Hey Newgrounders! Stanpai here with an update on our plans for the Newgrounds Festivals server this summer.

As many of you may recall, we had a slammin' time last year for the first ever Newgrounds Summer Festival. Attendees from all over the world joined in on the fun to make that weekend a blast of a time, with weekend long programming spanning three days of activities and content. In January of this year, we followed up with the Newgrounds Winter Festival. Yet another weekend bringing more of the same to the Newgrounds community.

With Summer upon us again, it's time to reveal our plans for 2022.

Introducing Newgrounds Festivals - Summer Sessions

Rather than a single weekend blowout, this summer we'll be taking a more staggered approach to the festival. Fitting everyone's panels into a single weekend is awesome, but also rather limiting. Some people can't tune in, others can't make the timeslots. With this in mind, we're trying something new. This summer we're inviting you, the community, to host one-off panels all summer long.

@LilSpook and I will be reviewing the panel submissions and contacting people throughout the summer. In a perfect world, we'll be able to have the panels hosted live in the Festivals Discord Server and broadcast on YouTube for general audiences when applicable.

Potential panels include...

• Animation
• Gamedev
• Audio
• Art
• Newgrounds History & Culture
• Whatever you want!

A great example of what this is like would be the one-off session hosted last year by @Anislug (Formerly Anisloth) about motivation.

These panels and workshops offer you, the presenter, more time to go into the nitty gritty without worrying about time restrictions and panel schedules. If this sounds like something you want to get into, fill out that application!

Fill out the panel application here!

Not a member of the Discord Server? Fill out the application for that here as well!

You must be 18 or older to access the server.

Finally- the WHEN. We're hoping to kick this off during the month of June, which gives you two weeks to put yourself on the lineup for the start of the sessions programming. We hope to see this series run until the end of summer, so don't worry about being first in line. There is plenty of time.

As for the question you may be asking next- will there be a Summerfest this year? The answer is... no! We don't want to overdo it by having two festivals per year, and this summer session format gives us both a good chance to breathe and the community some time to look forward to the next festival without getting overexposed to them. We hope you'll enjoy this new format as we experiment with new ways to bring the community together!

Please note the Festivals team will not schedule any content that will interfere with existing NG community events, so don't forget to prepare your submissions for Pico Day and Piconjo Day!

That's all for this update! You're welcome to start filling out panels now or later!

By the way, the art used this time was made for last year's Summer Fest by @KingInfinite!

Want to contribute art for the sessions? Use the tag #summersessions2022!

Thanks for reading!

-Stanpai