History
Year: 2009
2009 was undoubtedly a year of change. First priority was taking care of my two big goals carrying over from 2008- redesign my site and make the transition to school in Philadelphia. I moved in January to attend the University of the Arts for the Spring semester. I worked on the site redesign consistently in my free time from school.
In February I released Type It! II to a lackluster reception. I knew the original Type It! wasn't very popular but I thought a face-lift with new modes would be enough to entice people. Sadly enough there's just not much interest in typing games. More importantly though is that Type It! II was my first game in Actionscript 3.0. I had been debating the switch for a while so I decided to start with a small project. The transition was fairly frustrating but the benefits of using AS3 were well worth it, so I was happy to have that behind me.
Tragedy strikes in March: I lost the database for the site redesign. Since the back end of the new site was so different I had to restructure the entire database and update the content within. In a grave mistake while on my database administration page I accidentally clicked the 'remove database' button. For whatever reason that version of Cpanel didn't ask for a confirmation, it just proceeded blindly. I wasn't too worried at first because I keep nightly backups of all my databases. When I checked the backup though I found that the data didn't look anything at all like I expected. Turns out when I uploaded the backup script for the new site I forgot to change some parameters, so it was just making copies of the old database. So once again I had to spend weeks reformatting and re-organizing all the data from the old site into the new format.
Near the end of the school semester my redesign was finally coming close to complete. During the course of the year however I was starting to feel like school was more of a burden than a benefit. I had already been through college once back in Ohio, and even though my credits transferred I felt like I was still repeating a lot of the same curriculum. Not only that but after looking at the class outlines it didn't look like I would learn new stuff until at least junior year. I liked some of my classes but it was just too much money to be spending. I decided to drop out of Uarts but continue living in Philly after the summer was over.
I headed back to Ohio after school let out and finally launched the new site on April 27. Along side of it I also released Trapped in an Escape Game and Escape 4: The Bathroom. Both projects had been finished in 2008 but I wanted to save them for the actual site redesign. Both were met with warm reception. Coincidentally during the summer, Addictinggames hosted a 'web games showdown' featuring a couple of my escape games, and Escape the Car won first place for 'Best Escape Game.'
During the summer I had to say goodbye to my dog PJ, who made cameos in many of my projects including Black Sheep Acres and How to be a Guitar Hero. He had been progressing downhill for a while so it was sad to see him go, but also a relief. I was just glad to be home for it.
It turned out that long term contributor and site member Luis was looking to take on a position at Newgrounds, so we discussed the prospect of living together in Philadelphia if everything worked out. Sure enough I headed back to Philly in October to find an apartment for us. Tom was nice enough to let me stay at the Newgrounds office until I found a place downtown. Accommodations were made by November, and I signed the lease on my first apartment. The remainder of the year was spent getting organized and moved into the new place.
At the close of 2009 I had all but finished a very important transition. Instead of making flash games in my parent's basement I was now making them in my own apartment in the middle of Center-City Philadelphia. And with school behind me, surely I'd have time to finish a lot more projects...