I've finally hit the Publish button for the AIM 2019 album. Check it out if you haven't already! There are some great entries and really, there were some entries that I was quite disappointed didn't make it into the album. Perhaps I will make a playlist of these entries that I wish got into the album. But regardless, these picks were a result of choices made by my wonderful judging panel and myself.

These past few days, I've been listening to all of these entries, figuring out some sort of order for the runner-ups, downloading all the entries...even when the compo was over, it felt like there was so much left to do. I think the best thing to come out of this compo was just getting more involved with the Newgrounds community than I ever had prior to this. Last year, I was a judge for NGUAC, but I felt incredibly out of touch with the community in general and parts of the judging period took place when I was unavailable, so I felt like I didn't contribute much at all. This year, however, I didn't really have a choice to not get involved once I agreed to organize AIM, because, well, I was the organizer.

I think the most stressful part of organizing the compo was at the beginning, when I wasn't 100% sure on what to do. I tried to look up previous AIM threads, but they all seemed so scattered and it was hard to make out which threads led to where, especially when it came to finding the results and the Bandcamp in general. Honestly, I kind of wish I had the ability to edit the OP of the Submissions thread so that I could add links to the results thread, the full playlist of accepted entries and the Bandcamp album. It was weird having to bump the submissions thread to just add a link to the results thread, but it felt necessary, especially for archival purposes in a forum where threads are bumped out quite regularly.

But I digress. There were a lot of entries I enjoyed listening to, and I truly appreciated the wide variety of styles and interpretations of pieces of art. I wanted to review a lot of entries, but only got around to reviewing eight of them. Maybe I will go back and review some of the entries, but I make no promises. It's all about whether I have a lot to say about them or not. :P

Fun fact: I actually did consider entering the AIM Contest back in 2016, but ultimately didn't because I wasn't confident that I was able to make something that would hit the 3 minute mark. Three years later, I can say that I can hit that time duration quite consistently depending on the type of piece I make. On the flipside, I'm currently in a compo where the objective is to make a piece that is less than 30 seconds, which 2019 is finding to be quite the challenge, haha.

Well I'm rambling way too much for a news post. Thanks for reading this far if you did. Again, I'm appreciative to have been this involved in a Newgrounds related event. It's been a blast.