Well the holidays are over and I've got a few minutes to review the year. Guess it's better late than never!

I'll mainly focus on my game releases since I have the most to say there.

I really don't feel like repeating anything from the trivia year in review TeamTrivial posted, so here's a link to that for you wondering why I'm ignoring all the trivia stuff.

The Trivial 2024 Review - by TeamTrivial

Anyway, here we go

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After a year or so away from the site I decided to return to help with some trivia stuff I'm sure you've seen go out throughout 2024. This got me back on the site in February 2024 I think? Anyway, I started getting back into it and tried to get caught up to all the changes over the last few years. Lots of new series, games, and faces to figure out!

May 2024 - First New Game Release

So here's the fun story of Pico Rubber 2024

I made this game in the span of 4 hours (I hopped on NG at 11am in the morning, saw the inspiration around 12pm, published the game before 5pm) using code ripped from our WIP Trivial Trivia entry, art I found with a quick "pico" search here on NG, and some basic-ass HTML programming I remembered from the good ol' Electric Rubber JS days.

This game legit was made because I was browsing the Under Judgement section of the games and saw a Pico clicker. I opened it and legit thought who is making clicker games in 2024? I thought we all got over those in 2014 or whenever. So I turned on my autoclicker and found out the game was just a few buttons and an incrementing number, which made me think It's been some time since I've made a rubbing game, lets make one with more buttons than this! and Pico Rubber 2024 was born.

This game confuses me as well. It's rated well, has a lot of views, was somehow frontpaged, and still has people stumbling onto it today. IMO the game kinda sucks, is poorly made for mobile, and has some of the most basic HTML I've put into a submission since my early HTML/CSS games.. I figured the game would get a few hundred plays, appear on the Pico 2024 playlist, and we'd call it a day.

So thanks everyone for liking what I personally think is a sub-par interactive experience and if you really want another one you'll have to let me know.

Big thanks to @CayFettArt for their Pico art - I kinda used it first then asked them if it was OK after publishing... something I kinda hate to do.

Thanks to @ElRandomGMD for the inspiration. If you didn't make a clicking game in 2024 I would not have made a rubbing game in 2024.

August 2024 - The Next Inspiration

After a trivia entry or two, I got more inspiration after again browsing the Under Judgement games section. This time, I was inspired by an entry created by @doobieshloobie. Their entry was a pretty straightforward number guessing game where you'd guess between 1 and 100 and were given a hint on if you were higher/lower than the RNG number.

I thought to myself, I've never made a number guessing game before, so let's try and see what I can do! and Appless' Number Tower was born. I'm actually pretty happy with this game as it was built from scratch (not that Scratch) over the span of 3 hours. I did copy some CSS from the Trivial series, but that's really about it.

While the game didn't do as well as Pico Rubber (should've used Pico's sexy face again...) I am probably happiest with this submission out of my other hobby projects from the year.

Thanks to doobieshloobie for the inspiration!

September 2024 - A Mix of things

Well September was a busy month for me and brought in probably the strangest entry I've made to date... which is the School Shooter 'quiz' game.

This entry was created late at night in response to the school shooting here in the US that happened that same day.

A timeline of the Apalachee High School shooting | CNN

I was mainly inspired to make something like this as I had been doing a lot of digging into NG's history and had some of the controversies and other school shooting related entries/submissions fresh in my mind (I remember looking into that banned/removed game from NG like a week or two earlier). So with a fresh shooting to start the year, my mind already very familiar with the responses/entries NG has had in the past, I decided to make a little quiz showing off the issue we've got here in the US.

I understand this entry is basically a scream into the void, but hey, I kinda own the codebase I bastardized to make the game, didn't drag a certain other trivia series name through the mud to publish it, so we're good there. I know the 'quiz' will do nothing to change minds or really shine a light on the issue any further, but hey, I can say I made something about it at least.

I'm in an art collab?

Somehow I made some art and it ended up in a collab too.

This of course was the Mexican Independence Day collab which can be viewed here:

I made a hotdog and dressed him up. I'm not an artist by any means, but ElRandomGMD said art of any kind was allowed so you got a humanoid hotodog for September!

The follow-up to Pico Rubber 2024

I had an idea to follow up the Pico Rubber 2024 game later in the year since IMO that first entry kinda sucked and didn't bring anything new or special to the rubbing-genre of games. Originally I had planned to make a sexually questionable game featuring a hotdog to rub (this is why I had hotdog art..) that you could unlock condiments for, make longer, fluffier buns, etc. etc. but turns out I suck at weird art and I really didn't feel like continuing on that line of thinking.

So instead I had the idea to have an incremental game based on not numbers, but hex codes. This turned into RGB Up!

This game was made in the span of 1.5 days and basically is a heavily reskinned version of Pico Rubber 2024 with new features and a shit ton of new code. Turns out though I'm bad at math and the conversion function I had made to take an INT and convert it over to a hex code has/had some issues... so it's not as good as I had envisioned it. There's also the side effect of having a lot of flashing colors of mixed hues so sorry for that too.

RGB UP! is probably the most unique thing I've made in some time, although it didn't end up being too great. I am still happy with it overall and think it made for a good follow-up to the May rubbing game.

October 2024 - I don't like password cracking games

For some reason I encountered one too many password cracking games in 2024 which honestly put me over the edge. I'd say these games inspired this entry below but I'd call it more of a "I can make this same thing in 5 minutes but much better". This entry is Appless' PC

I kinda took on a bigger than expected idea here in that I wanted to make people unlock the PC (what these password cracking games really were) and then have a whole game behind it. Turns out this turned into a game like that Windowz XP submission but a little worse. Since I was short on time (this game took 1.5 days to make) I tossed some other HTML projects throughout the year into this one and called it a day. I am pretty happy these other HTML games worked out so well and can be fully played in this submission. If I get more time I may look to make a fuller version of this entry with proper features, gadgets, and other secrets, so we'll see what 2025 has in store!

2024 Review

Overall I'd say 2024 was a pretty good year. I had time for some personal short hobby projects outside of the Trivial Trivia series and even got scouted to the Art Portal for some reason. Here's hoping 2025 will be a good year too!