My house!

     I really enjoy 3d modeling and I usually try to model something each day or every other day even when i'm not working on a game. It is something that I try to practice and improve daily and get a lot of pleasure out of whenever I see my finished model. A 3d object or character that I created out of pretty much nothing becomes a thing that just exists with many uses. It could be printed as a real world object or used in a game or animation and so on. So for me, creating 3d models feels satisfying and rewarding at the same time. 

     If you have been following my work or this blog then you probably know that I have been 3d modeling for years now and I have probably created thousands of different models at this point. Of course I don't come on here and post a blog about every single 3d model that I make, but every once in a while you make something and it turns out cool and you are just so proud of it so you feel like you just have to share it.

     In this case, I recently created a simple house model which eventually ended up being an entire little environment. Which I will be using for my next game. 

     I was going for that old small American neighborhood type home while at the same time using inspiration from the house models in Silent Hill for the original PlayStation. I know it's just a simple house model and there really isn't anything cool or artsy about it. I have modeled houses many times before also but, I don't know what it is about this one. I just really like how it came out. Also, really proud of the texture work here. I think the textures are what really give it the feel I was looking for. 

Anyway, it started as a simple house, then I started adding more and more to it like bushes, some land, a wooden fence.

   Then I added even more things like some stinky trash cans on the side of the house and made the land the house is sitting on look like someone just cut out that piece of earth and now it's floating in the sky.

     Finished it off by adding a chain fence and exporting it out to use in the Unity engine.

     It came out so cool. Nothing wrong with liking your own work and being proud of what you have created. I think I like it so much because it came out exactly how I envisioned it. This wasn't just a random idea or something created out of boredom. But it was a concept I visually pictured in my head a couple days ago while working on my current game project. I thought about what the scene was missing in the level I was working on and I thought about this. I normally don't think about environments or environment design too much in games so it's unusual for me to create a model like this. One that is a game prop, full of other small props and a full low poly game ready (small) environment. I normally create each item separate and export it out to the Unity engine and then build the levels out of the parts I made. Kind of like legos. But this is all one piece and all the textures are baked to texture maps instead of using multiple individual materials. 

It looks nice, it's low poly, it's optimized, it's game ready. I don't mean to brag, but uh.. I just gotta say, i'm pretty good at 3d art. 

Snowconesolid Minis

     A while back I had a number of small game ideas I wanted to create especially for mobile platforms. Over the past couple weekends I have been creating a new small mini game for Android devices in my free time. To keep this post short, i'll just cut to the point and not wright an entire novel like I usually do.

Anyway, I have plans for a number of small fun mini/micro games that I want to develop over a short period of time. Instead of spending months and months developing these 3rd person styled complicated adventure games like I usually do and as much as I love creating these types of games, I want to focus on much smaller scaled, fun simple games that I can create in a much shorter development time span.

As I mentioned above, I have been working on a small game project for Android over the weekends. I have been posting development screens on my twitter (I know, I should really start updating my blog more often)

Dev Screens:
Of course these are not from the final game. This is all mostly prototype stuff. But I like to share progress anyway and think that a blog post needs some images instead of being a wall of text.

I'll share more details about this project in a later blog post but for now here is some basic information about the game:

1.) It will be a game for mobile devices (Android platform)

2.) It will be an endless/infinite game (Actually, my first endless/infinite game project ever!)

3.) It will be a fun cool dynamic game with physics, amazing graphics and awesome controls!

4.) It's a game with flowers and bombs. 

5.) It will be my first Unity Pro created game project (Thats a big one! I better do this right.)

6.) I plan on finishing and releasing this game to the Google PlayStore sometime this month (March 2015) therefore, this game will be my first release of 2015! whoooooooo hoooooooo

Also, you can check out a playable prototype demo I made a couple weeks ago on the webplayers page or right over here. It's a pretty simple demo. A lot has changed since I made this prototype. The idea was just to try and create the logic behind an endless styled game (which was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be). That was the entire goal of creating the prototype in the link above. Once I got that down I started to just continue working off it and now my new project is near complete. 

I look forward sharing more progress on my upcoming small game project soon in future post. I also already have plans for what games I will create once I finish up this one and get it out the door. These next few months are going to be very exciting! 

spending more time

Hey everyone.

Once again, sorry for the lack of updates and blog posts on here. I have been spending a lot of time still training on 3d modeling. Actually, I have been spending even more time than usual training and improving my 3d modeling skills and that reason is because I have recently become a citizen member over at https://cgcookie.com/ which is a excellent site that teaches you professional 3d modeling, animation, concept art and what not. Cgcookie is a big network that is split up in many sites. Depending on what you want to learn there is a separate site for each subject. I have been spending all of my time on Blender cookie and unity cookie.

The tutorials they offer are great and give you a much better understanding on a subject. They have a lot of free tutorials on the site, but their best tutorials are their citizen tutorials. These are tutorials you can watch only if you are signed up as a citizen member. You do have to pay for a citizen membership, however its a really cheap price to pay. You just have to pay $10 bucks and then you have a citizen membership for 30 days. I think it is very well worth it because you can just download every single tutorial and resource they have to offer for citizen members before your 30 days is up. So, for anyone who wants to greatly expand their knowledge on something such as 3d modeling, game development with unity, concept art, etc I highly recommend checking out CGcookie, even if you dont want a citizen membership, their free tutorials are also fantastic.

Sorry for being a bit off topic. Im making it sound like the reason I am posting today is to advertise Cgcookie. The main reason I am here is to just let people (if anyone reads this blog, I know it gets a good amount of hits every once in a while) know that I have not abandoned the blog or game development or anything because I know its been pretty dead around here for a while. But hopefully soon, I will start revealing some of my upcoming projects. So stay tuned.

So yeah, I am still just kind of focusing on improving my 3d modeling skills. Now I have a ton of tutorials to watch through to further improve but I am still here.

I am planning on starting my next game project maybe sometime in May.

Whats next?

Hello everyone!

Its been a little over a week since I released "Revolver Finger" on the app store. Since then I decided to take a little break from working on my next game projects. What I want to do now is to really polish up my skills, mainly my 3d modeling/art work skills so I can really create much more professional/ polished looking games and other 3d content. Also, I am going to be focusing on learning more about professional game design.

I have already released many games up till now but all of those games where mainly for fun/ learning. So my goal now is learn in a more professional matter so I can create much better and serious game projects. I do not know when I will start working on my next game project, probably not for a while however, I do have plans for many more games. Some for pc and some for Android actually.

Already, for the past couple weeks or so I have been training and really improving my 3d modeling skills and gaining a much better understanding of how professional 3d models are created.

here is some of my recent work: its still not perfect of course but its a learning process and I feel I have greatly improved if you look at my past models and compare them to my more recent ones.

Work-out/fitness type character

Realistic soccer ball:

Edit: I guess I should also throw this in here as well. Its one of the best looking things I made so far.
A somewhat realistic human head sculpt. I plan on creating the entire body for this as well.

So that is my plan for a while. And, maybe every once in a while I will make small prototype/ demonstration projects and put them up just to show what improvements I made. I'll probably have them up in the "Prototype Projects" section of my blog found HERE. Or by clicking on the tab that says "Prototype Projects" at the top of the page.

Anyway, that's all for now. Hopefully in the future I will have much more impressive game projects both gameplay-wise and visually. In the meantime I hope you enjoy the games I have already created and try out my latest one "Revolver Finger" for android.