Author Archives: Matt Roszak

RIP Kongregate

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Hey guys, it’s the end of an era.

Kongregate.com is going into archive mode and no longer accepting new games. A lot of the main staff already left a while ago, but there was still some really good web games being published there, so I’m a bit surprised that it’s no longer working out for them. They were even doing the monthly cash prizes for games up until the end, which I appreciate. I guess now they’re gonna be focusing on publishing mobile games, and on their store, Kartridge.

When I published Epic Battle Fantasy 3 on Kongregate 10 years ago, it got a million plays in the first week, and eventually 11 million in total. I think that was the biggest long-term boost to my reputation and career. The people at Kongregate were a lot of fun to work with, especially Greg the badge guy, and I don’t think any indie game platform today has anywhere near the same influence. I’m glad I published Epic Battle Fantasy 5 on there while I still could – it’ll be one of the last games to ever get badges!

Personally, I’m gonna keep checking the site every once in a while. There’s still lots of fun badges that I’ve missed. Even when the Flashplayer plugin is disabled, there’s still browser extensions to get around that.

A lot of the popular Flash games I’m sure will eventually make their way onto other platforms like Steam, but there’s also preservation projects like BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint to keep these games alive.

Anyway, you should go have a browse through Kongregate’s badge categories. I’m sure you’ll find something fun to play every time you have an hour or two to spare.

Fakermon 3

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And here’s the final batch of fake Pokemon from a while ago.
I enjoyed making pixel art for a while, but I think I’ve had enough of it now. It’s even more slow and tedious to do than vector art!

In other news, I’m still playing video games full-time, and the EBF games are still on sale on Steam.

Half Life Creatures

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Yo, after playing Half Life: Alyx, I felt like drawing some alien creatures. I’m also quite tempted to play the other Half Life games, as this was my first.

I believe it’s been two years since I’ve drawn anything on paper, so it’s nice to see that I can still do it! I may even draw more stuff – who knows?!

I’ve started playing Pokemon Sword now – I quite like the graphics and presentation, despite the low Switch specs, and I love how they replaced the random battle system. But they’ve definitely cut a lot of corners: Cutscenes beg to have voice acting, some animations are really bad, home interiors look copy and pasted, many Pokemon icons are too small to make out, routes and towns feel shallow and linear, and Pokemon still don’t have proper cries (except for Pikachu). Oh well.

I never finished Pokemon Clover btw. I loved it, but in the end the difficulty was just too insane for me. I couldn’t beat Prof. Stump, and I swear the AI cheats.