Hey Newgrounds!

I just want to share a little update about myself, since I've been pretty quiet for quite a while. My first game, Blackwood Prologue, was published here almost three years ago, and since then it's been a bit of a busy time for me. I finished school and went out and got a job, which now occupies a large portion of my time. I do other side jobs as well to earn a bit of extra income, which also cuts into my time a lot. What time was left has been mostly spent on a handful of more pressing personal projects.

Recently, I've started to reach a more stable place where there are less other projects and commitments floating around, so the next big thing on my list is development of the main Blackwood game. All throughout the past couple of years I've been doing planning for the story (I promise it won't be as wishy-washy and pointless as Prologue was!), and over the past few weeks I've been working on some initial artwork for the game, which I just finished today. This is the first glimpse of anything Blackwood related that I'm going to be sharing (I've posted it to the art portal if you are interested!), but it won't be the last.

Because the development process is still going to be a long long journey, I can't officially say or share anything about the game at this point, other than that I do plan to finish it some day. What I do intend to do though, is start sharing out bits of artwork and animation, and other glimpses at the work in progress as I go, just for those people who are interested in my work. It's not about promoting the game at this point, but just sharing what I'm working on, getting feedback, and giving myself a bit more purpose to get little pieces done. I'll be primarly posting things on twitter, so if you have any desire to see the odd Blackwood related content, feel free to follow me there. Fair warning though, there probably won't be a huge amount of Blackwood stuff, so you'll have to live with seeing all the other junk I tweet about clogging up your feed in the meantime!

Cheers, and thanks for all the support and interest you guys have shown over the past couple of years!

-Blake

My game, Blackwood Prologue, was published to Newgrounds today.

This is my very first flash game, slowly developed over the course of a year, with a lot of trial and error along the way!
It's (meant to be) a moody atmospheric side-scrolling game, more focused on art and sound than actual game play. This style, some might recognize, is based off of games like Coma and Nevermore.

In-fact, Coma was my main inspiration for this game.. As I was playing it for the third of fourth time, I thought, "I could make a better game than this!". A pretty bold statement, because I quite like Coma, but the reasoning behind it was the fact that Coma lacked a real tangible storyline. The storyline of Coma is obscure and more of an allusion to a storyline. By that, I mean that rather than having a storyline, Coma forces you to imagine your own storyline for a game. A cool Idea, but I think a game that has a solid lengthy story, as well as the deep atmosphere and feeling of these types of games would be even more well received, so I began to plot out a story for my own game. Blackwood Prologue is not that game though.

As I had never made any games before, I wanted to make a short little game to test my skills, and see if I could actually pull off the game that I wanted to make... Blackwood Prologue was born! I didn't put much thought into the storyline, and in-fact, it has no storyline... it simply carries symbolism and hints that point towards important events that will happen in the true Blackwood game/series. In this regard, it came out looking a lot more similar to Coma than I had planned (with the whole dreamy atmosphere, the purposeful confusing state of mind that it puts you in as you try to work out the symbolism), and I hope that no one, least of all Coma's creator feel like my game is a rip-off of his great work.... I certainly promise the next Blackwood game I make will stray much farther away, and truly be it's own game.

That being said, I'm taking a break from Blackwood while I work on my new game, as I wanted to try out a different style, so a sequel to Prologue will be quite a ways away from now. Hopefully by then I will be able to shore up my weaknesses that were clearly evident through the development of Prologue, and be able to create a game of higher standards. That's not to say that Prologue is a horrible game, I am quite proud of it, especially as my very first game, but as my first game, I could only accomplish so much, and there are places where it is lacking. But those are my own opinions... make sure you go play the game and leave me yours, so I can see it through your perspective!