@kr0tyara - @Aalasteir (Q) - Index

Q: How did you get interested in making tiny paper robots out of cardboard or other materials? What do they look like, and how did you learn about making paper robots?

1. I started making them in 4 grade, I think. They told us at school how to glue a box out of paper, and it got me really inspired. I also learned how to fold paper springs, and tried combining these skills for a school project. The first 'robot' was not actually a robot, but an orange cat in a space-suit. It was a box with 5 springs attached, representing its neck, arms and legs. Sadly, it broke very fast. But I re-created this toy later, replacing the cat's head with a robot one. That's how the V.N. was born. I created like 5 of them, and they all didn't last very long.

I re-created this toy in 2020, replacing paper with cardboard. And that's how V.Y. was born. There's even a game about this guy!

There's another robot - Ъ (its name is unpronounceable even in russian - it's just a letter named 'hard sign'). It looks similar to V.Y. in many ways, but it's yellow and has a 'ponytail'. Instead of paper springs, it uses wool threads to connect body parts together. It's also a bit depressed and has a broken heart sticker attached to its body.

There's also a pig-like robot with two faces, but I never finished it. Maybe later...

Q: What is your view on creativity?

2. (What should I say about this one... Green is not a creative color?? :D)

Everyone is creative. Most people just don't realize that. Or forget about it while being stuck in a mundane routine.

We all are humans after all! We have created everything around us from the ground up. I really hope one day we will win this war against the machine...

Q: What do you think about the Internet?

3. It's a great place. But I feel like it was much better when the Internet did not invade almost every single aspect of our lives.

- "Secret" Ingredients

I love adding chocolate and gummy bears to my oatmeal. They melt and turn into a sweet goop. It's kind of a guilty pleasure. Once I put a gummy bear in chicken broth and it wasn't that bad. People I told about this weren't very happy with this information. Are you? :D

Q: I think it's all cool! You can put Gummy Bears in any food you want, it's your food. Experimenting is how you make discoveries. What do people say about you putting Gummy Bears in food, and what are some of your favorite foods?

4. Well, they just say it's gross!

As for my favorite foods, I love sweets. Maybe a little too much for my age. My favorite is ... I'm not even sure. Kinder Chocolate maybe? Aside from sweets, I like pasta, my favorite kind is fettuccine. Any sauce is good, even ketchup. (If there are any Italians reading this, please wash your eyes and forget the last sentence. I didn't say that!)

Also pizza with grilled vegetables and mushrooms from my local pizza place.

- Sock Collection

I have a large collection of colorful funny socks. Many of them are Christmas-themed, because my relatives gift those for the holidays.

Q: What makes a good sock design different from a bad sock design?

5. When they just put a logo of something and call it a day. Also I don't really like when it's just a plain image that gets really weird and stretched when you put the sock on. I prefer socks with a pattern design, like bunch of ducks.

- Name Origin

Not sure if this one counts as an obscure fact, but my online personality is based on a mole (the animal! It's weird that English doesn't have an unique name for these creatures). My nickname is a transliteration of the Russian word 'кротяра'. It means 'mole', although not in a neutral form, but something like 'pesky mole'. And the profile picture/logo is a really abstracted image of a mole's head. Someone said they thought it was a picture of mountains :D

Q: What would be your advice for choosing a name for online?

6. Anything is good, just don't put in your real name. And it's better to be readable out loud. Also I can't be qualified for answering this kind of question, because most people (who don't speak Slavic languages) can't pronounce my username at all!

Q: How did you get interesting creating games?

7. In 2013, I learned that my favorite game was made with Adobe Flash. For some reason I really wanted to work on this game in the future, so I decided to learn Flash. And that's how it started. Eventually I learned JavaScript, C# and Haxe, they are a lot similar to ActionScript. It's obvious why my dream was not fulfilled, but well, I'm crafting my own stuff now!

- МиркоМир (MirkoMir)

In the past, I was working on a small multiplayer game similar to Club Penguin. It was called МиркоМир (MirkoMir). We had like 15,000 player accounts. It lived through 2017 to 2020, and then was shut down due to the death of Flash and collective burn-out. I was doing the client-side coding, planned some in-game quests and events, and sometimes I was playing as one of mascot characters during parties. I was 13-15 at the time, and I think that was a great accomplishment.

Q: What would be examples of the in-game quest and events? And your advice on working with multiplayer games?

8. Once we had a really cool Halloween event where you needed to navigate through a large maze and solve the riddles. The riddles were a bit too hard (especially for kids - I'm really sorry for them!) and the maze wasn't properly optimized, but it was fun. I also volunteered to animate NPCs for this event and they didn't even look too bad!

Also there was an Easter egg hunt. One of the eggs had a really funny animation: it swung on a swing, then it fell down, cracked and revealed a note saying something like 'Gotcha!'. And a few seconds later, the real egg was rolled out of a bush.

Also there was a quest based on fairy tales and we decided to design 3 mini-games for it: a 2048 clone, a Simon Says and a jigsaw puzzle. It was a real challenge, especially considering we had only one month. But we made it!

As for advice, well, don't bite off more than you can chew. We had a lot of ambition, but lacked skills and money (we were 15!). That's probably why we eventually gave up on the game.

Q: How did you create One Pencil, what was your process for the development?

What do you think about Undertale?

9. It started in January, when I decided to replay Undertale. I also learned that Undertale Yellow came out and gave it a try. It was really, really good! I got so inspired I wanted to design an Undertale-like boss battle of my own.

A few days later, I remembered about my unfinished prototype of a game that used hand-drawn gesture recognition and boom! It all came together. I also decided to tie it with Toonio and roll it out as an April Fools joke. That's how it started!

During the development, I got even more ideas that expanded the game mechanics, but it quickly became difficult to fit it all in a single boss fight without a proper introduction. Maybe one day I'll turn this prototype into a full-fledged quirky RPG... Who knows, who knows!

Also, this is my first time creating music all by myself. I didn't think it was really good and was too insecure about it, but in the end some people even liked it.

As you can tell, I'm really passionate about Undertale. I have replayed it countless times, I dived into the source code to find the secrets (sorry, Toby!), I've probably read every single dialogue line of the game. The characters were so grown on me, I didn't have guts even to attempt genocide route. I decided to try it only last month (8 years after my first playthrough!) It was devastating, but I needed to do my research...

Q: What is the story of the website: toonio?

10. Well, it started in 2011, when I stumbled upon a website called Toonator (Мультатор). It was a really simple platform that allowed you to draw cartoons and share it with the online community. Kind of like Newgrounds, but for hand-drawn animation. I've became passionate about it and met lots of friends there.

In a few years, the site became abandoned. In 2020, Flash died. Toonator used it for the drawing app, and they didn't do anything to keep it running. I made a port of the app to HTML5 using OpenFL and uploaded it as a browser extension. I felt like a hero :D

But Toonator continued to die out. Moderators abandoned this place as well, it became a really unsafe website. In 2021, I decided to make my own site, as a successor for Toonator and a safe place for the remaining users. That's how Toonio was born! It's not a huge place, but I like it this way. I really hope it will inspire many creative people, maybe even a new generation of artists...

Q: What do you think about NG and why did you create your account?

11. It's a lot like Toonator, so I felt almost at home. Well, except that Newgrounds is much, much bigger and better. And it had a real cultural impact on the entire Internet!

I initially created my account to publish my games to a wider audience. I'm still not really connected to the Newgrounds folk, but I like just watching everything that happens here :D

Q: Challenge! Create your inspirational quotes?

12. That's a hard one. Maybe this...?

We, human beings, aren't designed very cleverly or efficiently. Did you know that our own eyes would be seen as a threat by the immune system? Well, if the evolution crafted us like this and we (mostly) work just fine, why be afraid of imperfections? You can do art, even if you never used a pencil before. It will be far from perfect, but it will still be art. Your skills will evolve over time, just start from something! Become your own evolutionary force!