I am impressed with your ability to wrangle a bunch of people together and put together an indie animation series (really!) And it looks about as good, and is written about as well as most stuff on Netflix, or any cable/network TV place. That said... we're on the internet! There are no rules here! So why is it that, aesthetically, this show seems to be aping TV? Is the intention to use this show as a stepping stone to some kind of television/streaming service deal? If so, I will be blunt - that's the equivalent of being in the year 1950, having this amazing new communications technology called television, and trying to use that platform to become a big star on the radio!

I guess I shouldn't assume that that is your plan with this show, but I've seen it happen so forgive me for projecting, or something. I will say again that what you've created is very impressive in terms of rallying a zillion people together to make a well-produced, visually consistent and coherent cartoon. But let's see some more experimentation, huh? I want to see the idiosyncracies of the creator on display! Not the easy stuff, like the affinity for dry humor and gross-out jokes, but stuff that's difficult to pull off! Let's see some stuff that could get you in trouble, or get you called "pretentious," or that makes people say "this is weird and I don't like it!" Or at least some wackier visuals, idk.

Best of luck with your future endeavors!

Hey this is very aesthetically cool! Love the visual intensity, the nice little touches here and there, and that part where it's silhouettes on the flashy color BG.

If I may go on a tangent, that will make sense in a second:

Something that happens with a lot of people who are really serious about art stuff, and has happened to me personally, is in an attempt to get better they start obsessing about finer and finer details - getting every line perfect and redoing drawings fifty times, etc. Which is sometimes good because you reach for higher standards, but sometimes you can get so bogged down in the little details that you lose some of your ability to paint in "broad strokes," so to speak. For example, if I just spent hours and hours rendering one bit of animation, I might hesitate to put wacky video-effects on it, even if that makes it look cool, because I'm afraid of negating all that hard work. When this kind of thinking is applied over a whole project, the finished thing can come out kind of diluted - less punchy and less interesting than it would have been if I had just cared a little less.

I'm bringing all this up because I love the "broad strokes" in this - the flashing colors, the effects, the way the images are composed on the frame. It has this intense immediacy to it - a sort of rawness that sometimes people will lose over time, as they get too focused on the finer details of their work. So I just wanted to take a second now to say *please preserve that thing!* Obviously I don't know what your life's plans are or whatever, but if you're going to keep doing art, I want to give some encouragement to keep doing this kind of thing, and to not get in the habit of getting too attached to the work to fuck it up a little - to not get into the habit of pulling punches. Because you've got something good here, and it would be cool to see you keep pushing in this direction

Hey I really like the texture of the lines on this (the square-brush low-smoothing thing is something I get a lot of mileage out of myself) and so I wanted to ask, are you able to shit that kind of thing out really quick or do you spend a lot of time undoing or sculpting with the eraser or whatever? For me, every once in a while I can get into the right mindset where I can produce a lot of good rough-looking stuff fairly quickly, but most of the time I just get bogged down in fine details, even though the rough lineart thing is supposed to make the process go a little faster.

Forgive me if this is a weirdly presumptuous review! Any thoughts on this would be interesting to hear.

I played level seven over and over for like an hour so that I could beat the game and never want to play it again, and at some point it occurred to me to start taking screenshots of the different sizes and pasting them into a document for size reference but then as soon as I started doing that I accidentally beat the game

You know what I kinda miss with this update is in the original version, when the dad says "looks like you'll have to kill me for it" and the background goes red it like, switches over to the pixelated rasterized art at that moment and there was something unintentionally creepy about that - almost like a very subtle version of what they call 'deep frying' an image now. It doesn't really affect my enjoyment of the thing (still great after all these years) but I am curious if anyone else remembers this or would agree that that moment has a little less "punch" in this enhanced version

I like the game! This morning I asked Bill if he could sing a few lines on a song I'm producing and he said he'd do it in exchange for a review of his new game, so for the sweet sound of Bill's voice I'm going to write up some stuff I thought about while playing the game.

When I started the game for the first time I wasn't sure if I was playing user-generated levels right away or something curated to introduce the rules of the game. Actually, I'm still not sure. The rating thing after each screen suggests it was all user-created but I thought maybe it would start out with some basic introductory levels and then graduate to random user levels at some point. That seems like a very minor thing, but I think knowing whether or not these are "intro levels," or even just "game-designer-created levels" makes a difference with how I approach them - I sort of expect the author-created levels to be very deliberate and have their design ideas unobfuscated by randomly placed platforms or whatever, so if I don't know if the level is created by the game designer, I don't know how much I should be reading into level design to see if it's trying to show me something. As a quick fix I would have some kind of indication if they're player made, like a little thing that says the author of the level when you start, or even just a tutorial that is very overtly tutorial-y with the text in the background that tells you what to do n shit so that when it gets to the random user levels they are very obviously the user-made levels. Taking "we barely got this done in time" into account, I'm guessing that's the sort of concern that would be addressed with a little more time in the oven, so whatever!

I also thought it was weird that restarting doesn't take you back to the same level you were on. It would be nice to be able to use what you learned from that particular failure, instead of re-rolling until you get an easy enough level.

The big explodey death balls were cool but I almost feel like they would be cooler if they didn't speed up & home in on you when you get in range - like they're fun because they're a big looming threat that you have to learn to work around, but they would always blow up on me pretty shortly after appearing so I would never get to do anything cool to avoid them. I feel like it would be cool if they just slowly followed you around and didn't ever rush into to you, and they did a ton of damage or insta-killed so that they don't always get to you but just have a very threatening presence. I get why this sort of thing could be weird - if too many death balls spawn they would probably bunch up and just be a weird cluster of death balls following you around, but you could probably fix that by giving them an acceleration thing, kinda like the flying mask in mario 2, but slower.

Hm this "review" is getting into backseat-game designer territory, so I will cut it off there! I'm looking forward to seeing what this turns into with the future updates. Good work guys!

This is really great! The production on this is awesome, do you have some sort of secret sauce you're putting on that or is it just plain ass effects like basic saturation and compression or whatever? There is a really great sense of space and like, good attention to the different frequencies, or something.

In 2018 I took a year off of college to pursue a job offer, and in that time there was a teachers' strike that meant that many of my peers couldn't get the education they'd paid for for something like five weeks. Several of my professors didn't really care about the politics of the thing, but they *had* to strike because it was mandatory to for them be in the union to get work at the school. And so, they weren't allowed to teach the classes they wanted to teach, to the students who wanted to learn, disrupting the rest of the semester (they had 7 weeks to teach 12 weeks' worth of material), and in the end, the school didn't budge - the teacher's didn't get paid a cent more, and it was all for naught. Since then, I'm skeptical of anyone selling unionization as a miracle cure to anything.

Obviously animation is a whole other field, but it bothers me that any cons of unionization seemed to be hand-waved away with "it's all propaganda and lies!" said half-jokingly. I've heard the someone-who-needs-to-be-fired-is-protected-by-the-union story too, and I don't think every instance of that happening is fake.

I guess what I'm getting at is that there seems to be another side to the whether-or-not-to-unionize issue that's totally getting neglected here! Something that really set off some alarm bells for me was this bit at 42:00: "You're going to vote in your own self interest... it's the people who want a union out of the goodness of their hearts that are easier to sway to the employers' side. It's the people acting out of their own self interest who ultimately make most of the progress for unions."

Why might that be? I don't know what's going on there, but I certainly won't be pro-union with that question unanswered!

For the sake of not coming off like an evil villain, I'll say that I'm all for combating employee-abuse, and I've heard plenty of horror stories in that vein, especially from blockbuster VFX houses. But if the reason for unionizing isn't to fight US labor-movement type abuse, and is instead more about how working in the animation industry isn't quite the creatively liberating work I thought it would be and now I want as much money as possible so I can live comfortably in the second most expensive city on Earth, you might have some other options that won't risk everyone's jobs getting auctioned off to South Korea!

I'm willing to be wrong about any or all of this - I'd just like to hear the other side I guess!

man I love those weird background vocals that come in around 40 seconds. Really cool choice to not bury them in the mix and let them sorta fade into the forefront for just a second. What are those?

How common are margin doodles for you? I don't do this but I know a lot of people do

Love this interpretation of Gonathan G. Gooder

Whoa didn't know you were still around! Where have you been all these years?