It's always good to do short, easy, experimental projects from time to time to see what works and what doesn't in your personal style, before taking what you learned into a much larger project.

In my case, I fiddled around with a relatively lo-fi 3D animation app on my phone (Morphin, it's called) to figure out ways to make decent-looking cartoon animation on weak, limited hardware, then shared them as YouTube Shorts on YT and GIFs on the Newgrounds Art Portal. I set the Newgrounds GIF versions to automatically upload for the next few Saturdays (3 more Saturdays to go, as of this writing), but I uploaded the "YT Shorts" version of these videos this past Monday-Friday to see which week day is the best day to put my stuff in front of people (I guess people are too busy on Saturdays to watch YT videos uploaded on that day, and of course there never seems to be any reason to even go on YT on Sundays, similar to the past when Sundays would be the worst, most boring day to try to watch Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network).

Yeah, I know I shouldn't take too much stock in view/Like/comment counts on an algorithm-driven site like YouTube, particularly with its algorithm being known to be biased against any not-kid-friendly animation, but when you work 6 months+ on a single 1-3 minute animation by your lonesome, it's always nice to know that, at the very least, your own parents can at a minimum find and be aware of your video's existence without aggressive advertising on my part (I should save the aggressive advertising to strangers online, at least).

Anyway, here's some interesting things I learned from this experiment:

• On YouTube, and possibly on Newgrounds here as well, I seem to be already becoming known as the "Punk n Gunk" guy, to the point where people unfortunately don't seem to be as interested in anything I make that doesn't have Punk and/or Gunk in it as the main characters. The YT Shorts with those two have hundreds of views while Murpho the Miserable and BUTT-erfly barely break double digits. That's fine, I guess, it allows me to focus more on what projects I want to work on in my limited free time for hobbyist Blender animation, but I'm already starting to understand why Hideo Kojima didn't want to be known solely as the "Metal Gear Solid" guy or it took forever for the late Leonard Nimoy to eventually accept he would solely be known to fans as "Spock." Hopefully, like Hideo Kojima these days with the Death Stranding games, I will be able to still find success when I'm ready to move on from Punk n' Gunk entirely, but for now, any Punk n' Gunk-related content I make, like the upcoming new episode I talked about in the last two blog posts, will take top priority.
• Unsurprisingly, I find YouTube Shorts and the shortform vertical video format in general very limiting for animation. It seems to be only really good for making looping dance or walk cycle videos, or sharing meme-ified clips of your recent longer videos, and of course the vertical screen doesn't give your character much room to move around in compared to the horizontal widescreen format (or even square or 4:3 ratios). Like @TheMiamiDeSantos has told me before, getting lots of views on YT Shorts feels very hollow as well--outside of likely my own mother giving "Gunk Dance Loop" a single Like, nobody seems to be willing to hit the Like button, leave a thoughtful comment, or especially check out your other stuff and maybe even Subscribe to your YT Channel while they're just mindlessly doom-scrolling through TikTok-esque brainrot content.
• For those of you struggling to watch the GIF versions of my animation loops, unfortunately I think it's because the mobile browser version of Newgrounds simply sucks when it comes to showing GIFs. The GIFs run just fine on the desktop version of NG, but I've noticed on my phone and back when I had an iPad that GIFs from the Art Portal run at only 1-3 frames per second on anything considered a "mobile" device. I guess in the future, all my Art Portal submissions will mainly be static illustrations--maybe an optional GIF to the side showing my wireframes for 3D art and speed paints for 2D art, but the GIF won't be the first thing that loads up anymore. Unfortunately, my next 3 uploads up until August 2nd are all animated GIFs that won't run well on mobile devices, so all I can tell those of you that don't have access to the desktop/laptop version of Newgrounds is to maybe ignore my Newgrounds account and look at other people's stuff until after August 2nd if you don't want to suffer through my laggy GIF animations, sorry.
• Clarity and bright colors >>>>> overly-detailed attempts at "triple-A" visuals. Especially if you're going for a cartoon-y rendering style. Especially if your audience is likely watching your stuff on tiny mobile screens. Especially if YouTube compression and/or only uploading your NG Movie Portal submission at 720p will "crunch" away all the subtle texture detail you worked so hard on for hours or even days anyway. Especially if you're just one person using Blender and don't have access or funds to a massive, multinational team + render farms to make optimization of everything completely optional.

Tell me what you think of these lessons I felt I've learned in the comments. Do you think they're spot-on and will undeniably help me in future Punk n' Gunk projects, or I'm somewhat misguided and I should pay attention to some subtle caveats in these lessons?