Hey guys! My second indie game, MOLE MASHER, has finally been released to Newgrounds! Rated T for Teens and up!

Please try it out for yourself HERE, try to beat all the levels, and give me a fair and honest review. Please?!

A big thank you to @snazlazzle for featuring my latest animation in Takeover Tuesday earlier this week! : D

What is Takeover Tuesday? I'm glad you asked, because until I logged in to read my notifications tonight, I had no idea what it was either. But I just did some research...

Apparently in October, Tom Fulp added a new feature to Newgrounds whereby supporters can feature one item per week, and it will appear on the Front Page for a while. This is a great boost for visibility, especially for a small user like me who has been seemingly perma-banned from the Art Portal (for reasons still unknown...)

Since this feature is only available to paying supporters of Newgrounds, sadly I cannot use this feature myself (not until I pay to become a supporter, which I'm not likely to do until the Newgrounds staff make me scoutable again), but I still appreciate others who feature my works to support me as a creator, so thanks again snazlazzle!

Hi everyone! I'm finally back from my stress break, which I took through the whole of November (last month) and part of December (this month). It didn't go terribly well for me though...

I tried to work on some new projects while I was away, but sadly, IRL really had it in for me... for the first couple of weeks of my break I was sick from some flu-like illness, and was bedridden for several days. Tragically, not long after I recovered, I found out that my grandfather (who lived in a carehome a couple dozen miles from us) had taken a turn for the worse, and his doctor told us that he did not have long left to live. Just a few days later, he passed away... Of course this was very upsetting, but he was over 100 years old (living with dementia), so I think we were kind of expecting him to leave us sooner or later, but still... he was a big part of my life before he moved into that carehome, so I will miss him greatly... We'll be holding a funeral for him in a couple of weeks to pay our last respects.

Despite how depressing and stressful the past few weeks have been for me, I did manage to get SOME work done: I finished a couple of drawings for outstanding art trades, I made a short animation with my mascot OC Fnuzzlee (check that out here), I've started working on the Twitter raffle artworks I owe, and...

...and I finally finished my MOLE GAME! It's called "Mole Masher", and I'll be releasing it here on my Newgrounds within the next week or two before Christmas. Like my previous indie game, there will be many unlockable artworks to earn, so you won't want to miss them!

So, yeah... behind all the cheery emotes, I'm still a bit gloomy about losing my grandfather, but I am starting to cope with it. I might be a little bit slower to respond than usual, since I have been away from most of my social media for so long, but I will try to get back to you all eventually.

See you again shortly!

I've mentioned this to select people a few times now, but I've not yet made a public announcement for everyone to see... I'm taking a big stress break from social media until mid-December. This 4-6 week break will probably be the longest hiatus I've had since I returned to posting art online in 2020.

I've needed a nice, long break like this for some time... my usual 2-3 week breaks don't last long enough to fully relieve my increasing stress and depression before my return, nor is it enough time for me to get back into a healthy sleeping pattern where I'm not staying up late every night sharing art and interacting with hundreds of notifications across multiple platforms... yes, I need some time off to recover both my physical and mental health.

[NOTE: You can skip reading the next paragraph here, it's kind of rambling, but offers a deeper explanation as to why I'm leaving this November if you so desire to hear, but I summarise it in the paragraph after anyway]

I think now is a good time for me to take this much needed break. For one thing, it gives me some time to work on several unfinished art trades and Twitter raffle prize artworks, for me to deliver upon my return just before Christmas. For another thing, I think November is going to be a pretty wild, and potentially toxic, month politically: the US (the country most my viewers live in) is incredibly divided right now (no thanks to a ton of misinfomation and conspracies on both sides), and their election is imminent, so given the amount of political extremsts active on the internet nowadays, I think it's fair to say that there will be a VERY negative reaction to the result of the upcoming election REGARDLESS of who wins, and possibly even a second civil war; tensions in both the Middle East and Ukraine continue to rise, with North Korea now joining the latter conflict, further increasing the risk of WW3 as well. As you probably already know, I'm not a fan of politics (that's not to say I don't have opinions, but I'm pretty moderate and prefer to keep them to myself), yet I can't ignore the consequences it has on our culture, social media experience, and at times, even our safety... I wish everyone would stop fighting and get along, but sadly, humans are argumentative by nature. Whilst I'm probably going to be safe for now in my small suburban town in Britain, I hope all you folks reading keep safe, because, as rough as things are at the moment, they are potentially about to get much worse... I really hope this won't be the last time any of you'll ever hear from me...

Anyway... sorry about all that depressing waffle, but I just hope you understand that I'll still be busy working on a lot of stuff while I'm gone, which I should be able to get through quicker and less stressfully without the distraction of social media, and I thought November in particular would be a good time to leave the internet due to the imminent political toxicity at no doubt an all-time high, and so I can avoid that potential stress as well.

I say leave social media, but... whilst I'm not going to be posting any new artworks or news posts on any of my accounts, nor respond to most public comments (except urgent messages to me), I won't be COMPLETELY gone. No, I do plan on finally spending a couple of days to visit the galleries of many of my fans and friends here on Newgrounds (something I've neglected to do due to lack of time, and the high amount of stress this site causes me, resulting in me not sticking around this site for very long). Also, I still plan on reposting artworks to my Twitter once or twice a week during this period (mostly because I'm paranoid about losing access to my account again due to lack of activity).

I look forward to returning to Newgrounds, and my other accounts, for proper in December at the end of this year. I have many ideas I'd like to share once I've found the time to work on them, including finishing off my upcoming MOLE GAME! I do hope this year's Christmas will be especially merry, and bring everyone together again despite all our differences.

See you all soon (I hope), and good bye for now! (˵ ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°˵) ノシ

HAPPY HALLOWEEN! 🎃

I have a couple of spooky artworks for you to enjoy this season, mostly centering around Pokemon, but all is not as it seems... Be sure to visit the pages to see the HD versions, and please give a fair rating. And, if you haven't already, maybe even considering faving + following to help give a poor unscouted artist some support?!

Hope you enjoy! Have a fang-tastic night, he he he!

Last month, I teased the new indie game I was working on, an expanded version of Whac-a-Mole:

I said then, that I hoped the project would be completed by early October. Well... it's already near the end of October, and still no sight of Liquid's mole game. What gives?!

Well, you see... video game development is very unpredictable, and sometimes we can't always foresee the kinds of problems we may encounter, or know how long they will take to resolve. Needless to say, I encountered a couple of technical problems on this project, mostly relating to the complex CSS animations of the moles popping on and off screen when defeated or not fast enough to strike.

While these issues have since been resolved, the whole development was delayed past my initial estimate. The version of the game for my professoinal porfolio has recently been completed, and is in a very playable state, but I won't give you the link because that may expose my IRL identity. That's why I still need to make the "cringe" version of the game (the version for Newgrounds, slightly altered and expanded, and featuring my own OCs), and while there is not much left to do at this point, I'm not going to have this finished before the end of the month. Or even early November...

In fact, if you didn't know already, I am planning on taking a big stress break from social media starting early next month (more on that in a future News Post). Because of that, my mole game probably won't be available to play on Newgrounds until I return in mid-December.

As the legendary game dev and Nintendo CEO, Satoru Iwata, would have said: "Please Understand!"

Hope you'll still enjoy my game when it does release, it's far more ambitious than my previous game was. You may consider it an early Christmas gift from me!

I just received a message from the Portal Bot. Not to FINALLY tell me my unscoutability was being revoked, or to FINALLY explain why I had been descouted in the first place though!

No, of course not. Just to invite me to a panel of judges to decide on the "Best" artworks of last month:

If my art is not even allowed on the Art Portal, how am I even eligible to vote on the quality of portal artists' works? Why would I take time out of my day to simp for bigger, more popular artists than me who don't "need help getting noticed" (in their words), when I know that I'll NEVER be given the same treatment regardless of how much effort I put into my artworks, all because of this nonsensical, flawed system.

Sorry, but unless I get an apology and assurance that my scoutability will be restored by taking part in this, I'm not interested in sacrificing my valuable time to participate in this panel.

It's a little over a year since I first noticed I had been de-scouted (effectively shadow-banned) from the Newgrounds Art Portal. I never, and to this day, STILL have never received any notification or explanation as to why I was removed from the portal. I only figured it out for myself by looking around in the settings, as per my news post at the time:

https://liquidfreakstudios.newgrounds.com/news/post/1381288

My account has no doubt suffered greatly as a result of losing my scouting. For instance, I used to receive hundreds of views on my latest art posts when they were shown on the art portal, whereas nowadays I am lucky to get over 50 views, even with DOUBLE the amount of followers. In nearly 5 years of regularly posting art to this website, I have only 123 followers, whilst my peers on the forum who did NOT lose their scouting have gained hundreds of fans in the same timeframe. For a particuarly egregious comparison, my Twitter account recently reached over 125 followers compared to 123 here, despite only joining at the start of this year! And I have nearly 1.8K watchers on my DeviantArt!

Still, I tholed on, hoping that this de-scouting would just be a temporary setback, and that my artworks would be on the portal again eventually. I read somewhere that becoming unscoutable like me is only lasts for a limited time, and then we can potentially be scouted again. Well... it's been over a year now, so surely that's long enough to wait?!

As far as I know, there's STILL no option for people to scout me, but if you DO see the option to scout me next to my username on my art posts, could you let me know? That would make me feel a lot less hopeless and depressed... otherwise, I'm going to have to work up the courage to ask the staff if they can make me scoutable again. And there's a good chance they'll probably reject my request, because I am not well-liked on this site...

No doubt, this whole scouting system has caused me a lot of psychological damage, and resulted in me having considerably less confidence in my art than I ever used to have. Just as well for Newgrounds that I have no lawyer, eh?!

Much like Newgrounds, I ain't very popular on Twitter. It seems only DeviantArt am I allowed to be semi-popular: everywhere else, I am either hated or ignored for some reason.

I opened a big RAFFLE on my Twitter account recently, to celebrate a pitiful 100 follows (most of whom are bots, but whatever, it's still a milestone). Sadly, only a handful of people joined, and I only gained one new follower who WASN'T a bot! (The whole point of the raffle was to help me grow and become visible there, like everyone else who opens a raffle, but no...)

Would you like to see me potentially draw your character for you for FREE? Well, if you have a Twitter account, just head over to my account here, scroll down a little bit to my raffle, and comment your OC below. Easy, right?! If you don't have an OC, I can draw fanart of a character of your choice. And if you aren't somebody who takes part in raffles yourself, for whatever reason, perhaps you have a friend who might like to take part?

The raffle ends on October 1st, and there will be THREE winners. Given that very few people have taken part, you'll have a very high chance of winning an artwork from me!

As for my 100+ milestone on Newgrounds, I am still planning on celebrating that by opening up for some free request doodles for followers soon, but those will probably be in November. Thanks to this raffle, and Halloween, I'll likely be too busy until then...

Just to let you guys know that, while I do plan on releasing some new art this month, I have recently been suffering from a strange technical problem that severely limits my access to the internet. My WiFi has been exceptionally slow, and frequently I lose connection to the internet altogether. Trying to browse the internet has become something of a nightmare as it is, nevermind trying to download or upload large files! (Indeed, I just spent about 20 frustrating minutes trying to log into Newgrouinds just now...)

Until I manage to resolve this issue, or it somehow resolves itself after the next Windows update (here's hoping!), I fear that I may not be able to contribute much if anything to Newgrounds and similar websites. (Newgrounds especially, given the amount of large alt files and such necessary)