Welcome!

Hello! Long time no see, aye?

Sorry about the long wait. It’s been a bit of a busy and rough summer but I am alive! In fact, I’m starting to write this in my dorm room the day that I moved into it. How strange! Don’t know when this will be posted but hopefully before the end of August…

We have A LOT to catch up on, so to get through as much stuff as possible I’ll keep things brief.

Although I have a lot to show off in terms of games and whatnot, I’m gonna hold off and wait to talk about that stuff for next month unless it’s REALLY important. Expect The Levi Post for August to be almost entirely about my games with screenshots and gifs and such! Look forward to that! 

So let’s not waste any more time and talk about all the things that happened this summer, The Levi Post - TRIPLE FEATURE!

STD 1-Year Anniversary! (May)

To Start off, STD celebrated its 1 year anniversary! It’s pretty crazy that I released my first commercial release a whole year ago! Time flies I suppose! 

Shoot Trip Die - 1 Year Anniversary Artwork by @LeviRamirez

Sadly, not much actually was done to celebrate its birthday! I did a little piece of art (Seen above), posted a huge thread on Twitter about some development stuff (Which you can find here), and held a little event in my discord server (which you should join too btw!)

Other than that, there wasn’t much else. I had hoped to have been able to release an update at least during the month of May, but sadly it couldn’t come to fruition… BUT!

The Next Shoot Trip Die update will be coming This September! To just say this publicly, @Dungeonation asked me a while back if he could work on an update for STD! This was around the time I started working on Gappy’s Playground, and although I had plans to do an update myself, I trusted him enough with his ideas he had for the game and programming skills to do some fixes and add new features to STD while I worked on my next big project! And after months of work, I can safely say he did a great job! I am still working on my part of the update, but even just the things they added could constitute its own stand-alone update, not only does it add some cool new mechanics but also fixed a lot of back-end and gameplay stuff (which makes my life a whole lot easier! and the game much more fun and smooth!) 

Early Gif of new 'Shoplift' Mechanic!

I believe STD has 2-3 major updates before I say it’s complete. Of course, a very popular update request is adding more minigames or doing a full-on minigame update. With that, I can safely say that at least 1 new minigame is coming in this upcoming update, but also there will definitely be an update dedicated to JUST minigames, so stayed tuned!

And if you just read all of that and don’t even know what I’m talking about, just go on Steam and buy Shoot Trip Die! it's fun for the whole family!

First Test-Build of TAOG Released to Testers! (July)

Throughout the entire summer, I worked very hard on my upcoming game, The Adventures of Gappy! I got together some people from the Newgrounds Community who I’ve come to meet throughout the years and asked them if they’d like to be testers! And by the middle of July, I sent the lucky few the first Test Build of the game! 

Feedback was overall pretty good! The game is still REALLY early on, only about 75-80% of the FIRST WORLD is complete, and I took the feedback I got and continued to build upon the game.

As I’ve worked I have actually gone back and played a bit of Gappy’s Playground, and although I am still very proud of my work on Playground, it does not hold a candle to how the modern game feels now, a huge improvement! 

I’m mostly saying this just to show everyone that yes, even though I haven’t made a post in like 3 months the game is still chugging along! But truthfully, after the release of the first test, I haven’t really had the time, or energy to work AS HARD as I did at the beginning of the summer. I hope to change that soon… but progress is still being made! :-)

Also, thank you to everyone who helped test, I hope you will continue to help! :-)

@Cryptospore / @Dungeonation / @NAMELESS / @ProscuittoMan

And many others! But they didn't get around to testing as of writing this... oh whale... herm...

A Bunch of IRL Shenanigans! (May-July)

I got up to a lot of stuff this Summer! Most of it was just working, but I still found time to have fun this summer! Here are some of the highlights!!!

Friends Wedding

My college friends got married! Wow! This event made me feel really old but in a good way. Truthfully, I've never even BEEN to a wedding up to this point, been to a few receptions and even a few divorce hearings but never a wedding, especially not MY FRIENDS wedding!

It was really fun, and pretty laid back for a wedding. Does help that the bride is a huge feminist and the groom is just some FRIGGIN' DORK so it was pretty non-traditional which I think was the main reason it was pretty laid-back all things together. Also, I'm a man so who knows really...

Jeffery Lewis Concert

I went to see Jeffery Lewis in Cleveland, it was super cool!

Concert Poster (Left) / Jeffery Lewis Himself (Right)

I Love Jeffery Lewis! He really is a huge figurehead of my artistic inspiration right next to Edmund Mcmillen, Weird AL, Gene and Dean Ween, etc, etc...

and the concert was really the bee's knees! I hope to see him again soon if he ever drifts through the Midwest again! Please come back soon Jeffery! Please Please Please!

Colorado Trip

And to end off the summer I went to the great state of Colorado!

Me (Right) / The Mountains (Left)

Really great experience! Would LOVE to go again! Fuck it, I wanna LIVE there man! It was great and beautiful and wonderful and awesome! Too bad it cost an Arm and a Leg to live there but surely I'll be able to pay for that when I become a real n' true artist! Surely!

THE END!

Yup, that's about it.

I wanna say sorry for being gone for so long, I didn't really intend on waiting so long to write another Levi Post, in fact I had ones started for June and May but I just never finished them, and got bogged down with work and my other game projects to get around to finishing them... so my bad. But more or less I didn't do TOO MUCH on Newgrounds as a whole this summer, but I plan to turn that around for the coming fall months. I'd say overall, although I was still very busy, this summer was a much-needed break from the average content output I am used to, and I have this URGE to MAKE MORE BROWSER GAMES! And I'm making this DREAM a REALITY!

So stay tuned for next month! Ciao!

- Levi Ramirez