Thanks to the Stencyl community for letting my first game have a part in the 2013 jam and congrats to the winners! First published flash game, first go at pixel art.
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/616467It was great fun, and I learned so much through the process. It's been a while since the winners were announced, but I thought I would share some of my experiences in this process.
Late last year I started playing with Stencyl in my spare time and after a few months I felt comfortable enough to start making my own character for a basic run and jump platformer game. I never had made pixel art before, so that took some doing. After 3 versions of my main character I was pretty happy with my first prototype and posted a video of it online. I had my main character, I used tile sets from Stencyl Forge to make one prototype level, and I made a time lapse of my pixel art process for an enemy actor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLwiFjUbNm4After that I took a month off from working on it at all, until I just happened to see the post for the 2013 Stencyl Jam. I thought this was perfect, I had a framework built and had an idea of where to go, but it was still barebones enough to qualify. I made the decision to go for it and participate. I started making all of my own tile sets, backgrounds, animations, and level designs. I worked on it in my spare time, and the majority of the work was done in the last week before the deadline. I actually took a week off of work mostly to work on the game. I posted some videos online of my progress along the way, and they met with a fairly positive response. I knew it wasn't perfect, but I was pretty happy with my first build for my first game. I tried to publish to the Stencyl arcade first, but encountered my first problem, I didn't optimize the game properly and the file size was to big to publish - 18.8mb. I freaked a little at first since I was really close to the deadline, but then I was able to create an account on Newgrounds and upload there, barely made it - there limit is 20mb.
I wasn't expecting much, but so far I have been very happy with the game's response. I realized after about a week that Newgrounds is using my game's thumbnail for the Stencyl Jam 2013 section under related stuff, which I thought was awesome. So when I went to play Quantum Corps I scrolled down and saw my little pig under related stuff, pretty cool.
There's still a lot of bugs to fix and improvements I would like to make. I have so many questions going forward, as in game optimization and how does one go about seeking sponsorship for a game? I had a great time and learned a lot, so thanks for letting me participate!
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I might have to throw my hat into the ring, sounds fun! I just started working on this little guy: 
