Not good at having an online presence

     As usual, here is another late overdue blog update. The last few posts I made have been art and game design/development related which is really the whole point of this blog I guess. I mean that's why I started this whole thing to begin with. To talk about game design and share my works of "art". This post is kind of different though. I've been doing this indie game developer thing for a while now. Years actually. And I don't know what it is, but I feel like I haven't been doing it right. The main thing especially is communicating. Sure, I have this blog that I post updates on every once in a while to share what i'm working on, or talk about video game design or just have some kind of presence online. But, it just doesn't seem to be really doing it. After releasing "Potato Thriller" (which was my first commercial game) I felt like I had to really go back and pursue this indie developer journey more seriously. Learn more, improve myself, build up my skills to produce better quality and more polished games and so on. And I have been doing that. It feels like I have been working on improving my game developing skills forever now.

     I haven't released anything at all since Potato Thriller as of this post because I have been spending so much time reinventing my skill set. But it isn't enough. Going back to the communication thing, I feel like I have been terrible at communicating. I have a YouTube channel, but I barely ever use it and when I do, I just post some random shitty weird animation I pieced together. 90% of the content on my YouTube channel makes absolutely no sense at all. I have two twitter accounts, my main one which I occasionally use and my "productions" account which I made to exclusively just self promote my work, my games, art and brand or whatever. You know, like those company/studio accounts that the big boys have to self promote their brand. I thought, "i'm a game developer, I make stuff, I should make an account to promote my own brand!" - I barely ever even look at that account.

     I don't know. I'm just not good at having an online presence. Not good at doing PR stuff or whatever. You know what I mean. And I see so many other people who are just so naturally good at having an online presence. It's like woah! These people are so much cooler than me. I don't know how people do it but, it's impressive for sure. I applaud those who can pull it off. It's hard to have an online presence and communicate with people. Like, it takes some real talent and skill to manage. Social media is hard! I'm not an old man or anything. Age 25 as of this post. But I am just so naturally bad at social media. But then again, maybe that's because I spend all of my time dedicated to working on my game projects. But sometimes it just makes you so out of touch man! Game developing. It's a lonely and cold thing.

      I'm not really sure where i'm going with this blog post. It's kind of all over the place. Just a rant about myself. But I do want to reinvent myself. Or at least try to be better at the whole online presence thing. I really need to reinvent how I communicate, use twitter, YouTube this blog. YouTube especially, that's a big one. It definitely is the best and most efficient way to share, get info out and communicate with your audience. I mean, I don't even have a freaking comments section on my blog. I get daily page views and visits but I don't know what people are saying. I can't interact with anyone on here. I mean I can. I can just add comments, but it's just different from a comments section on YouTube. So I really want to get into YouTube and start using that as my main platform of communicating, sharing updates and rants and whatever. And I know, I think I have said "I want to get into YouTube" like a hundred times on this blog throughout the years and never really follow through. I guess blogging is just easier and quicker than filming a video, editing and uploading. But I want to do it! I might go back and clean up my current YouTube channel or just start a new one entirely to have a fresh start. I would still post updates here on the blog as well of course.

     Anyway, sorry for the lengthy post that kept jumping around. Kind of confusing rant I suppose. It's different from what I normally talk about here on the blog. I'm not sure if this was even really worth posting. But I already typed it, so why not.

     As for new projects, as mentioned many times already in previous posts, I am working on multiple new game projects and I still believe that 2018 is going to be a great year. I have so much new content I want to get out there and my new games are a major step up from anything else I have ever developed. I'm excited to continue creating games and sharing them. My next game will probably be announced and have an official Steam store game page within the coming weeks. I'll definitely keep you guys posted!

My Ice Cream Truck!

     I spent two days working on this and... This is one of my favorite 3d models I have ever created. Now I know it looks a bit rough, a bit unprofessional and somewhat sloppy but that's why I love it so much. I had more fun creating this model more than any other 3d model I have ever made before because I allowed myself to just be creative with it. This was one of those "first instinct" type of works where I just went with whatever I came up with. No planning, no prototyping, no "oh these colors don't work with each other" or "this texture doesn't go here" or "maybe I remodel this more accurately to look more like a real ice cream truck" kind of deal.

None of that. The process was just "I like how this looks so i'm just going to stick with it and keep going" kind of deal. I just let myself have full creative freedom with this one and this is why I enjoyed working on this model and love how it turned out so much. It's kind of hard to explain, but what I mean is, as an artist (and i'm sure many others can relate to this) I always feel the need to get things looking just right. Looking "believable" to a certain extent. So, even though we always create art, it's like we always kind of put limits on ourselves our work flows. It's like we tell ourselves "no, this wouldn't go with the work, it wouldn't make sense, it wouldn't feel consistent". Sometimes as artist, we just have our own set of rules that we force ourselves to follow and in turn that kind of limits the creative process and creative freedom. I'm not sure if any of that made any sense. But, when it comes to creating art - something that should be fun and enjoyable, it sometimes just feels like an un-enjoyable more stressful experience because of how over critical we are of ourselves sometimes, or how sometimes we have high expectations for how a piece of art will turn out and in our head we imagine this perfect, epic, stunning amazing piece of work but then when we go to make it, the actual art work turns out looking nothing like how we originally wanted it to come out. Then we get even more stressed out because the work doesn't look exactly how we wanted and then what happens? That piece of art work just gets scrapped and never seen again. It never gets shared.

Artist need to stop being over critical of themselves. If you make something don't be afraid to put it out. Give yourself creative freedom, don't always try to be a perfectionist because that just makes the process feel stressful. Me personally, I feel like I learned an important lesson from creating this weird ice cream truck model. And that's to just go with first instincts sometimes. If you're having fun creating something, just keep going at it. Don't worry about technical aspects like matching colors based on color theory or getting something looking exactly like something else. Don't think about these things and just keep creating. Experiment with things outside your comfort zone.

     Anyway, I didn't mean to get off topic. This blog post is about my new ice cream truck that I made which I plan on using in one of my new upcoming games.

     The colorful rainbow texture is something I created by accident. I was just messing around in blender and trying some different things and man, you can create some crazy looking materials in there! I kept messing around until I eventually ended up with this colorful graffiti looking texture which I instantly loved and said "yes. This is what i'm going to go with". This texture is created procedurally. It's not just a random image texture that I got and slapped onto the model. It's something I was able to generate in blender through many experiments and it's actually not that hard to create a material like this within blender. Maybe later i'll do a short tutorial to show you guys how I ended up making this rainbow diarrhea.  Most of the materials you see on this model are procedural actually. The eyes and mouth, the ice cream and cone, the sound horns, and even the striped umbrella thing in the back. I was able to generate all of these all in blender alone without outside resources and that is very awesome.

     Here is a white version of the rainbow material. I was able to easily create this using the same rainbow material above. All I had to do was tweak a few settings. I think this white rainbow material seems more fitting for an ice cream truck. It feels like it fits more. but I personally like the original rainbow material I created first in the images above more. I will probably end up using the all rainbow material in the actual game I intend to use this model for.

    The above images are just quick blender renders which show other details such as this specular glossy look and bumpiness and smaller finer details because of the normals. I don't really care much for normal maps or over glossy models so these details likely won't appear on the in game model. I baked out the textures to a map to use in game and the game model of the ice cream truck will look more like this: 

     This again still isn't the final in game look. Once I set this model up in the unity engine, things like the lighting, color correction and other post fx that my game is using will give the truck a more polished look and to match the overall presentation and style of the game itself.

I also created a "rusty" version of this model, a third version which will also be used in my game somewhere.

     That's all for now. More updates soon. Maybe my next post will be about the actual game I am working on. We'll see how things go so keep checking back! I really like my rainbow ice cream truck though!