HELLO NEWGROUNDS
Consistency is not my best suit, but I have decided to start a small series, the staslog - just a bunch of blog posts from me with updates on my life, projects, and stuff.
so, Who am I?
Let me introduce myself again, as it is the first entry.
My story, so far
I'm stas! (as of 2023) 20-year-old enby from Poland, making music in their free time. I've been doing this on and off, as a hobby since ~2020, when I first started playing around in FLStudio. My parents signed me up for a public music school for the first 6 years of my education, where I practiced the piano. Personally, I hated being forced to play some piece nobody knew, written by an old man hundreds of years ago, so instead of practicing - I started to compose my own tunes. Of course, that had quite a negative impact on my grades and since I wasn't interested in continuing my music education at the time - I quit.
TF2 mapmaking
Through middle school, I didn't do much on the internet really. I tried my luck with YouTube a bit but without much success. At the time I mainly played Team Fortress 2 and I developed an interest in mapmaking, specifically for MvM. Thanks to potato.tf, I found a community of other MvM enthusiasts and soon started my own map project. The map was called "Tabletop of Terror" and was supposed to be a Halloween-styled map, where Merasmus has trapped the mercenaries in a tabletop game, forcing them to fight against his hordes of monsters. I even made a soundtrack for the map with Musescore, as at the time that was the only DAW-like software I knew how to use, which you can find here. As my Hammer knowledge and abilities were quite limited I decided to enlist some talented people to help. Here, I must give a huge shoutout to JaidenDestroyer, an extremely talented and devout mapper who basically took that 'project' held together by hopes and dreams and made it into reality. I would go on about this more, but I don't wanna waste your time with an era I left behind a long time ago. The map is now called Legerdemain, you can sometimes check it out on the mentioned potato.tf servers if you'd like.
The Unturned Dawn
At some point in early high school, my friend introduced me to a zombie survival game - Unturned, and to not waste my musical talent, also as I just discovered FL at the time - I made a couple of tunes, inspired by the game's lore and setting:
- Opposing Force - a sort of 'tribute' to the Coalition, the in-game equivalent of the UN, the main fighting force against the zombies.
- Nuclear Kalinka - a piece about the story of what went down in Silo 22, a radiation-polluted missile silo.
- Broken Vials - a track dedicated to Scorpion-7, a research company/lab, responsible for the zombie virus outbreak.
- Shady Connections - a track inspired by Krovi Estate, a mafia base on the Russian map.
Somewhere down the line, a map called Elver came out, and it changed my life forever.
Of course, like with any new content in a game, me and my friends decided to check it out. I was stunned by how different it was from everything else in the game so far, but the thing that stuck with me the most was of course - the story, yet again. At some point in the game, you befriend a certain cult, led by a half-zombie, half-human - Rainwright. And so, I decided to make a track just about that. This video was the beginning of a new chapter in my life.
Even if subpar, by my standards today, it was enough at the time for Danaby2 - the map's creator to contact me on Steam, about whether he could add it to the map. Although I don't have the original Steam message anywhere, this DM will forever live as probably the most important message I've received.
And thus, my music career as the Unturned musician began. To commemorate my music getting added to Elver, I made a remix, and later on, I found myself integrating into the Unturned community more and more. I made two tracks for a new map - Kuwait and sometime later I was contacted by Danaby's friend - Renaxon, asking whether I could make some ambient tunes for his upcoming map - Arid. And so - that was my first ever music commission I believe, you can find the Arid OST on my Soundcloud, here.
That was sometime around 2021. Also when I created my Newgrounds account! Yipee! By that point, I found my place in Unturned. I was friends with a lot of content creators, people that I used to look up to when I was younger.
Making a name for myself
Sometime by that point, I got an email I would never expect to get. The game's developer - Nelson Sexton, the man, the legend himself, contacted me about making an official soundtrack for the game! I was beyond extcatic! We exchanged a couple of email, eventually moving over to Discord DMs. In the end, the official loading theme for PEI was complete!
As PEI (a.k.a. Prince Edward Island) was the first map added to Unturned 3.0 (which is the current, modern version), I decided to go all-out on the nostalgic tones and chord progression of the already existing main menu theme, which for years was the only music piece in the game. This was my first-ever collaboration with Smartly Dressed Games, but certainly wasn't the last! - Soon after I made a loading theme for the game's most PvP-intensive vanilla map - Washington:
As I mentioned previously, this is a very PvP-oriented map, and so I decided to make the track very upbeat and full of energy. This is as of now - the last official addition to the game by yours truly, however, I promise you that more is on the way in the future!
Also, I almost forgot to mention, but I became a host on The Unturned Podcast as well! Check it out if you wanna learn more about the game and the community!
Buak (Boo-ack!)
The last project I've been involved in is Buak by Toothy Deerryte! She contacted me about it, somewhere in the middle of the map's development and since it's a pretty ambitious project, my music was more than just a tune to listen to whilst loading into the game, or an ambient noise coming out of a megaphone! Now it was an actual in-game theme! Besides that I also helped master voice lines for the map, featuring your favorite oomfie, the bestie - Emizip (who also was the one to introduce me to Newgrounds), as the voice of Anthe Grim!
Check out the full Buak OST by me and Paulfest on Soundcloud,
And check out the VA work I did in this video by Diddlyono:
I can't thank Danaby, Toothy, most importantly Nelson and everyone else who helped me get where I am. You all gave me a reason to live and a platform to hone my skills on. Thank you, once again.
What's next?
Well, if I have to be honest - I grew tired of the Unturned community. The game's creator is a wonderful, awesome person, unfortunately, the community is riddled with problematic people, to say the least. I'll still stick around there, as my job is not done yet, but I started branching out to other stuff. One of those branches is gotta be my work with SmileDev, a small studio consisting of a couple of my friends - Flodo, Nolam, and Spebby, whom I've also met through Unturned.
Check out some games we made together, here on Newgrounds!
So what now? I don't know! I'll make an effort to be more active here, on Newgrounds more, but oh well no promises :P.
Thanks y'all for reading this lil story of mine, and stay tuned for more music, art and staslogs like this one! Upcoming ones will probably be a lot shorter however, so don't expect another bible of staswalle lore coming up. Cya!
Abranos
Truly interesting Autobiography, quite detailed