Feel of Atmosphere and progress update...

Gamedev and chill.....

Posting a quick update (mostly more screenshots) to share some new progress for my upcoming game "Samer Hills"

Early Lighting Test

The Atmosphere...

This game will be different from any of the other games I have created up to this point and creating the right atmosphere is very important. This new game will have many different themes to it such as dark, horror, etc. However, one very important theme, which also will serve as the main focus of the game is the idea of loneliness and isolation. 

Hello friend....

There won't actually be any real people/characters in the game to interact with other than the main character (PonyTail). I won't explain much of the story and the truth is that the plot to this game will be very open. One of my main goals with this game to leave a lot of room of individual interpretation. I want each player to have a different experience and attempt to understand the game in their own way. To better express the idea of loneliness and isolation, throughout the game you will find these wooden mannequins in different poses. The wooden mannequins are symbolic in many ways such as contributing to the theme of loneliness as well as symbolizing "fake" people. They don't move or do anything when the player tries interacting with them. This represents the idea of being ignored constantly.

What's up?

I am also aiming to creating a post-apocalyptic vibe in the game. So you will be placed in different scenarios that show this. Throughout most of the game you will notice really heavy grey fog everywhere, weird creatures and so on.

Look at that bug!

Foggy Forest

I don't want this post to be too long so I am going to end it here. I am making great progress on the game. It is all coming along nicely and I can't wait to share more of it down the road. Here is some more screenshots to end with. 

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! 

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!

Lana The Lemon

     Everyone. This is Lana the Lemon. My most recent 3d character and probably one of my personal favorites yet. I have not updated the artwork section here on my blog in a while. As a matter of fact that section is kind of outdated now as I have created many new characters and 3d stuff over time and have greatly improved. I just never felt like spending much time on updating that section as often anymore. Maybe I will eventually get around to that.

Anyway, I felt the need to post about this new character because of how weird it turned out. Something about this character that is very unique and completely different from any other character I have ever made. Not trying to brag about my work, I just really like this character.

Lana the Lemon will also be a new character in my upcoming horror game "Potato Thriller". Expect to encounter this hideous looking creature/lemon/beast soon.

The above image is the final model. But here is a quick breakdown of the model.

Modeling the character was easy. The challenging part was doing the texture work. I also ran into some issues with the rig for the character.

Wire frame:

Base Colors:

Ambient Occlusion: 

Detail Texturing/ Normal Map: (The eye lashes look terrible here)

Character Rigged and exported to the Unity Engine:

More updates soon. Thanks for reading.

Non-game apps, smaller ideas, android dev and rapid development

Hello once again everybody.

Today I want to talk a little bit about what I have been planning, what I have been working on and what types of projects I have coming up in the future.

More Android Dev:
I have been focusing on the android platform for the past couple game releases and plan to continue developing more and more apps and games for this platform. As I mentioned in a older blog post, the android platform and the mobile market have been a huge area of interest for me and I really enjoy creating applications that users can run off their favorite devices. Whether its their phones or tablets. It just feels nice to create something that runs on a portable device and can be taken anywhere with that user.

Another reason why I have recently been focusing on the android platform is because of the ease of access. Its different than web, pc, mac and linux platforms. What I mean is, once I create an app and publish it to the Google Play store or other app store, its really easy for tons of users to access it, download it and try it right away on their device. It feels more available to users. Having something published through the app store for mobile devices just seems more convenient than it would be if it was on a desktop type platform. There is a lot of other reasons why I am focusing on android now but I think I am starting to ramble now and I don't want to make this a long blog post. Bottom line is, I really love developing for the mobile platform now and see myself releasing many apps/games just for android in the future.

Non-Game Apps:
Speaking of apps and the mobile platform, recently I have been having a lot of ideas for a bunch of small apps I want to create. These new ideas are actually not necessarily game ideas but instead just various small interactive non game ideas. I have been creating games and only games for nearly four years now and I truly love doing it but I kind of want to start branching off from games and create non-game apps now. Just various ideas that I have that I think are really cool or would make really cool apps. I want to put the skills that I have acquired throughout these years creating games to use and try my hand in a different area of development.

What kind of non-game apps?
So I have a ton of ideas for a variety of non-game apps that I want to develop. There is really no specific way of explaining what type of app these ideas will be because these ideas vary from one another and each one could be described in its own way. But I guess that I could say that some of these non-game apps will be more like "toy apps", "novelty apps", "simulation apps", "random apps", "3d interactive apps", "interactive art", etc. They are just going to be these small, fun little ideas that I will pull out of my head and create in app form and then share with everyone.

What tools for development will you use?
Off course, I am going to continue using the unity game engine and blender3d. The same tools I have been using all these years. I think that the unity engine is a perfect tool for creating pretty much anything. Its not limited to games creation and already actually a lot of people have been using unity to also create non-game apps. Unity will always be my tool of choice when it comes to game development, app development, interactive development, etc.

On Rapid Development:
I have a lot of ideas and I want to pump out as much as I can in the fastest time. Through the experience and skills I have gained throughout these years creating games, 3d modeling, animating and publishing I have kind of adjusted, created my own workflow and became a fast efficient developer. Once you truly understand how to use the software and tools and spend years practicing everyday you naturally adjust, you learn how to do things faster and more professionally. I have also learned to down size projects. Keep them simple. They don't have to be some big complicated project that should take months to complete. They can be small and enjoyable. I never liked spending too much time working on one single project. I have done it before many times in the past with previous game projects. For example, "Hide-n-Seek Winter" one of my older games, was the biggest project I ever created so far. It took me four months of development to complete the entire game. And of course I am really proud of completing the game and finishing it and publishing it, part of me was really happy that it was finally over with. Four months of development on a single project is really long and a lot of work for one person. So now, I plan on spending as little time as possible creating my new games and apps. A week (7 days) will probably be the most. I plan on rapidly developing the app within a week time frame and publishing it the same week then moving onto the next idea. There might come a time where I release a new small app every week now and that is something I actually really look forward to doing.

Will you still create games?
No need to ask such a question. I will always create games. I love creating games and am very passionate about it. Just because I want to work on non game stuff now doesn't mean I won't make games anymore. It just means that I will be creating even more content plus games. I have a lot of non-game app ideas but also I have just as much or maybe even more small game ideas that I also want to create. Sometimes, I might even have moments where I am working on both a non-game app and a game app together at the same time!

So that is all for now. I am very very excited. I love developing and creating my ideas. Bring them to life and sharing them with the world. I look forward to showing what I have coming up and can't wait to get these ideas out there.

Thanks very much for reading. Stay tuned! More updates coming soon.