Thursday, September 22, 2016

Making progress....

Today I started working on the first level for the next game. This time around, I really want to focus on texture and graphic quality as well as level design.

Dev screens bam!


Oh baby! Those textures!

Look at the lighting son! nice!


Snowconesolid Productions!!!



Character design changes:

Also, from the above screenshots, you might have noticed something different about my 

"Ponytail character" Hmmm what could it be what could it be....

Thats right! he now has a super cool hat!

I thought something was missing from the original model so I went back, modeled this hat and re-did his texture. I decided that he will be some kind of mail man character.

This hat though! It really perfected my character! Look at all these hats! Looooook!
I loved the new hat I created for the character however, I was dissatisfied with the new color scheme I came up for him. Soooo... I decided to go back to his original pink texture that I created. I felt this pink texture made him more unique and comedic and cartoony. I adjusted the new hat to match his clothes and boom!

He is now a very cool looking character model. Especially with the hat that has my "Snowconesolid Productions" mascot on it. A 3d character wearing snowconesolid merch yo!


Back to level design:

I really want to structure the levels properly this time and am focusing on a more modular level design workflow. 

Here is the first "non-development" screenshot from the first level, which is essentially just a quick short tutorial/getting started/intro to the game before the actual game starts.

This first level is like a little easter egg cave essentially. I really like how it turned out and can't wait to make more progress so I can eventually show more progress. 

More updates soon! 




Saturday, September 10, 2016

Making of "PonyTail"




Here is a quick breakdown of how I created the Ponytail character that you see above.


First, I started out with a quick character concept sketch that I drew on paper. As you can see, the character I originally had in mind was more of this older cartoony vampire type character. The end results was a completely different character. 

I started off by poly modeling the entire character from a cube. Everything from the head to nose was poly modeled by hand. I did not do any dynamic sculpting (dynamic topology) or retopolgy at all for this character model. However, I did use sculpting tools such as the grab, smooth and inflate brushes to adjust the vertices I already had on this model. 



After modeling the main body, I then modeled the features that give the character a unique look. Small detail stuff like hairstyle and type of eyebrows, adjusting certain aspects like how wide is the character and so on. Originally, I tried to go for a bald top - crazy hair coming out of the sides hair style, very similar to my concept sketch. I did not like the way it looked. It was messy so I scrapped it. I then decided to just model a simple ponytail type hairstyle as you can see in the next two images. After giving him a ponytail hairstyle, I decided to just name the character "Ponytail"




The modeling was done at this point.




I laid down some simple base colors for the character. Not final color scheme. Just preparing early for texturing later on.



For the eyes, I was originally planning on just texture painting them onto the mesh. However, I later decided to actually model in the eyes and make it part of the mesh's geometry. This was a much better result. 




Next came the texturing process. I started marking seams on the model and unwrapping the parts. I then organized them on a 2048x2048 texture map.





Still on the texturing process. I baked out an AO map and a diffuse map and used those to create one texture map for the character model. I then hand painted extra details such as the eyes, added fabric detail to the clothing pieces, fixed the messy parts of the texture map (such as artifacts from the ao bake or seam lines that showed) and played around with the color schemes a bit. 






Next came the rigging which is actually a very quick and easy task to do if you are using Blender3d as your 3d modeling program. Using Blender's rigify add-on, I quickly rigged my humanoid character model. While the rigify add-on does save a lot of time on the rigging process, it is not perfect. So I had to go back, adjust some weight paints and clean up a little bit so that the mesh properly deforms and is animation ready. 





At this point the 3d creation and rigging side of things from Blender3d is complete. Finally I exported the model as a .fbx and the .png texture map to the Unity game engine. I created a small working prototype demo and set up a third person controller so that the character can actually move and be in action. 



And that is the whole character creation process for "Ponytail".  I would say this character model probably took around 4-5 hours to create from start to finish. There is still a lot more work to be done in the unity engine. This is just one of the many things that goes into game creation. It's a very time consuming process and takes a lot of patience and work. But it sure is a lot of fun and seeing the end results of your hard work is a great feeling. 



Friday, September 9, 2016

Im back. Updates. Making a new weird game + future plans



Hey everyone. I am back and have a lot of cool stuff to talk about. I'll just cut right into everything without rambling on and on. The character you see above is a new character I recently created. He has a ponytail. I named him "Ponytail". I am experimenting around and plan on using him for my next game. What kind of game will it be? I don't know yet. I never plan any of my games. I always just create stuff randomly and throw that stuff into the unity engine and eventually come up with a game. Maybe that is why my games end up turning out so weird. *cough* Potato Thriller *cough*

Anyway, I created ponytail, I threw him into the unity engine and made a small prototype demo. 

Again, just messing around at the moment with no real game design plan.
Hey, remember those donkey characters I made a while back and also showed off a working prototype demo of? You know, these donkeys ?
Well guess what, they are back! See!

I will probably make the donkeys and ponytail part of the same game instead of making two separate games. Who knows, maybe down the road I will also make a separate game for each character. But lets focus on whatever this project is going to turn out to be first. 


Here is another screenshot from the new demo. If you remember, the coffin models here are the same ones I made a while back when I announced that I was making a cartoony game about a vampire and garlic. Do you remember? You know this one over here. Yup, I posted an update that day, said I was making some game featuring that vampire character and then vanished. I haven't updated the blog since. What happened to the vampire game? I don't know. I might eventually go back to it. But for now, my interest has shifted to making a game featuring my new ponytail character. 

If you guys haven't noticed by now, I make a lot of 3d characters and 3d models in general. I have so much 3d stuff I create, esp characters and then end up not using. I literally could make dozens of new games with all the 3d models I create on a daily basis. But that just isn't really my development style. I like to work on something until it feels right to me. Until it feels like it came from me. Until it feels like it has that "Snowconesolid" type feeling to it. Not sure if this makes sense to anyone. But it does to me. I can't really explain it. 

Anyway, I will probably end up making some kind of new horror game with my new characters and the donkey characters. I don't know yet. We will see how things go. But I am definitely in the mood for developing something new. I want to post a new "Making Of.." for my Ponytail character later on the blog. Which I will get to maybe later today or tomorrow. 

Other Updates:

I also plan on posting a new video update soon. Maybe a new "Cookin Games" episode over on my channel showing off the new prototype demo in action and just to kind of reconnect with everyone who follows this blog and my youtube channel. So keep an eye out for that here on my channel

I also kind of feel like adding new content on my youtube channel. Stuff that is not really like developer updates or anything. I want to expand and get into new stuff. Not just game making all the time. Like I said earlier, I have a ton of unused 3d characters and props. I also have so much of my older 3d stuff from other projects that I could reuse. I don't know for sure yet, but maybe I will start doing animated short series and posting those to my youtube channel as well? We will see. It depends on if I get the time. So I am not making any promises yet.

Final piece of news. I haven't really said anything about this until now and I am not sure how much I can say about it so I won't get into too much detail until later on. But I finally signed with a publisher. I signed my previous game "Potato Thriller" with a publisher and they have a major update planned for it and everything so I am eventually going to go back and work on the update for PT and go live with it on Steam eventually. That is all I will say for now. I'll keep posting more updates here on the blog though. 

Anyway, I have been keeping busy. I have a lot of new stuff that I am really looking forward to get working on and I can't share with all of you. Thanks everyone once again for all the support and stay awesome. More soon!