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Waiting for Territory War updates? Maybe news on a new escape game? How about... an 80's themed, cheesy music video?? I present to you, Bible Black!

I'm back in Pennsylvania now, and before I left Ohio Joe and I collaborated on one final project. It's been a goal of Joe's for a long time now. I was skeptical at first, but ended up having a lot of fun producing it. So sorry if it's not what you were waiting for, but I need some variety in my work ;) Unfortunately the video display is a little distorted because the aspect ratio is widescreen and I don't have a video player to support that yet.

With Bible Black out of the way I can focus more heavily on Power of 3 again. Adobe's recent announcement of app development with the newest version of flash has me pretty excited, so I'm looking forward to testing that out when I get a chance too.

What is it with me and making updates on the first of the month?

Anyway, just put up an article for the Denver Beerfest. This time I actually had a camera with me, and didn't feel like tweeting every hour, so I went with the classic approach. This was also a new trip, so it deserved a page of its own.

I updated my 2008 timeline, thanks to Danny for pointing out that I'm lazy ;)

I'll have a music video project uploaded for you guys to check out in about a week or so. You'll probably hate it because it's not a new escape game or content for Territory War, but that's ok :*(

Really anxious to release some details on our Power of 3 game...

Mod Meet 2009 was cancelled and reconfigured into the Denver Meetup, centering around the Great American Beer Festival coming to town. This time I brought my pals Joe(SleazeRocker) and Josh(kelwynshade) with me. We created Crystal Lake together, and Josh has also provided music for my other games like Territory War. They had been wanting to make it out to a Newgrounds meetup so Beerfest seemed like a perfect opportunity.

We flew out on Thursday to get settled in early for the festivities. We started off with some food and drinks from the hotel bar, and eventually met up with some of the NG staff later that night for pool. We called it a night pretty early so we could get back to our rooms and rest up for the next day. And I mean rest up, because we slept in pretty late. But who am I kidding, I always sleep in. We skipped out on Psycho Goldfish's cookout and headed down to Beerfest early to get a place in line.

A small part of the Beerfest line

We were actually pretty close to the front

It wasn't long before we were inside and sampling beers. Upon entrance we were given 1oz sample glasses to take around to the booths with us. As cool as Beerfest sounds in theory, it wasn't actually that exciting. It started off fun but became pretty crowded over time. It became hard to squeeze in and get samples. Not to mention that mixing so many different kinds of beer together isn't so pleasant.

Ready to drink

Time for a break

It's been a while since guest flash has been posted to the site, and I've been meaning to put these up:

Fancy Pants Adventures World 2. Brad Borne's smash hit platformer. Featuring a bonus level by me!

House of 1000 Cats. Zombie-Pimp's award-winning pico day 2008 submission. I helped out with the menu and intro animation.

Work continues on my power of three game with ego and kelwynshade. Still not releasing many details though... More to come!

Ok I've actually been back for about a week, just a little delayed in getting some updates up...

Comic-Con was, as always, plenty of fun. For me it's about meeting with everyone after-hours and talking flash. The appeal of the con itself is starting to wear thin, as each year becomes more of the same stuff with longer lines. Rather than take a bunch of pictures with my non-existent camera (see: wizard world), I opted to take some mobile photos and post comments along the way via twitter. This approach was a little more fun, since I don't have to recollect everything that just happened and find the pictures to match it. I might try it out more often...

Though I'm not going to post an actual article for Comic-Con, be sure to check out the amazing tourism advertisement that I came across while on my way to San Diego.

While at the con I spoke with many Newgrounds regulars including egoraptor, my artist partner for the Power of Three event. Progress has been a bit delayed due to the amount of traveling that both of us have been doing and will be doing, but the game is shaping up quite well. I still plan to start up some sort of devblog for the game, but I think I'm going to hold off until NG fleshes out their 'alphas' system, where everyone can post game updates in a uniform fashion.

I've actually been spending most of my time reading Essential Actionscript 3.0 by Colin Moock. Before picking it up I was already familiar with AS3, but this book fills in all the little gaps and offers plenty of new insight into the language itself. I'd like to read the book in its entirety before moving ahead significantly with Power of Three.

Other news: I updated the press section to include a few more articles regarding the Addictinggames Showdown and my win in the Escape Game category. There are actually a lot more articles than these, but most of them copy and paste the same text from each other.

Not sure how to classify this one, so let's stick it under 'reviews.' A critique, if you will.

As I was on the plane traveling to San Diego for Comic-Con this year, I took a magazine out of the seat pocket in front of me and started rifling through it. After a few pages I was presented with an advertisement so amazing that I had to save the magazine, bring it home, and scan it for all to see. Check it out:

It's an advertisement for tourism in Chile. The presentation is average, but it's the content that stands out. The tagline is 'everything in one country.' With such a bold statement, the pictures that follow must surely demonstrate this. Let's take a look.

First up, we have a man talking on a cell phone and using a laptop. With the stock nature of this image I think we can see where this picture set is going. But ok, if I go to Chile, I suppose I can rest assured that I will have internet and phone access. Not my first concern for vacation purposes, but it would be for the tech-savvy business types. I wont deduct too many points for this one, we've got five more pictures to make up for it

To the right we have an inside view of an air traffic control tower. That's right, Chile has an airport. Airports are necessary, yes, but this advertisement is located in an airline tourism magazine- airport presence is kind of assumed. My interest in Chile is already waning. What's next, evidence of cars?

No, satellites. In the ever changing and constantly evolving business world, we need to be reminded of the presence of satellite technology. Big ones even. And lots of them. For a second I was afraid that Chile's air traffic control system operated through an elaborate system of smoke signals.

Next to the satellites, consuming the largest area of any picture on the page, we get a glimpse at Chile's renowned cargo bay and boat yard. Honestly, these pictures are starting to baffle me. In the event of airport difficulties I suppose I can opt to sail my frigate down.

I got back in town after an extended stay in Philly last Thursday, and as always I've posted up an article on the trip.

Thanks to everyone who voted for my games in the Addictinggames/Nickelodeon showdown... Escape: The Car won in the "Greatest Escape Game" category! All winners posted here. I'd really like to try and get the actual tv clip uploaded somewhere, but youtube is touchy with that kind of stuff, so I'm looking into it.

I also made a few small changes to the site this week. Since a lot of the content here has a decent amount of votes, the rankings are actually determined by score now. Before it was just by amount of views. Also, guests can no longer have line breaks in their comments, this is to combat some of the spamming.

As mentioned in the Wizard World post, progress on the Power of 3 game is coming along pretty well. Still planning on getting some sort of devblog set up for it, hopefully I can take care of that next week. Until then I'll be heading out to the Screw Attack gaming convention in Texas. More to come!

Wizard World Philly marks the first appearance of a Newgrounds in booth in their home state of Pennsylvania. Check out Luis' coverage here with plenty more pics. I was long overdue for some airport shenanigans this time. For whatever reason I had to make a connecting flight in my own state. When I got to Cleveland I found out my flight to Philly was flat out cancelled. I've had delays but never a complete cancellation. Instead of waiting till the next day and possibly paying for a hotel room, I took the next flight into Allentown, which was about an hour south of Philly. Tom was awesome enough to come pick me up at the airport there. Thanks Tom!

When I got in the booth was more or less set up, so we met up with everyone back and the office and hung out for a while. We had quite a few out-of-towners including me, Luis, Swain, Egoraptor, liljim, HappyHarry, Jonas, Sardonic-Samurai, Tomomoto, and 36Holla. We stayed till about midnight then headed into center city where we had some hotel rooms to store all of us.

Luis and liljim

Tom in the conference room

Friday we grabbed some food at Dunkin Donuts and headed into the convention center. I have to be honest, by this point the appeal of the conventions themselves is starting to wear thin. I'm not huge into comics and anime to begin with, so the booths start to blur together. The reason I come of course is to meet up with everyone that I would otherwise only talk to online, and to help with the Newgrounds booth. It's always enjoyable to meet actual fans of the site- even the... ahem... most dedicated ones ;)

The booth

Surveying the crowd

Lots of little things to update you guys on lately:

First off... Vote for my escape games in the Addictinggames/Nickelodeon showdown! I have two entries in the "Greatest Escape Game" category. If you're not sure which to vote for I'd pick the car, it's what I've told my friends to vote for since the car was the original game and still one of the most popular. After the voting ends the results will be aired on TV on June 27th! I'll update you guys again with confirmed times.

Thanks to everyone who has played, commented, viewed, or voted on escape #4! It's brought a welcome increase in traffic to the site, I always count on my escape games for that. Thanks to jayisgames for the review, I've added it to my press section. As usual the new traffic has strained the server, but this time purely through bandwidth. I blame this on the escape video- since the game links back to it it brought a lot of viewers here, and one viewing is around 10MB. Much larger than an average 500-700kb escape game. I've upgraded my bandwidth to a constant 10mbps, and temporarily removed the video from the site to ease the stress. Hopefully things will hold up.

Those that visit NG might already know this, but I'm officially teaming up with kelwynshade and egoraptor for my next game! It's part of the Power of 3 summer event. We have a lot of great ideas in the works, I'm excited to move further into development. I intend to start up a new section of the blog devoted just to the game, to give a little extra insight on the creation process for anyone interested. I'll actually be meeting up with ego this weekend in Philadelphia for the Wizard World convention, so stop by and say hi if you're in the area! We'll be around the NG booth.

Lastly, I posted a review for Flash CS4 last week. Check it here.

I just got around to upgrading to the CS4 Production suite recently, which of course includes the latest in the flash series. It's actually the only application I've installed from CS4 so far, I'm waiting till I get a new computer to bother with installing everything else. CS3 will do for now. I really wasn't planning on upgrading at all until CS5 or later, but CS4 gives me two very desirable features that I'll get into later.

First up, the interface and layout. It's.. well.. more rigid. Whereas CS3 had curves and padding, this one is more about straight lines and making use of space. It took a few moments to get the panels arranged the way I liked, and then I noticed it- the properties panel has changed drastically. Introduced in Flash MX/6, the properties panel has been one of my favorite additions to the interface and now they've gone and tampered with it. All it really comes down to is that the properties panel is now meant to be docked vertically, not horizontally. That's great, but I don't use a widescreen monitor. So now that I'm forced to dock it with my library and other panels on the right side, it increases the overall dock width and gives me less viewable stage width. More importantly though I'm accustomed to looking down at the bottom panel to see the properties, and now it's not there. The properties panel used to serve as a 'snapshot' (in my opinion) for the current active object on the screen. Additional info for that object was hidden away in the tabs, like filters for example. Now, all of this information is present at once, via little drop down menus. The stacking of these menus (even collapsed) takes up a lot of space, hence the change to a vertical panel. The problem is that it's filled with information I don't need or care about. When I glance at a movieclip I usually just need to know its instance name and/or screen position, not its filters, blend mode, color effects, or "3d position" (that's a new one).

My other main gripe with the new layout is that the open filename tabs are attached to the stage now, not the top of the screen. In another attempt to mess with my preferred layout, CS4 puts the timeline at the bottom of the screen. I can put it back up top the way I like it, but since the filenames are included with the stage they now get sandwiched in the upper middle of the screen. Now when I go to quickly select another tab's file I find myself entering the timeline's motion editor instead of a new file (another new thing, I'm getting there I promise).