbobmanbob merged at 2023-02-11T02:18:44Z, added:
  • 1 line:
    • Shitty chromatic tutorial - ChimmieMpeg (tutorial isnt actually shit)
• PR FunkinCrew/funkin-resources#78, "Addition of Engine List" by system32unknown merged at 2023-02-11T02:17:29Z, added:
  • 1 line:
    • Leather Engine - A fork of Kade Engine that includes with 1-21 key support, supports mod with Polymod.
  • 1 line:
    • Psych Engine Mod Installing Tutorial - Shows you how to install mod packages within Psych Engine's mods/ folder.

closing thoughts for the week

by ninjamuffin99

more kickstarter related stuff this week... update from dave!!! things been goin alright in funkin land....

SONG OF THE WEEK

HELLO everyone, this is our THIRD WEEK of funkin blog posts!!!

Got a small little handful of blogs here... one particularly about... kickstarter backend stuff! thats right, new authors here! yaaahoooooooooo!!!

This is still not a fully automated process lol.... I should get on that sometime this weekend maybe. Usually on the weekends I spend time with my girlfriend, but she got damn sick! So can't see her this weekend, so it's lookin like a weekend of coding! Hopefully a bit more progress on website stuff heheh. Might even get the domain moved to funkin.me finally lol

ANYWAYS here's this weeks blog posts!

Week 7 source code RELEASED

by ninjamuffin99

YEP it's been a long time coming... I know!! A lotta apologies!!! But in my defense.... what other games promise to even GIVE you source code!! Listen cut us some damn slack with it!

ANYWAYS yeah I finally tossed up the ol week 7 source code up onto the main Friday Night Funkin' github repo

Why now? Well partly I feel like it's been long enough, partly I figured that people would be happy ENOUGH with JUST the barebones of week 7 code. We wanted it to work on desktop, we wanted certain things fixed, we wanted to just wait until next update was done and out, the list goes on. ALL of that code was really written in a different era. Our LIVES were completely different just a little under two years ago. We had our full and undivided focus and LIFE behind the game at the time, and nowadays we still pretty much do. But it really was a different era of staying up until 7AM programming, and then waking up to program all day until the late hours. We had the Kickstarter on our minds, which despite our wacky little stretch goals, we had NO IDEA what the reception of the Kickstarter would be. Would we barely scrape by and get to our goal? Would we smash past it? How far past it would we smash? As the story goes, we raised over 2 million dollars! We had to really take shit seriously and focus on things OTHER than main game work. We had to focus not only on our OWN LIVES and workflows, but taking care of the game as a LEGIT JOB and all that. Doing all the paperwork to become a company, file the proper taxes, get proper bank accounts, payroll, employees, contracts, THAT list is one that really goes on lol.

One thing about the week 7 build is that the cutscenes are implemented... STRANGELY lol

Originally the week 7 cutscenes were implemented in the same way that many of the other in-game animations are implemented, with spritesheet animation. But eventually, the animations sorta out grew the capacity of HaxeFlixel's texture size limits, and we had to split it up a certain way. THEN we ran into memory issues where the game would stutter and lag on load, and it would desync the audio for the animations! I tried a few different solutions, but in the timeframe we had (a lot of the work was done through March 2021... a single damn month!) I just ended up doing it naive way, and then just screen recording that, and then just doing a Newgrounds only build! We had always intended week 7 to be Newgrounds exclusive temporarily, although apologies it has lasted this long bwah!

At this point in time I feel like most lil FNF offshoots and whatnot have surpassed the work I put into week 7, figuring that most of these offshoots already have had multiple times the amount of development time as the whole game at that point had!

Kickstarter (Backend) Stuff! Missing Surveys check the end of the post

by Shamwayne

Sup everyone! I'm Shingi, the constantly sleep deprived and all round dumbass gremlin working on the Kickstarter Backend stuff (sorry to everyone who didn't get the gig lol).

What's this "Kickstarter Backend" thingy you ask? Well...it's basically going to be a portal where all the Backers can manage their profiles, view their rewards (and potentially track their shipment/delivery progress, still working on that one) as well as answer surveys and get updates on everything FNF! Well that's the overall idea - just think of most of the problems with the current Kickstarter setup and the new Portal will probably have a fix for it.

Huh, i was supposed to add a small section about why this new backend portal instead of just working with KS but i kinda answered that already. Welp, that leaves me with no choice but to give you spoilers for upcoming content! Wahoo!

[REDACTED]

That's about it for me, I do occasionally check the Kickstarter for ideas and things to improve on so if you have ideas and suggestions feel free to post there. Also holy crap it's been 6 months since the last Kickstarter Update??! WTF (I know you're reading this Cam, go finish writing the KS update right now lol).

One more thing: The Ninjas might have stopped me now, but who knows what easter eggs i'll plant in the Portal when it's done ;-)

One other thing: shout out to NamelessEntity, DanTheMan_1234, Braxton, Redberd36 on the KS page - whenever i visit KS i see you peeps active on the page. I have more i wanna say but this post is is too long already for my liking but i just wanna say all the Backers are valid and your feedback is seen, don't worry. speaking of Backer feedback...

One last thing (important)

If you haven't received a Survey for something, and You've seen everyone else with a similar Reward Tier get their stuff comment on the KS with RE: Missing Survey and your username (if it's different from the one on the KS page). No promises it will be fixed anytime soon (probably until the Portal is done which will have the ability to fix it built-in) but this is more of a check to see if there's a problem and how severe it is.

Eric's lil update

by EliteMasterEric

Hello every-nya it's me Eric!!!!

Uhhhhh I'm still working on that input survey here's a preview of what it looks like

Yes one of the input systems in the survey IS copied from the October 2020 codebase and yes it DOES feel awful you need to know what's bad in order to know what's good

Work on this stuff might get pushed off a bit while i work on some other stuff so please be patient lol

funkin-resources x funkin.me blog

by ninjamuffin99

I try to slowly advance the funkin blog website, eventually we will have it be our MAIN WEBSITE for the game, our company, blog, etc !!! I want it to be good website! Ever since we released FNF on Newgrounds 2 years ago, I have wanted to be the person that created the Funkin website... because I really want to polish my web design knowhow! I'm a punk ass bitch like that! But also it helps that it is very fun and refreshing to work on a project like this (the website that is, although FNF is very nice to work on!)

ANYWAYS this week's nice little change is a nicer INTEGRATION of sorts with our little funkin-resources github list! As mentioned previously in the blog, it's a nice little list of resources related to FNF, mostly modding related resources as of now. In these little weekly digests of Funkin blogposts, at the end I will include all the changes from the week, which is done automatically!!

It runs off a Github action that was created by Aurel300 on Github, after he saw my post in the funkinBounties github page! Paid him a cool 50$ for it!

Summary of last week's funkin-resources additions!

by github-actions[bot]

• PR FunkinCrew/funkin-resources#76, "Add Sparrow Atlas Resizer & Funkin Rewritten" by GuglioIsStupid merged at 2023-02-02T17:48:46Z, added:
  • 1 line:
    • Sparrow Atlas Resizer - Simple program for resizing sparrow atlas png & xml's
  • 1 line:
    • Funkin' Rewritten - A rewrite of FNF in lua that is very focused on optimization. Can also compile for Nintendo Switch homebrew
• PR FunkinCrew/funkin-resources#73, "free-softare to free-software + Modding+" by SmeckoGeck46 merged at 2023-02-02T17:48:16Z, added:
  • 2 lines:
    • Modding+ - An engine with HScript support with the intention of easy customization and enhanced gameplay options.
    • Disappointing Plus - A fork of Modding+ with additional features such as framerate adjustment, camera movement whenever a character sings, and an improved character swap function.
• PR FunkinCrew/funkin-resources#64, "Add an online Spritesheet Maker animation tool." by EyeDaleHim merged at 2023-01-29T22:44:49Z, added:
  • 1 line:
    • Free Online Spritesheet Maker - Combines multiple images together into a spritesheet, an alternative to Free Texture Packer. Make sure to select XML as the output format.

Closing thoughts

the site seems like it's finally starting to come together, and working on it I feel got me into the habit of... WORKING on PROGRAMMING type things more... for the past while it's really felt administrative heavy and biz bullshit! they were gonna introduce themselves, but this week was also the first official week of working with our new producer project manager person on the team! it's lookin pretty good so far, even if it's just someone to help answer and get back to emails lol

SONG OF THA WEEK:

right now these are manually created by me...but eventually... they will be automated too hahahah!!!

I gotta fix somethin up with github actions and payments, we have a crazy automated system with FNF, but since it's on a private branch, we only have a certain amount of MINUTES we can use! I need to write something like a discord bot that can run 24/7 and/or doesn't USE the as much Github minutes... in the FNF repo, there's definitely room for improvement in terms of like... MINUTE optimization... lol

anyways this week was a bit of a slow week with the BLOG DEVELOPMENTS. It's mostly me, ninjamuffin!! writing blogs this week! I'll try to give people some insight on some things we been cookin up

FUNKIN RESOURCES

written by cam :3

This week I started what is currently known as funkin-resources on the FunkinCrew github. The TLDR is that it's hopefully our little central place for people to add to and contribute neat little FNF related things. Modding tools, music tools, anything related to the game like that. Right now it's very much focused around modding and whatnot, but I do wonder with some of the tech stuff we are cooking, if things might shift in a different way. If we make some crazy high score stuff, maybe there will be stuff like high score guides? IDK but I think it's interesting to watch hehe..

As mentioned in the repo, it's inspired by the "Awesome" lists on Github. Personally whenever I've found myself interested in something, a coding language, topic, or interest, usually... there's a pretty hefty "Awesome" list on Github! peer to peer? the rust programming language? terminals? If you spend any amount of time in the main github Awesome list you're likely to find a topic you've been curious about but maybe didn't know where to start! It's like if you asked someone, "hey, I want to learn X, but how do I start?" and they give you every damn website/article that helped them personally and send you on your way. A nice little shortcut like that!

In a broader view, it's good to cultivate self sufficiency and fulfillment from self-teaching and learning with a community! And we can't take credit for too much of that in terms of Friday Night Funkin'. There is a god damn SHIT TON of resources, guides, tutorials out there that have existed long before I even thought of something like this, and there's already been many successful communities of people coming together to help each other! Discord server, people asking for help on twitter, watching tutorials with each other. So far it's been pretty damn thriving!

I think it can be just slightly one step beyond though. I like to hope with us being the official real mf devs, the tighter we get into those aspects of the game and COMMUNITY, all the more enriching it can possibly be, especially for outsiders who haven't taken a look at much modding stuff yet.

Ideally I'd like to cook up a bit of a section in each of these weekly blog posts. Maybe showing the past week's worth of additions to the resources list so that people can keep an eye on just the fresh stuff (inspiration by haxe.io weekly roundups). Or maybe each week there's an addition that's the "resource of the week" type deal! Could all be fun I think! And makes things play nicely together with this blog, and other aspects of our lil ventures or whateva heheh

Anyways, you can check out funkin-resources on Github: https://github.com/FunkinCrew/funkin-resources

Eventually we also plan on it being directly on the website itself! Nice little homepage for all that heheh.

Ease of use: Blogging

written by cam ninjamuffin99

One thing about quirky little blog stuff is sorta EASE OF USE. I want our blogging system to be as easy and intuitive to use as essentially posting small updates to twitter, and be accessible to anyone on the team internally to write nearly whatever they please.

It's a hard job to get artists to write and format markdown files on some niche internal blogging software, hell, even getting someone to open up Google Docs can be fussy. The idea I have is to connect it to a Discord channel/bot, and then "write" blog posts within discord. Everyone on the damn internet uses discord, and it's available on mobile, PC, and even web. It would be trivially easy to whip up something small, and post it to the blog. Then anyone on the team has the ease of use and access to post to a blog.

I do want to put more thought into this ease of use stuff. I DO want these blog posts to continue on as long as we can. We've been thinking about it for a while, and a few inspirations always come up. Factorio has an awesome dev log series "Factorio Friday Facts" and they really dive into the nitty gritty of their work. Another is the S&Box and Garry Newman's blog. It's definitely been done before, but the S&Box devlog is inspiration behind having just a bunch of "mini" blog posts within a larger post. Something as small as a tweet, within a blog post!

Even now, the system is merely setup for Github issues, and I don't have the Discord bot just yet, but already it feels pretty damn slick to write things that are on my mind, and post it to the Github issues and jot it all down.

I like the idea of a Github bot because I sorta wanna refresh my skills with DEPLOYMENT bullshit. I rarely mess around with any of that stuff, and I find it very interesting!!

I also think writing Discord bots are a nice cute way to practice coding in a new language, so I will be a freak... and program it in a language I've never used before! It's good to expand ur brain bwah!

Small Kickstarter update

written by ninjamuffin99

Small kickstarter update is that pins, and posters and whatnot should be HOPEFULLY beginning manufacturing sometime next week. Will be another follow up blog about it sometime next week!

Closing thoughts

it's been on and off in terms of game stuff biz stuff and cute lil side project biz. wrapping up dipshit tax prep, which the deadline is on the 31st!!! unfortunately as we get a bit busier with game work, we have less time to write for this cute little blog but I hope that this week is still decent substantial heheh

as mentioned earlier, we also ran out of github free minutes lol, by the time next blog comes out we'll get new minutes... lol!

SONG OF THA WEEK:

HELLO, this post is a test of a bit of like... the MASTER post system!

Basically the idea is, at the end of the week... all the POSTS of the week will be tossed here, and come out all at once!! Yippee!!

This system uses a buncho fancy Github actions, which currently live in our private repo (for convienience, but I'll toss em out into the world eventually heheheh.

Anyways, if I have it setup right, once this post goes live... there should be a few nice little niblets of posts from FNF team about various things!!! yahoo!!!!!

Issue extra test teehee

by ninjamuffin99

this is a small test for the issue thingie... lol!

ran into a little snafu... this blog post is a test for the queue system. when I close this issue, it should be sent to our private queue

HEADING

italics bruh

code

lines and lines and lines of code 

What is BPM?

written by PrincessMtH

a BPM is how many beats there are per minute.

sounds straightforward, but, what is a "beat"? well in my lil DAW there's 4 beats per bar, so it's just a 4th of a bar, clearly. but not all music is written like that. sometimes there's 3 beats per bar... we call that 3/4. so the 3 in that means how many beats there are, and the 4 means... what does the 4 mean...? something to do with steps, surely?

let me look this up... ah, so since it's from music notation, the 4 in 3/4 means that every bar (measure) lasts three quarter notes. so if it were 3/8, that means that a measure would last three eighth notes. so that means the music is twice as fast, right? well, the music would still be notated the same, so not really... it would just be going way over the supposed length of a measure, i guess. but as for counting "beats", i suppose functionally there's not much difference in counting 3/8 as 3/4 at double BPM?

wait, so if it has nothing to do with steps, what is a step??? that shit is used all over funkin, and there's definitely reasons one might want to time stuff inbetween beats. are u telling me it has no basis in music notation. this is so awkward.... i guess we just have to arbitrarily decide how many steps the beats are divided into depending on what's needed. this is going to get really funny with music in swing :)

ok test post over, you can get back to your own business

here's a little attached gif, you can click it to be taken to a little midi tune on newgrounds and add it to your faves

~Signed Emma MtH i wrote this

Inputs, Scoring, and MORE!

Written 2023/01/20 by EliteMasterEric

Intro

Hey, it's me, EliteMasterEric!! If you don't know me, I've been helping out with a bunch of programming stuff for Funkin' for about a year now, and as of a few months ago I am a full-time got-damned EMPLOYEE! My work has mainly related to engine stuff so far, such as refactoring the game to work well with the new modding system I've been developing. I've also been working on a bunch of feature-related stuff along the way. Hopefully my musings can help pad out these weekly blog posts~

Inputs

My current focus is refactoring the game's input system. I've done a lot of research into how HaxeFlixel handles keyboard inputs, and I have a lot of solutions I can try to hopefully make the system feel great. However, all that work is for naught if the community doesn't like it, so here's the plan:

First, I'll create a barebones little program that lets you play the game as minimally as possible. This means no fancy visuals except for what's necessary. Then, I'll make a menu where you can select between several different input systems. Week 7 as a baseline, my new system, a really old one from like Ludem Dare era, and several that I'll rip as directly as possible from the latest versions of a few of the most popular engines.

Then, I'll scramble them all up! Only I know which one is which, it's a little blind study! We'll release it with a nice Google survey for people to take, so I can know if the systems I add are actually making the game feel better to play. Expect to see that come out in the next week or two.

Scoring

On a similar note, I've also been thinking about how the game handles scoring, and I put out a little survey:

It's pretty clear from this that the in-game scoring system is ignored by the vast majority of the playerbase. That's fair, considering that many of them are rhythm game veterans and will only ever care about the accuracy percentage, but for a game with an arcade-like feel such as Friday Night Funkin', it's a problem that so few people are invested in high-scores, especially as we want the game to have proper leaderboards in the future.

The fact that the scoring system was probably designed in 15 minutes during a Ludem Dare and never thought about until today is probably another big reason too, ehe :P

I've been doing a lot of RESEARCH into what different scoring systems do and how, and into the ways that scoring systems can make the game more nuanced, or even influence how our players behave. We'll see how that information can help us make the scoring system more appealing to players.

Mod Stuff

You may have seen this already, but a bit ago I was working on code tied to the mod loader. With some help from UncertainProd on GitHub, I was able to get the asset loading system working for ZIP mods, on desktop and web.

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/4635334/213643382-af7ddd75-2626-47fa-9f7b-9bddc49bdd19.mp4

Boy that sure was a cool video, I sure am glad nothing caused the embed to break and thereby destroy the whole fucking website.

No promises that this feature will necessarily show up in the next version, but it's very promising functionality and great for people who are based and play the game on Newgrounds.com.

Wrap-Up

...and that should catch you all up on what I'm working on right now! I bet those haters who said the Kickstarter is a scam and we spent all the money on crack feel PREtty stupid right now. sniff

You can look out for more posts from me on this blog (the one you're looking at right now), or follow me on Twitter where I post random shit sometimes.

P.S. Look at this cat his name is Gilbert. He's not my cat I just think he's neat.

state of funkin biz: Q1 2023

by ninjamuffin99

Past 6 months or so have been interesting. In many ways it's felt like we've gone from chump ass crew of misfits, to a semi-professional game development team. Not to say that we've taken things any more or less seriously, but I think things have more STRUCTURE for ourselves than before. This blog part will talk about buncho administrative bullshit that we balance on top of actual game development production work!!

Meeting shenanigans

Near the end of the summer of 2022, I feel like we started thinking about our PRODUCTION and HOW we worked a LOOOOT more. We had those floating thoughts before, sorta knowing that in some way or form we would have to "organize" ourselves more. First thing I think we did, was to organize WEEKLY MEETINGS. I know that may sound funny, but before then, we generally just all kept in touch with each other via messages, and work was somewhat okaaayyy.... It did end up leaving us with some miscommunications. Who was working on what? What was the progress of this thing? What did we all have planned in OUR heads? Having weekly meetings has kept us close to being on the same page since we've started them. Big biz people also do STANDUP meetings, which entail DAILY meetings, albeit, short 10-ish minute ones. Maybe that's something to pursue furthur for ourselves, but generally so far we've done a decent job at updating each other on what progress we make each day in DMs. Keep in mind, we have a good damn handful of people in different timezones, meetings can be fussy to setup!

Disclaimer: we do our MEETINGS with our CORE crew (me, kawaisprite, phantomarcade, and evilsk8r) and most/all of our PROGRAMMING team. We haven't done too many meetings with much of our other contractors, but that is also something we can probably take a peak into.

payroll shenanigans

As well as thinking about HOW we work more, we also have put more thought into HOW we get PAID. Through 2021 (Kickstarter/week 7 release year) we didn't touch ANY of the Kickstarter money. This was because we wanted to keep everything clean, and we didn't have company yet, so we didn't want to touch that money and deal with weirdo taxes!!!

Through 2022 however is when we started dealing with paying not just ourselves, but contractors as well. We paid ourselves just in big lump sum for the year, partly due to some quirky tax stuff, and partly due to convenience (can be fussy to manually send wire transfers to ourselves). For our contractors, we paid them (and still pay them) with just paypal invoices usually.

Towards the end of 2022, we ended up sorting out getting PAYROLL figured out. A nice automated system to pay ourselves regularly, and does all the fuss of withholding all the proper taxes and all that! You will be surprised at how much work goes into things like that, and how fussy things like that could be. We all set that up for our first OFFICIAL employee ERIC, so now we don't need to send him quirky paypal invoices or anything like that, and he doesn't need to deal with any more bullshit 1099 tax form nonsense. Now we just need to setup that stuff for OURSELVES, which gets a liiiiittle fussy... because I'm canadian lol! Outta the frying pan and into the fire!

Producer person shenanigans

Through November/December we generally came to realize that we feel like we not only wanted, but felt like we NEEDED someone to help me and PhantomArcade manage PRODUCTION of the game. We generally like to hope we both have decent instincts on workflow, and productivity, BUT we also both feel that making it someones dedicated JOB to focus on things like that (as well as deal with things for us like emails, paperwork, etc.) would be worthwhile. We'd have more time to actually work on the game, AND general productivity is enhanced by a professional who's sole job is to help the game be as productive as possible.

Through December we were hunting around a bit, and eventually found someone who was recommended to us. Late December we interviewed them, and then a week or so later we all shook hands, and now by end of January (in about 10 days or so), we will OFFICIALLY begin work with a PRODUCER / PROJECT MANAGER on our crew. Just like how PhantomArcade is a professional at art and animation, and Kawaisprite is a professional with music and sounds, this person is pretty much a professional at project management. Something that goes very unsung in the biz! We have high hopes for working with them, and feel like it's starting off the year pretty good! Very much looking forward to working with them! more info about them at a later date though probably once they start they can introduce themselves here heheh

Taxes shenanigans

January 2023 is deadline for some tax stuff we need to do... so good ol' PhantomArcade has been grinding his way through that in the past few days, yeowch! Could really damn use extra hands ow ow ow!

Hiring and Interview shenanigans

Back in October 2022, I put out one of our first open job application posts. It got a good chunk of damn good applicants!! It was my first personal experience in this position, and I was unsure what to expect. It was VERY hard to filter down people, and a MUCH bigger task than anticipated. Doing research on candidates, comparing them to each other, doing research on the answers they gave. Basically for the period of a few weeks I had to go from game developer to full time hiring manager.

I slowly started getting in touch with some of the tasty candidates, INTERVIEWED THEM. It was a strange experience. Everyone I talked to was a delight to talk to, and I genuinely would want to work with everyone that I interviewed! I really do mean it when I say it was hard to nail down to just a single person. But I found a mfer! They been cookin since about middle of December and things have been a good experience I feel so far heheh

2023 and beyond

As mentioned earlier, we've been looking forward to working with our fancy new producer person, but that's just a small slice of work that we deal with! We still have not only a LOT of work on the game itself, but things around the BUSINESS! We will have our work cut out for us, but the light at the end of the tunnel gets brighter and brighter. It feels like we work much more productively, and week by week, we accelerate that productivity. Things get better and better for ourselves and our lives it feels. Here's to Funkin 2023, and here's to funkin' blog posting wahoo!!!!!

** written by ninjamuffin99** this is a small test for the issue thingie... lol!

ran into a little snafu... this blog post is a test for the queue system. when I close this issue, it should be sent to our private queue

** written by PrincessMtH** a BPM is how many beats there are per minute.

sounds straightforward, but, what is a "beat"? well in my lil DAW there's 4 beats per bar, so it's just a 4th of a bar, clearly. but not all music is written like that. sometimes there's 3 beats per bar... we call that 3/4. so the 3 in that means how many beats there are, and the 4 means... what does the 4 mean...? something to do with steps, surely?

let me look this up... ah, so since it's from music notation, the 4 in 3/4 means that every bar (measure) lasts three quarter notes. so if it were 3/8, that means that a measure would last three eighth notes. so that means the music is twice as fast, right? well, the music would still be notated the same, so not really... it would just be going way over the supposed length of a measure, i guess. but as for counting "beats", i suppose functionally there's not much difference in counting 3/8 as 3/4 at double BPM?

wait, so if it has nothing to do with steps, what is a step??? that shit is used all over funkin, and there's definitely reasons one might want to time stuff inbetween beats. are u telling me it has no basis in music notation. this is so awkward.... i guess we just have to arbitrarily decide how many steps the beats are divided into depending on what's needed. this is going to get really funny with music in swing :)

ok test post over, you can get back to your own business here's a little attached gif, you can click it to be taken to a little midi tune on newgrounds and add it to your faves

~Signed Emma MtH i wrote this

Wahoo, another lil blog test thing!

Today I've been getting back and sorta workin on workflow-ish stuff. Getting quirks figured out, and as of right now... you SHOULD be able to write blog posts and they should be automatically uploaded to the website!!! Building and everything!!

Right now, the workflow is

• Write github issue in our private little blog-queue repo
• Post Github issue, that issue will essentially act as the DRAFT
• Whenever it's ready to post, just CLOSE the issue

The next few little concepts I got in my brain is instead of having the blogs be posted whenever anyone pleases, once closed, it gets put into a queue of sorts. Then at the end of the week, all the blogs of the week will be posted in a bit of a mega weekly post! I feel like that's a bit more fun than instant posting, heheh. It's like taking a film photo, and waiting for it to develop!

More things I want to figure out is getting like... the AUTHOR stuff sorted out as well!!! And then attatching it all to a discord bot!!

This is a test for blog post issues! In fact... I will write the whole idea of the WORKFLOW here.

The idea right now is to sorta use Github issues as "drafts" of sorts for the blog posting. Github has a decent little markdown text editor, which would play pretty damn nicely with the static site generator!

SO the idea is that issues can be used to write little blog posts, and then every Friday or so, all the issues that get "closed" by the OP by the end of the week will be included in a roundup of sorts! I prefer a weekly roundup than like... big stream of info? I think it's refreshing to be able to expect something nice at the end of the week heheh

The workflow will include a few cute little Github actions, one on our little blog-queue repo, which will just be a buncho issues really, I think the Github action I'll put in the funkBlog repo, so that people have access to what that looks like :)

For anyone reading this and wondering about similar implementation, just know that this other repo we have truly is just a buncho issues only!

I want to get it setup this way, less so for GITHUB use, and moreso to have integration with a DISCORD bot. The next step is making a small discord bot, so that even dummies like PhantomArcade can write and post small little snippets and ideas for blog writeups!

So far so good!

Here are a few tests...

HERE IS A HEADING OF SORTS!

this should be BOLD

and this one is italic!

fuck it, code

HELLO EVERYONE READING THIS!!!

This is the first OFFICIAL blog post! If you are reading this the day it is published... it means you are a maniac and probably stalk me!

This is a bit of a post to look back at, and I suppose to document the process of even MAKING this damn blog! Moreso for the people in the future looking back a billion blogposts and reading this, and see where this blog started! (or digging through my github to see an abandoned project, doh!)

ANYWAYS, we want to make lil bloggy stuff, twitter is annoying and i think we like to keep to ourselves a lot of the time. We don't like comments so don't expect some mf forum or someshit around here.

This is also a general revamp of the funkin website, since we are trying to be more legit and real and PRESENTABLE!!!

Lil tech details... this blog is made with ZOLA STATIC SITE GENERATOR!!!

I have been trying to chip away on this blog every day for at least 20mins-1hr, and it has been fun lil side adventure heheh.

captains log donezo

lov, cameron 💞💞💞