(without you my friend)

Hey someone messaged me to ask if I was okay haha. I'm alive! Sorry for lack of updates here, what's been happening is we've gotten funded for Rhythm Doctor and are making a full version!! And we've started releasing closed beta levels!! There's a mailing list over at rhythmdr.com if you'd like to be part of that, we release one level every month :) And Newgrounds is a huge part of this trajectory, would never have had so much exposure without it! Truly grateful to Tom Fulp and the team - it is incredible how dedicated he is - and you guys of course.

Besides that, I've just gotten older I guess heh. Hope you're well, it would be nice to do a small rhythm game project to release on here again, but its balancing between that and finishing Rhythm Doctor (and A Dance of Fire and Ice too), which are both turning into tiny commercial projects. In any case thank you for following me and playing my stuff. If I'm silent again for an extended period of time don't worry - you can check my twitter for updates and screenshots of things! Till next time!

Good rhythm games you should check out: 'Orbit or beat'

A Dance of Fire and Ice finally has a solution to pesky calibration issues: a mini game! I'm really happy with it and hope you find some fun in it. All you do is press to the beat, but thanks to statistics and the power of the modern computer, we can extract lots of information about you from that!

Basically put, the minigame checks how spread out your hits are from each other. It does this by guessing which beat you meant to hit, taking the error, and then calculating the standard deviation of all your errors.

If you don't remember Stats class, just know this rule: the way a standard deviation is defined, 95% of your errors are within two standard deviations of the average. So if the standard deviation is 0.01, that means 95% of your hits were within +-0.02 of the average.

For this particular game, in order to get an A rank, the standard deviation required is 0.015 - meaning all your hits have to be within 0.03 seconds of each other. If you're finding it hard, you will most definitely find that you will do better if you hit your key hard so it makes a sound. This game basically confirmed what I always suspected when testing Rhythm Doctor - the harder you slam the more accurate you'll be due to being able to hear the sound of your key. Try it out!

A Dance of Ice and Fire was a 48-hour Ludum Dare entry I did about one and a half months ago. It did pretty well, netting 6th out of a thousand something for Audio. Since then I think i've put in like triple that time into updates.

And this is update number two, adding WORLD THREE!

This new world took ages, and together with that, lots of little features. This is also a little last swansong before my final year of uni which starts in a few days, so updates are gonna drop slower from now on!

Before I go though I'd like to try an experiment - my games have now got about 140,000 plays across the web, thanks largely in part to Newgrounds. That's sort of an insane number, and one that I cannot really envision, and I'm really happy it has got so much reception. I've made next to nothing so far (though one kind soul called Nick Robinson donated 5 dollars last month! My first income ever!! Thanks Nick!), but now I'd like to try a little something!

That something is this: would you be willing to exchange a dollar for a mobile Android version of ADOFAI? No don't tell me, answer with your wallet! Hehe. It's just the same as the game, and is the absolute minimum price Google allows because right now there are three worlds. As more features are added, the price will go up, I think that's fair. Anyway, what this means is that buying it now will have a lot more value as you'll get all the updates free! So yeah, think about it :D And find it on Google Play as soon as I put it up, which should be right now.

Enjoy the new levels! They were really fun to make.

A Dance of Fire and Ice was a game I made for the Ludum Dare 48 hour competition, in which a game had to be made from scratch in 48 hours. Of the 1000+ entries, ADOFAI managed to bag #6 in audio!

And now I've added a second level pack. Enjoy!

While the first focused on the breakbeat, this one focuses solely on hitting the offbeat.

I've received several messages now from other developers telling me they wanted to take the concept and expand it themselves into their own game, if I wasn't going to do anything with it. So I'd just like to say, first thanks for asking, I really appreciate it. Second, I do plan on building this game slowly with updates - and endless mode would be awesome. And third, I can't claim full credit for the idea of one-button traversing - if you enjoyed my game you should totally look at Nintendo's Rhythm Heaven where they had a similar concept! This game was definitely inspired by that one, I wanted to see where I could take my new twist of having two orbiting planets, and I think there is a lot of potential in this version of it! Triangles, hexagons, as some of you have suggested will give really funky rhythms, and I plan on adding those in the next update if I can.

As for Rhythm Doctor, I've been working on the port fairly steadily, though unfortunately I won't have anything new at the end of this summer wrt that. The change has just been porting the entire thing to Haxe, which would then enable mobile versions to be made, so it's more an internal thing. And with uni starting soon, it looks like the project will have to be put on hold again for a while. But one day it will be done, and it will be glorious. If you want me to email you when there's a new level for you to play, there's a form over at rhythmdr.com that you can fill. Imagine, it will be like Christmas when you see that email. Till next time!

Hiya NG peeps,

Rhythm Doctor was a game I uploaded in January 2013 as a demo, to really nice reviews on NG! Thank you so much for the support and suggestions so far. We are still working on it, and in case you missed it: we've updated the game with a delicious boss level for you guys. Also, you can now play through the game with two players! Just press Caps Lock during play to toggle, and use the L key for P2. It works much better in the levels with multiple rows - or at least we think so. Would be great to hear your feedback on these new additions :)

In other news, funny story but we won the Independent Games Festival (IGF) Student Showcase award, along with seven other really cool student games, including one Flash one called Westerado which you should check out (cause they are cool guys)! It was a great experience to be able to have a booth at GDC and meet tons of people, and for that we owe it to Newgrounds without whom things would very possibly have turned out a lot different. So, a humble thanks to you guys for not blamming it to hell and for seeing something in our little game! We will be able to work on it full-time again this summer, and thanks to GDC we're working with someone to port the game to the iOS so you can watch out for that too. If we're lucky we'll be able to wrap it all up by the start of the next term of uni in October. Thanks for reading, and here's to the future.