Draft:William Alexander Ryan

William Alexander Ryan (born April 29, 1992) is an English YouTuber, musician, animator, writer, and video game developer. He is most known for his songs based on video games, which he releases under the DAGames alias. He also releases original music under the IRIS and Will Ryan Originals aliases.

Career
Ryan began his career in 1999 on Newgrounds by making various animations, eventually resulting in the creation of the ComiX series in the year 2008. ComiX was a series focusing on two guys who befriended each other in their school days and who now work in a comic book store because of their deplorable academic performance. Around 2007, Ryan started creating music and uploading it on his Newgrounds channel, as well as MySpace, with two separate projects: Epical Trance (seemingly becoming W.A.R later, being an acronym of Ryan’s name), a solo project focusing on electronic, pop, and trance music, and Land of Hell a metal project consisting of Ryan and Joshua Spreight.

Ryan continued working on music announcing two albums, one for each project: Imagination! for Epical Trance and Cus the Bitches Can for Land of Hell; being almost finished and ready for release; however, a majority of the songs featured have either been lost or have remained unreleased. In the latter part of 2008, Ryan started expressing his qualms with animation, saying that he felt like he could not push himself to animate even though he had no problems writing the scripts and recording the lines for the projects; around this time, Ryan also announced that he is starting music college. Near the end of the year, he announced that Land of Hell would be changing its name to the simpler name, Colony, along with an album called Devilution, which seems to have never been released.

In January 2009, Ryan announced the first actual Colony album, The Sky. Later that month, he would release an EP with the same title containing four tracks from the album. The tracklist for the full album is unknown, and all the songs off of the EP other than Tears Drop to the Ground have been lost.

In July 2009, Colony's name was changed for a final time to Onyx Colony. At the same time, another album, Claustro Ego, was announced and released in September. During this period, the band consisted of Ryan, Joshua Spreight, Liam Ledger, and Danneh Parkinson. Around this time, Ryan started his first YouTube channel, where he uploaded animations, Let's Plays, and Onyx Colony songs.

2010 marked Ryan's retreat from most of his projects. It marked the year of his daughter's birth and the start of his time at Game Developer College.

In 2011, while still in college, Ryan once again started uploading animations and music on YouTube, mostly leaving his Newgrounds channel behind. He only made posts when new videos were uploaded on his YouTube channel. That year also marked the creation of a new YouTube channel named Diamond Armada Online, which would later become DAOnline and DAGames.

In 2012, Onyx Colony released the so-called Borderlines EP, with 15 tracks on Bandcamp. However, a large part of the EP remains lost because it was removed from Bandcamp.

2014 officially marked the name change of the Diamond Armada Online channel to DAGames, along with a bigger focus on Let's Play content. Around 2015, Ryan released the FNAF 3 animation One Animatronic At Freddy's, which gave the channel a significant boost in popularity. Just a month later, Ryan posted his first nerdcore song under the DAGames name, a FNAF 3-inspired track titled It's Time to Die.

Through the years, Ryan continued making more songs inspired by various videogames, releasing the greatest hits album Press Start to Begin Vol. 1, and in 2017, he released his most popular and loved song to date, a song inspired by the hit indie horror video game Bendy and the Ink Machine called Build our Machine, which currently has over 180 million views. Around this time, Ryan started feeling tired of making nerdcore music and started working on original music, launching a series of singles starting in December 2016, in preparation for his first original album in years, titled Heart of an Artist, which was released on May 24, 2018, alongside DAGames' Greatest Hits, Vol. 1.

Since then, Ryan has continued making both nerdcore music, as well as original music under the alias IRIS, releasing the album Goliath's Throne in October 2019, Dawn of the Dimetrix in August 2021, and a remake of Heart of an Artist, titled Heart of an Artist: Resurrection, in December 2023. Ryan also launched an original album titled Flashdrive in 2020, under the DAGames alias with the tagline "Songs made in an hour", because of the fact that each of the songs had been completed in just one hour. In 2022, Ryan announced that a remake of the album called Flashdrive: SSD was in the works, later getting a projected release date of 2024, and then getting delayed to an unspecified date.

Another currently worked-on project is Open Infinitum, an album that is completely original in essence, not being inspired by any game, whose songs are to be later connected to a certain game or show by the rest of the DAGames team. The album was also projected to be released by the end of 2024 following the release of its first single, Mad Man, but has been delayed indefinitely.

A greatest hits compilation, titled Press Start to Rewind, is slated to release physically on July 15, 2024, with a digital release set to release later. To date, DAGames channel currently sits at over 2 million subscribers.

DAGames
The DAgames channel and alias contains all of Will Ryan’s video game-based songs and compilation albums; his most popular songs such as Build Our Machine and Get Out come from this alias.

IRIS
Will Ryan began the IRIS project by releasing its first single, Heart of an Artist, on December 5th, 2016, followed by an album with the same name on May 24th, 2018. The record was then followed by 2 more albums: Goliath's Throne on October 30th, 2019, which kick-started the actual story for the IRIS project, which was then expanded upon by the last actual album in the IRIS trilogy, Dawn of the Dimetrix on August 21st, 2021. At some point in 2019, Ryan announced that the album Heart of an Artist would be receiving a from-the-ground-up remake titled Heart of an Artist: Reignite. Two remakes of the tracks Why Do We Hold and Draw the Line were released in preparation for the project's release before the announcement of its postponement. Later, in March 2023, Ryan announced that the project was being worked on again under the title Heart of an Artist: Resurrection. Three remakes of the tracks Why Do We Hold, S.O.S, and Draw the Line have been released as singles in preparation for the project's release on December 15th, 2023.

All albums in the IRIS project are concept albums that tell the story of the realms Hithaföl and Yondrathöl, their people, and the unimaginable power of the IRIS, an emblem of archival, holding the knowledge of everything that ever existed, which merged with the story's protagonist Goliath, as a result of an invasion on Pergaprime Castle caused by the story's antagonist Abrahm Valentin and his flawed copy of the IRIS called the Dimetrix. A virtual TTRPG experience based on the IRIS story called Jaws of Dawn, in which people from the discord server could participate, was streamed live in 2020, coinciding with the release of the single Mothohive.

A series of novels covering the entire IRIS story is being written; however, work on the novels is being done at a slower pace due to Will Ryan being occupied with multiple other projects.

Will Ryan Originals & Pandorium
Will Ryan Originals is a collection of Ryan’s original stories and music; the collection currently includes two series: IRIS and Pandorium. Pandorium is an anthology series of interconnected stories that began in 2021 with the announcement of Ryan’s dystopian sci-fi story Solitude. The project's first song, "Hail to the Jester, Queen & King," was released on June 20, 2021, followed by a second song titled "Know Your Place" on October 28, 2023.

Solitude will be spread across a comic book series and a video game titled Solitude: Echoes from the Bloodline (developed under HammerScorn Media), which will be released sometime in 2024 alongside the first issue of the comic book. The third Solitude song, Join the Bloodline, was released on June 30, 2024.

The Pandorium anthology also includes three other stories: HumN, Mercy's Garden, and an unnamed 4th project.

Discography
 Albums 

Epical Trance / Will Ryan

Imagination! (Unreleased)

Knocked Down to Disaster (Unreleased)

W.A.R

Crank It Loud (Unreleased | 2007-2014)

Land of Hell / Colony / Onyx Colony

Cus the Bitches Can (2008 - Lost)

I'm Watching, I'm Waiting (Lost)

Devilution (Lost or Cancelled)

Claustro Ego (2009/2011)

The Sky (2009 - Lost)

The Encrypt (2011)

Borderlines (2012 - Mostly Lost)

Corruption (2012-2014)

Borderlines (The Lost Relics) (2020)

DAGames

Press Start to Begin Vol. 1 (2016)

Pizza Puppet Panic (2019)

Eternal Swing (2019)

Flashdrive (2020)

Borderlines (The Lost Relics) (2020)

Flashdrive: SSD (TBA)

Press Start to Rewind (2024)

IRIS

Heart of an Artist (2018)

Goliath's Throne (2019)

Dawn Of The Dimetrix (2021)

Heart of an Artist: Resurrection (2023)

 Video games 

Tetris flash edition (2006)

Will on da keyboard! (2006)

Will + co: Tipsy Turvey! (2007)

IRIS: Jaws of Dawn (2020)

Solitude: Echoes from the Bloodline (2024)

IRIS: Jaws of Dawn: Behemoth Update (TBA)

IRIS: Jaws of Vegala (TBA)

Personal life
Ryan has revealed that he has two brothers: Joseph Charles George Ryan (younger brother) and Thomas James Ryan (older brother), as well as a daughter named Jessica Ella May Ryan. He is in a relationship with one of the head moderators of his Discord server, InuTrash (otherwise known as Sofia).

Ryan is known to have had many pets throughout the years, such as two hamsters named Iris and Megara, as well as multiple birds, all of which being different species of parrot, named Zelda, Axel and, his current pet bird, Odin.