EDIT (May 25, 2016):

Years went by, and I finally decided to make a game to finish the story.

Everything below this point is now just here for posterity!

Link to all the discarded plans for the series:
http://jonbro.newgrounds.com/news/post/732386

~

I've made the difficult decision to officially discontinue the rest of the Riddle Transfer series, along with anything directly associated with the Riddle School series or its characters.

When I came up with the first Riddle Transfer game, I'd originally intended to finish all of the games at once and release them after set periods of time, because the element of surprise about the series would have remained intact and the insistent requests for sequels would already have been met. I dropped this idea when the first game took me six whole months to make, which is a longer period of time than I ever anticipated or hoped to spend working on it. I spent the next fifteen months feeling anxiety about RT2, chipping at it from time to time hoping something would come out of it, and nothing has. I wanted so much to make RT2 and finish the other three games afterward so that those who liked the previous games would see the rest of the story and be contented by the continued content, but ultimately I have decided the end product simply wouldn't be worth the pains it would take to make.

My main motivations with RT1 were simple but ambitious. I wanted to change the way Flash games and adventure games were seen. People insist the point-and-click adventure game is a dead genre, just like people insisted the side-scrolling platform game was a dead genre, but that says nothing about its still-limitless potential. I believe the reason people think point-and-click adventures are a lost cause is because they haven't been "done right" yet. Often players are either required to skew their thinking to match the logic of the game developer, or look at a walkthrough because the logic is so obtuse. Some developers compensate for this lack of clarity by dropping ten-ton hints everywhere, but when the puzzles are too reliant on hints, there's no epiphanies or sense of discovery involved. I didn't want to make a mindless or frustrating game, but one that actually made sense and encouraged players to mentally piece things together to proceed; Riddle Transfer was meant to be taken seriously as a game that was truly satisfying. And I wanted to prove that this was possible with Flash, the same program most people use just to make simple little browser games that they can pass the time with when they're bored.

But what purpose would it serve to make an entire series like this? I already know what the response to RT1 was: people still cling to Flash games as a way to temporarily escape boredom and don't see the intended artistry in a carefully designed experience because the immediate expectation of a Flash game is 'quick and easy fun', and my game hasn't changed that. I may have created a game people found interesting enough to rate high and ask to see more of, but they missed the point I was trying to make. Perhaps it was a subtly-made point, or one that's easy to disagree with or pay no attention to because it isn't commonly emphasized. But for this reason, there is no point in continuing the RT series, because I know full and well that I could butter up the remaining games as much as I want, adding new puzzles or story twists or playable characters or whatever, yet at the core, they would be the same game as RT1 and would not bring anything new to the world of Flash game development. It would just bring me a little short-lived Internet 'fame', which is a terrible primary goal.

I pondered over the reasons why I would legitimately devote the next several years of my life to this Internet series, and for the most part, it boiled down to satisfying my fanbase. But since the time I started making the series, I've discovered a few things wrong with that mindset. Fans cannot comprehend the amount of time, work, and personal sacrifice it takes to make games of this size unless they have been in a very similar position themselves. Fans go by what they know, and what they know about you and your work is always going to be significantly less than what you know. If you aren't putting yourself in the perspective of the game's creator, it might at first seem selfish for them to terminate a project because they don't want their main goal to be satisfying others, and I've thought the same thing, but that's not what it's like. It feels less like providing enjoyment and more like a form of appeasement. You can't put hours of days of months of your life struggling to finish something you see no value or substance in anymore.

Long ago, I thought that the Riddle Transfer series would be worth making because of its storyline, and how everything would come together in the end in a climactic way, but looking back on it now, the ideas I had for the story were all very weak, partly because I had a less well-developed sense of story structure than I feel I do now, and partly because the foundations of RT's story were centered around very shallow, basic characters that don't deserve any limelight. As a level-headed bald kid with two big eyes who goes to school and makes sarcastic comments, the series' main character Phil might be an easy figure to relate to, and in many ways, he might be deeper than the average Flash game protagonist, but he's not deep enough for me. He's a surface-level reflection of my most basic thoughts, and it's easy for anyone to tell what nearly his whole personality is in a matter of moments. As a storyteller, if I'm going to make an effective and captivating story that will keep my own interest after dedicating to it for months or years, I want to write for a more believable, complex character than Phil Eggtree, and I don't want that story to be way too difficult to understand, full of contradictions, or in other ways disconcertingly flimsy like the plotlines of Riddle School and Riddle Transfer are.

People have told me I ought to stop working on the series if I don't feel like it's in me anymore. And I've finally come to terms with the fact that it's not in me anymore. An online friend of mine, TheWildALK, once told me I wouldn't go through with the rest of the series, and though I sought to prove him wrong, I discovered he may have had a point. I've thought about it hard, and there are no strong reasons I know of to keep working on this series. It had a good run, I'm really happy with how it turned out, and I've learned a lot of things from it, but I don't think there is anything else it can teach me that I couldn't be taught more adequately through moving on to bigger and better things. I've poured my heart into this series for a huge portion of my life; I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel like a small part of me has gone from making this decision, but I believe this choice of abandoning the series is for the best. My perspective on art and design has changed. I've realized potential in game design that has not been sufficiently touched upon, and if I dwell on the past any more than I have, I won't be able to test my theories or fulfill my goals for the future.

Thank you all for your overwhelming support to the series over the years. I deeply appreciate it.

For the sake of completeness to those who are curious, this post spoils everything that was going to happen in the series, had I opted to go through a half-decade of headaches to push it to its originally intended finish.

~

NOTE: Remember that I'm still the same person that I was when I made Riddle School in the first place. Even though I've left the Riddle universe behind, it's always possible I'll make another game with humor and puzzle-solving like Riddle School's always had, because I love those kinds of things.

ALSO NOTE (Updated Jan. 21, 2015)  I used to say no one had permission to continue this series, but my thoughts on that have changed and can be found here.

~

EDIT (May 25, 2016):

Years went by, and I finally decided to make a game to finish the story.

Everything below this point is now just here for posterity!

Link to the original cancellation announcement:
http://jonbro.newgrounds.com/news/post/732398

~

I've chosen to discontinue the Riddle Transfer series. This post explains what would have been in the games had I decided to finish.

RT2 was first planned to be a game where Phil, Smiley, Phred, and Zack attempted to escape through a sewage system, which did not get further than one room drawn, and there would have been a few water level-changing puzzles that would be better suited for a Zelda game than for something like this. The end of the game would have involved an alligator or some mutated creature being electricuted by a toaster. Most of the game was not planned out.
I scrapped this idea after many months and played around with a different idea derived from something my friend Mr-Shark said. Diz would have been recaptured by Zone 5.1 (which is actually an independent organization not related to the government at all, and that was a common misconception fans had about it because I never made it clear). The new game was going to involve playing as Diz, which started by getting out of a prison cell much like in RT1, but no blueprints were put on paper beyond that. Once again, one room was drawn and production slowed to a halt. At the end, Diz was going to be captured a third time, this time by the leader of the facility, presumably but not certainly to be killed by agents. The best part about the game would have been a puzzle involving the word "woof," which was inspired by a suggestion from AbbyDrew.

** A couple of people wanted to see pictures of what the first room in Riddle Transfer 2 looked like.
There are two versions of the first room since I started the game over at one point.
Version 1 of the first room in Riddle Transfer 2
Version 2 of the first room in Riddle Transfer 2

RT3 would have involved the four young central characters just getting out of the sewers and finding themselves in a simulation room, in which Phil would have entered six virtual chambers into the six unutilized rejected games Riddle Company, Riddle School 4+1, Riddle Manor, Riddle Mansion, Riddle Eye, and Riddle Attorney, only these games would have been made from scratch and altered in such a way that would keep consistent with the series' gameplay scheme. As I mentioned in Riddle School 5's special features, all of these games were rejected for a number of different reasons, and it is clear that they, like the rest of the RT series, would not be worth the time and effort they would have taken to create. This game would have mostly been a cheap ploy to satisfy fans that served no relevance to the story, which is a really sad basis for motivation.
At the end of the game, Phil and his friends were planned to have come face to face with the leader of Zone 5.1, whose name was Shaw deLot and behaved like a stereotypical shady villain, and next to him would be Viz, alive and well with two of his four arms missing. DeLot pulls a lever, and all the characters fall into separate classrooms in a personalized prison called Prison School, where the fourth game was going to take place. Zack is not sent down with them because deLot and Viz have other plans for him.

RT4 would have played just like RT1, rescuing your friends and then attempting to escape, in a somewhat school-like setting with a color scheme mostly comprised of dark shades of gray. The concept of the Riddle School and Riddle Transfer games have always been fairly repetitive, and this game certainly wasn't going to help that. Upon reaching the top of this fake school deep within the caverns below Zone 5.1, Shaw deLot was going to be playing the role of the principal and attempting to interrogate Phil and his friends. Phil was going to ring the enormous school bell aboe the room and cause it to fall onto deLot, trapping him inside of the bell, then take his key and make the escape into the final game's setting, essentially the last stretch before hopefully saving Zack and ensuring their freedom.

RT5 would have taken place in a big indoor test area with many unpursued science experiments, and it would have been reminescent of a school playground on a larger scale. None of the puzzles in any of these games were planned, so I literally know nothing else about what the main core of the game would have consisted of. The last door would have been opened by rearranging the letters in Shaw deLot's name to spell "Slow Death." And through the last door is a room with similarities to the final room in the Riddle School series, with machinery at all sides, a large doomsday weapon powered by Zack's heat, and a large, suspicious round hole in the floor blocked by heavy doors. The weapon begins to charge, and you confront Viz, who is using his brain waves to assist the weapons' charging progress. Somehow, you were going to knock him off his post, and you realize Viz was, in fact, your alien friend Diz. He was brainwashed by Zone 5.1 after RT2 and was made to believe he was Viz in order to burn the world with the original plans of Vizion. (The real Viz died at the end of the RS series just before RT1.)
DeLot, who is irate, picks up Phil with a giant mechanical claw from the ceiling and opens the heavy doors in the floor, revealing a lava pit like the one Phil falls into in Riddle School 4, only this wasn't going to be a dream. The claw loosens its grip, and Phil's friends watch in shock and fear as he falls down into the fiery chasm, his life flashing before his eyes. At that point, Phil would have stopped his fall by barely hanging onto a small outcropping in the pit, and you'd take control of Phil, trying everything in your power to make it back out of the pit, realizing there is nothing you could do. Then you would have taken control of Smiley, Phred, and Diz somehow to rescue Phil before his grip loosened. Like all the other Riddle games, there would not have been a way to fail this final test, but the idea was to make it a very tense moment for those who had grown attached to the characters. In the end, Phil is pulled out of the pit by the same claw that Shaw deLot used to drop him in, and deLot accidentally fall into the pit himself in an attempt to jump and grab Phil to kill him with his own two hands.
The agents were going to admit they were glad to be free of deLot's rule, which is the same way the aliens following orders under the Vizion project felt after Viz was frozen to death. Zack is now neither hot nor cold, but a perfectly comfortable temperature, and he is slightly saddened but mostly relieved by this fact. Phil is shaken up but greatly thankful to his friends. Diz feels morally conflicted about having left the others behind in RT1 and wonders if it would have been best to stay with them rather than only save himself, because there wasn't time enough to save everyone. But he apologizes sincerely to them and they're all just glad that Diz was there in the end to help save Phil's life. Just outside of the Zone 5.1 building, the agents prepare Phil, Phred, Smiley, and Zack to fly in a jet to their home town at long last, and Diz is with them, only they have to split ways because Diz still has a life to live with his friends in the far reaches of the galaxy. They say their farewells, with Phil and his friends flying in the jet into the distant skies, and Diz going the opposite taking the old Vizion ship back into the cosmos. Before he takes off, it is clear by his expression that he will miss them, but it's for the best that he leaves them behind and goes on his own way.
As his ship disappears into the stars above, the credits roll. And after them, I was thinking of having some quick cutscene where Diz and Quiz are playfully laughing and having a friendly, casual discussion with one another as they talk about the silliness of Earth's Internet. This cutscene was going to be my way of laying to rest any assumptions that Quiz was significant to the story. He's just some blue alien who was forced to follow Vizion just like all the other aliens. Nobody liked Viz, and it seemed like the perfect way to say Quiz was a totally innocent and unimportant character was to have him and Diz get in a nonthreatening and funny conversation.

I also had the idea that Riddle Transfer 5's credits sequence would have involved clips of Phil's life with his friends, going through the years of school all over again, living his life and growing older, being in the same high school graduation ceremony as Phred, Zack, and Smiley as they got their college diplomas, and the last shot was going to be Phil, walking into his empty university dorm room as clouds dimmed the light coming from a window in the back, and his fully grown, fully matured character was going to set down his bags and take in the silence and the significance of this milestone, because at any given point in his journey, if something had gone wrong, he might not have done, or would not have been able to do, any of this. And even as a world hero, he is still just a human being like everyone else. All of Phil's development as a character would have happened following his near death experience at Zone 5.1 and reliving his life in school with a different point of view. It would have been a very emotional series of scenes, especially for such simple characters that were only a means of comedic effect in RS1-3.

* One thing I forgot to mention when I first posted this, is that I had also planned to gradually give Zack more and more hair throughout the series in order to distinguish his appearance from Phil or Phred. It didn't seem like an illogical plan since he had hair in RS4. This is hardly a significant detail, but it is one that people have asked about and it seemed like it was worth adding to these discarded notes.

That's that. All of my abandoned development plans are out and exposed to the world now.

I hope this conceptual road map was an interesting read for those of you who enjoyed the series, even though it never saw the light of day in the way I had originally intended.

But as for what was released, it wouldn't be hard to just say that Phil, Diz, and the others successfully escaped at the end of RT1 and that's the end of the story. That works just as well.

~
NOTE: Remember that I'm still the same person that I was when I made Riddle School in the first place. Even though I've left the Riddle universe behind, it's always possible I'll make another game with humor and puzzle-solving like Riddle School's always had, because I love those kinds of things.

ALSO NOTE (Updated Jan. 21, 2015)  I used to say no one had permission to continue this series, but my thoughts on that have changed and can be found here.

~

Riddle Transfer series has been cancelled, redirect to this post:
http://jonbro.newgrounds.com/news/post/732398

It's a parody of a multi-parody. So I'll be the first to say 'parodyception' to end that punchline quickly.

In any case, it is Mario Meets Kirby, an animated interpretation of an absolutely ridiculous fan fiction I came across online when I was looking for stupid things. This movie has been sitting on my desktop for a long time, and now it's here, with every typo from the original action-packed tale kept in tact.

And a hearty thanks to my good friend Mr-Shark, who inspired me to make this Flash in a number of small and random ways.

It's very shiny.

The new features are all definitely improvements, though I think the layout is a bit odd in that everything now looks like the old Newgrounds Art Portal. It feels like the site is almost too reliant on images, and that makes browsing for interesting-looking movies and games on the Front Page and in different sections of the site less convenient. But that's not really a big enough problem to go into further detail about. This setup might be better and I just don't realize it yet.

Looking forward to using this setup, seeing what it has to offer, and seeing what it'll offer in the future.

*Edit*
I'd also like to say that I absolutely love how the different sections of the site are color-coded now. That is GREATNESS.

Below is what I'm currently working on.

My good friend Mr-Shark, or MrJKrahs as he is on YouTube, just started making Let's Plays.

He's never done this before. He's not sure where it's going to go.
So, like most people, his first LP isn't exactly a shining bar of gold.

But I know this guy. He's a really funny, clever, helpful, unique person. Even though he hasn't really gotten into these Let's Plays yet, I have a feeling he'd be an absolutely hilarious and enjoyable LPer in time if he did.

You don't have to like him, but show him support and constructive criticism if you have some to give.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSqtrTz DABs

For those of you who care, which is probably very few of you. But that's okay.
I just had to get some things off my mind.

---

Riddle Transfer series has been cancelled, redirect to this post:
http://jonbro.newgrounds.com/news/post/732398

RT2 and RT3 have both started production, but I've had no sufficient time or motivation to work on either of them. I will at some point. But I'm just going to warn everyone that I have a feeling it will be years before this five-part series is finished.

In the meantime, for those who don't know, I have a second hobby that takes less hard work which allows me to put something new online almost every day.

I'm mostly wondering because I just started making my first one.

If you know anyone who would enjoy watching me make a fool of myself, it'd be great to have some recognition, especially since I'm not very good at this yet and will need loads of constructive criticism.

If you don't watch Let's Plays, that is also perfectly understandable, and you have the right to mock me relentlessly on top of all the embarrassment I'm already suffering by posting my mindless rambling on the front page.

/sorryfortheblatantadvertising

---

I've noticed that the first part of this LP has about 400 more views than any of the other parts, and that's because they're all coming from this user page. So, I figured I might as well post one of the better episodes in hopes that this becomes interesting:

I have three things to say:

# 1
There will not be a Riddle School 6.

# 2
If there was one, it would look exactly like this.

# 3
Riddle Transfer will be a five-part series* which takes place after Riddle School 5. This is the only finished game of the series, so it could potentially be a few years before the conclusion finally arrives. In any case, I believe the Riddle Transfer games will outdo all the Riddle School games by a longshot, and what has just been released is only the beginning of a deep and wild adventure.

(*note -- will no longer be a series)