The Debug™ - Surprise New Game Release! Available Now!

Help an adorable dancing turtle fight off disease infected insects in this groovy arcade-styled adventure!

Nasty Woodensects are attacking the pond! Grab your can of Wood-Be-Gone™ spray and help this adorable dancing turtle take back his home! Protect him at all costs!

Available NOW for FREE: https://snowconesolid.itch.io/thedebug

More on Samer Khatib itch.io profile: https://snowconesolid.itch.io/

Game Features:

+ Full Controller Support
+ Full-Screen Mode (Press ALT+ENTER To toggle On/Off)
+ HD Resolution

Game Screenshots:

- The Debug™ - 

© 2020 Samer Khatib (Snowconesolid Productions) LLC

Game By Samer Khatib (Snowconesolid)

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!

My billboard!

     While I was designing a 3d billboard prop/model to use in my game projects, I got distracted and ended up creating a 3d billboard with my face on it called "A Regular Room". Inspired off of the real-life billboard Tommy Wiseau used to promote his movie "The Room". One of the greatest movies of all time.

blender cycles render.

     I am a big fan of The Room and Tommy Wiseau and not too long ago I watched James Franco's "The Disaster Artist" so, a lot of Tommy Wiseau related stuff is still fresh in my memory. This caused me to easily lose focus and get distracted from my real game project which I am currently developing. Look, I even animated the billboard!

     And posted a very short video on YouTube...

     I spent waaaay more time than I should of on this and I could of done much more important things but I have no regrets at all. It was a fun little art project that was spawned out of boredom and I am very proud of it. Time well spent! And now with that out of my system, I can focus working on my actual game projects again...

Ready for 2018!

     Happy New Year everyone! I wanted to do a quick blog update to talk about some plans I have for the year as well as show that I am still very much active as an independent game developer. And putting out the first blog post of 2018 is the best way to do that! Before I get into the actual update, I just want to say that doing this blog over the years and seeing how much I have evolved as a developer is something that I am personally very proud of. When I said first blog post of 2018, it dawned on me that I started this whole adventure into game design, 3d modeling, animation, keeping a dev blog, etc back years ago. About late 2010-ish. It's crazy to think about how time just flew by. I certainly didn't know if I would still even be doing this after all these years. But i'm still here. I'm still doing what I love doing and still following my dream. It's an amazing feeling and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I would also like to thank all of you who have joined me on this journey and followed my work, visited this blog or checked out some of my games. You all keep me motivated to keep going and I appreciate it so much. From encouraging comments to harsh critiques or just reaching out and saying hello. It all means the world to me. So thank you everyone. You are all awesome.

     I have a lot planned for this year and a lot that I want to get done. I didn't release any new games in 2017 but that is because I have been working hard on multiple new game projects. I said this in my last blog post - Not one new game, but many new games. 

     Putting out lots of new games. That is exactly the plan. I am very excited for 2018, this will be a big one for me personally and I really do have several new games in the works for this year as well as a ton of other ideas that I would like to develop. If you are interested in getting a small glimpse of whats to come, check out my last blog post for more information as well as a ton of screenshots from many of my new and upcoming games. 

     Other then that, I really don't have much to say at this time. Just a quick recap of what I said in the previous post. Mostly, I just wanted to show a sign of life on the blog because I know sometimes there is a long time gap between blog updates and it could sometimes seem like I have abandoned game development. However, that's not the case at all. I'm still here and i'm just getting started. 

I look forward to sharing updates and many new game releases down the road. There is a lot more to come. I wish you all an awesome 2018! 

Not one new game, MANY NEW GAMES! COMING SOON!

AAAaaaaahhhhHHHH!!!!!!!!!

Q: Woah! SAMER!? You're back!!! Did your new game come out!?!?!?!?!?!

A: No. It did not. I know I know. In my last blog post I said that the next time I post an update here on the blog, it will be an announcement for the official Steam page for my new game. But things just don't always worked out as planned okay man?

Q: So, there isn't a new game announced/coming out today!?! But your last blog post said...

A: No. Not today. No new game just yet. I know, I couldn't keep my promise from the last post but let me just expla.....

Q: Are you even still working on a new game or did you just stop creating games!?! 

A: Of course I still make games! Actually, that's what I'm here to talk about today! Lets get started :D

     Okay everyone, I have been away from the blog for a while and as mentioned above as well as my previous post, I was suppose to have my next Steam game/Steam page up for my next game the next time I posted, which was suppose to be this post right here but, as you can see, that didn't happen. I apologize for not being able to keep my promise and deliver but things happen and everything does not always go as planned. So, there has been a change of plans.

My biggest problem is that I can never just stay dedicated to one project at a time. I constantly find myself creating a ton of assets, art, mechanics for a game and then stop half way through. Then I start working on a completely different project and so on. It's like this never ending cycle of creating unfinished game projects for me. It is not something that I am proud of because what's the point if all of the projects aren't finished, what's the point if i'm actually not putting any new content out there? Right?

So do I still make games? Yes, I most certainly do. I haven't been working on A game project. I have been working on MANY game projects. To many multiple projects that I lost track of and it got out of hand and now, I am sitting on at least 5-7 maybe even 10 unfinished game projects and it is driving me crazy!

AAAAAAAAahhhhhhhhhh!!!!

     So here's the plan. I need to change my development process. Starting this month, I'm going to stop creating new games and focus on finishing those other games. I'm going to go through all of my other projects, organize them and work through them one by one and then start releasing one new game after the other.

Each game is different, some are shorter then others, some are longer, some have more plot while others focus on just gameplay, some are simpler games while some are more complex, etc. All the games vary greatly from each other. Hopefully, I will have the first one done and out by the end of this month. It will be a short toon styled game. That will be first and then i'll go from there. So, expect lots of new games from me in the coming months!

before I go, here's some WIP screens from the various game projects I'm working on:

Looks like some cool stuff right!?!

Yeah I know!

Okay bye!

UPDATE: Oct 27 2017

More new wip screenshots of new game projects in development.

Someday, I will finish all these!

UPDATE: November 2nd 2017

Even more screenshots from the above game!

This one will probably be finished and released first.

Keep an eye out for new blog update later in the month.

UPDATE: December 1st 2017

Okay,  I have good news and bad news.

The bad news is, that I still don't have a new game ready.

The good news however, is that I made a giraffe!

Look at it!

and here's some renders!

I will eventually have new games out I promise!

I really need to focus! I can't focus! :(