Hey everyone, so as promised, I'm adding the link to Nymble's new home on CrazyGames! Thank you again for all your support.

Hey everyone, it's been a quick minute since I was last on Newgrounds. Hope you're all doin' well. Just wanted to give a quick update about Nymble.

Nymble is getting published on Crazygames! This means I'll finally be able to generate some revenue (hopefully) through their revenue-sharing program. As you may know, this was entirely a solo project with all expenses (licensing fees, web hosting, mobile app fees, etc.) out-of-pocket so I have yet to break even after so many years. So I am pretty excited that I signed this deal.

However, because this is an exclusive license, I won't be able to host it on other sites anymore, including Newgrounds, which is a bummer. The Newgrounds community has helped my game gain exposure and player feedback which I used to improve the UX of the game. Thanks for all your support.

Nymble will still remain up for a week or two and I'll share the new URL once that's available. Stay tuned!

The title says it all my Android-user friends! The Android build has been submitted. Their approval process is currently experiencing some delays, so it could be a week before it's in the stores. Stay tuned for updates. :)

P.S. Oh, and check out my new profile pic. That's gonna be the new app icon.

UPDATE: Version 1.4.1 is now live! Download Nymble for iOS on the App Store!

I just took a 9-day-long vacation from work ... to work on Nymble! Time well spent, as I managed to squeeze out 20 new levels, 3 new enemies, and a fifth boss fight. I've submitted it to the App Store for review, so it should appear in a day or two, if nothing goes wrong. For now, here is a teaser ...

I am thrilled to announce that my very first video game music album is finally in stores! 

(っ◔◡◔)っ ❤︎ Listen here ❤︎

Spotify | Apple Music | iTunes | Amazon | YouTube

The album contains all of the current OST plus two bonus soundtracks to be featured in the upcoming 5th world. Anyway, please check out the soundtrack and let me know your feedback!

(I think I messed up the normalization so everything's too quiet; re-releasing in a month or so.)

TLDR: Classical musician learns game development, and makes a game to have something to showcase his music on.

Since I was young I've always known I wanted to someday write music for video games. I think it was Final Fantasy VII that first inspired me. I enjoyed the music of the Final Fantasy franchise so much that I would arrange and notate some of my favourite tunes by ear, just so I could enjoy it at the piano. (In fact, I have an old YouTube channel dedicated entirely to this nerdy hobby of mine ...)

As time went on, I learned that in reality, it is actually very difficult to gain visibility as a composer: for how does one exactly gain visibility in a non-visual art form? The last time I attended a video game conference, the top question that came up in conversation was "What games have you worked on?" and, of course, I had no answer. In order to gain any credibility, I was going to have to somehow get my music onto a game, or similar kind of project. But how? I entertained a bunch of ideas, some crazier than others:

• Creating my own game, composing/producing music and putting it on the game to show to others. Haha, yeah right—how am I going to find time for that?
• Collaborating with a visual artist to provide music for their speedpainting tutorial videos. This one I actually did try, and miraculously, I somehow connected with an artist across the world who liked the idea. So we tried this, and actually produced a few videos for YouTube. But in the end, it did not gain much traction, so we stopped.
• Creating an interactive portfolio that felt like a game. Basically, I was thinking of an interactive prototype that simulated the overworld experience of an RPG, where you could walk around and the music would change depending on what area you are in. But that's not very interesting. Why would someone roam about in an unfinished game when they could play an actual game that was complete?

As insane as it sounded, I eventually circled back to the first idea.

At the time, I was employed full-time, but it just so happened I was also in the process re-evaluating my career path, unsatisfied with my current company, and beginning to doubt the industry I was in (user experience design, by the way). So I took a risk and resigned, and went on a hiatus (that turned out to be 6 months long) to make time for my crazy impossible project.

After a short vacation to visit friends, I returned home and began studying game programming seriously. I settled on Game Maker Studio 2 because the language was closest to what I was familiar with (a fun mix of HTML/CSS, PHP, Java, and C++). Before long, I had my first prototype uploaded to itch.io that featured my very own music. It was exhilirating. I still took on various side projects to support myself financially, but now I had much more freedom in how I spend my time.

Fast forward a month or two, I have now created a few mini game projects, and one larger project that would eventually become "Nymble."

In case it isn't obvious, Both "Jack" and "Nymble" are inspired by a mix of pop culture, literature, and wordplay:

• "Nimble" means to be quick and agile, which is a pretty accurate description of the game's main hero
• "Jack" from the nursery rhyme "Jack be Nimble", which references jumping over a candle stick
• "Jack and the beanstalk", in which "Jack" literally climbs a beanstalk
• The physical exercise, "jumping jacks"; Jack sure does like to jump!
• "Nimbus" is the latin word for a type of cloud, and the game pretty much takes place among the clouds

Everything kinda just fell into place afterward.

Six months later, Nymble was up to 40 levels and 2 worlds—still not quite a full game, but long enough for a substantial demo. I decided I had enough of a hiatus and was ready to move back into a full-time job (steady income is nice), so I returned to the UX industry (I still wasn't fully passionate about the field due to various reasons, but that's another story lol). For the next year or so, with my full-time job, I didn't really have time to work on Nymble much.

Then in 2020, the pandemic hit, so we were all sent home to work remotely. It was a very sudden change, and took some getting used to. Of course, with everyone staying at home, hanging out with friends became less and less a thing. In a way, there was a silver lining in all of this, because I now find myself with so much more free time. So what did I do? I started working on Nymble again, of course! And so came all the winter levels.

It soon became routine. I would roll out of bed, work from home, then once work ended, I would switch over to my personal computer and work on game dev. At the time, Nymble was still only hosted on itch.io. As the months went on, incoming traffic seemed to dwindle. So, I looked to other indie game hosting platforms like Gamejolt and ... Newgrounds.

Bear in mind that the last time I logged into Newgrounds was probably over a decade ago (I'm old lol), so my then understanding of Newgrounds was based on what I remembered from my highschool days: I remembered it as a popular website for hosting fun little flash games and animations. I didn't know if Nymble would be appropriate for Newgrounds' audiences. But I uploaded it anyway out of curiosity.

It was probably one of the best decisions I made for Nymble. I was shocked at how vibrant and engaging the community had become. The quality of game reviews here on Newgrounds really sets a new standard for indie game feedback. I think a lot of it has to do with the way the website encourages people to provide justification for their ratings, whether high or low. In fact, If it weren't for the constructive criticism and encouraging feedback from the Newgrounds community, I don't think I would have pushed myself to work on the iOS mobile version and submit it to the App Store. So thank you all. :)

So it's now 3 years later and my music is finally on a commercial video game on the App Store. But there's still a lot I want to do. I plan to continue to add more levels to the mobile build and work on an Android release this year, but my focus will be on getting the word out there and (attempting to) promote myself as a video game composer. I have some exciting initiatives in the works, but I'll leave it at that for now.

Thank you for reading my long-winded retrospective. Hope you enjoy the soundtrack!

Cheers,

Xalezar

Hi Everyone, I am so very excited to announce my first album is coming soon to Spotify! The album will feature all of the soundtracks from the Nymble iOS release plus 2 bonus tracks for the upcoming 5th world. The orchestral soundtrack includes a mix of high-fantasy, easy-listening, jazz, classical, and everything in between.

Listen to the preview and let me know what you think. Don't forget to pre-save ahead of the actual release. (Release date is projected to be within 2-3 weeks from now).

The Nymble website has officially launched! Honestly, sometimes I still can't believe Nymble made it onto the App Store, but somehow, having a website makes it feel more real. You know that feeling when you've achieved something that you've been working towards for a very long time, but it just hasn't sunken in yet and you're not sure what to make of it? I'm feeling a bit of that right now lol. That said, there's still a lot more to get done. Future plans include:

• Linking admob to the iOS app so that it will start serving ads.
• Code in-app purchases for ad removal.
• Investigate marketing opportunities.
• And of couse ... design levels 80 to 100!

Anyway, if you see this, please let me know if you discover any typos or rendering bugs on the website—thanks!

Keep on jumpin'

After several days of non-stop hard work, I am very excited to announce that Nymble is now on the App Store! The mobile release features 20 new levels and a fourth extremely tricky boss fight. You can now play it on your iPhone or iPad. Please give it a whirl and let me know what you think. The performance should be much improved with no lag.

Please note: Your progress is saved when you open/close the app. What I haven't been able to verify is if data is saved when you update the app as new versions come out.

An update will be released in a week or so with some minor improvements.

Thank you Newgrounds for all your support and encouragement. Happy holidays!

So this happened lol.

I was thinking more about the current (version 1.2.2.0) "back to map" button and the user experience (UX) considerations surrounding it.

Would the player be upset if they were on a very hard level and accidentally pressed "go back to map" and lost their progress? Probably.

Coincidentally, the "retry" icon on the main view (when not paused) is actually in the "hard to reach" thumb zone for right-handed players, so at least this minimizes accidental retry for the majority of players. (According to a source on Wikipedia, studies suggest that 90% of people are right-handed). I wonder how many of you who have played this on Newgrounds are left-handed?

Is the icon clear enough? The "map" isn't exactly a traditional map in this game, as it's a vertical beanstalk. The design language of my icons is confined to a 16x16 space, so I have to be very economical about how I use pixels.

(Pardon me for nerding out. I happen to be in the UX industry lol ...)

So in the end, I decided to switch the "back to map" icon (on the main unpaused game view) with a "pause" button since the "pause" glyph is generally universally understood. Furthermore, I could utilize the pause screen to show more stuff, like the progress of your current goals. The actual "back to map" button would live on this view. In the first screenshot, was it obvious what to press to return to the map?

Upon playing around with it more, I realized that the close button is hard to reach with the thumb, so I am looking at adding an explicit "resume playing" button, and the ability to tap the scrim (the darkened background) to dismiss the pause dialog. So you may see that in the next release (along with this pause screen).

And man ... it sure was a fun time coding this. The most challenging part was activating and deactivating buttons as you switch between the paused state and the unpaused state. But once I figured that out, the rest of the work was mostly adjusting placement coordinates.

Surprisingly, the showing/hiding transition was the most straightforward. It was just a linear interpolation function that I applied to the dialog's base coordinates and opacity values. It was originally without a transition and felt very jarring for it to appear out of nowhere. Funny how little things like this make a huge impact on the feeling of the game.

Anyway, you'll see this in the next release which I'll be putting out later today.

Keep on jumpin'

After being delightfully flooded by so many insightful comments here on Newgrounds, I've taken in your feedback to make improvements to Nymble. And over the past several days, I was also surprised to learn that Nymble got livestreamed and reviewed a couple times! Hearing real players think aloud was very informative on how I can improve the first-time experience.

So anyway, here are some things you can find in version 1.2.2.0:

• Levels 41 to 60 now unlocked! Skip to the boss level or play them all again. (You may find some little surprises.)
• Improved level cleared UI to explain how to get a higher score. I thought about including this in the HUD (Heads-up display), but opted to keep it clean and minimal and have the player find out by exploring.
• Level 3, updated to better onboard the player about how to kill enemies.
• Level 20 (boss): Same level, just replaced some gates, and reduced map size
• Level 40 (boss): Some modified puzzles as well as a more exploratory layout.
• Levels 51, 52, 54: New designs to onboard the "snowman" a bit more clearly. Slight improvement in puzzle complexity.
• Level 60 (boss): redesigned the "snowman" puzzle. The boss fight spawn tiles have been redesigned to have a clearer active/inactive state.
• Partially fixed stacking sound-effects glitch.
• Toggle the snow by pressing "P" and see if it reduces lag in your browser.