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!

Sneaking around hamburgers prototype demo

     Just uploaded a video showing off a quick prototype demo I created in the unity game engine. The demo shows my donkey character sneaking around large hamburgers from a third person perspective. Nothing really crazy or anything. Nothing in this video is final. This level/part of the demo won't even be in the final game if I decide to make a full game (which I probably will)

This is just a quick random little prototype that I put together while messing around in the unity engine. Thought I might as well record some of it and show it off in action. Also, here are some new screenshots I took while developing this. Just like what is shown in the video, these screen shots are only screen shots from the prototype demo. 

Honestly, I have no idea what I am even trying to create here but, I like it so far! 

More updates soon.

Something random, coming soon...

     Put together this really small teaser web demo for a really random game idea I am currently working on staring my "Bag Face" character.

Try it HERE

I am looking forward to showing more about this project in upcoming posts. As I just mentioned, its just a game I am randomly putting together.

Stay tuned for more updates soon!

In love with Unity's built in AI !!!

    Recently I started playing around with Unity's built in Navigation/ NavMesh tools so that I could learn a little bit more about AI behaviors such as pathfinding and so on. I must say, I am in love with the built in navigation the game engine provides. Its very smart, easy to use and opens up a ton of different possibilities for what the game engine could be used for.

For those of you who don't know what I am talking about check out the Unity website over here. Pretty much you can bring your characters, enemies, whatever you want in the game to life using Unity's AI.

In very little time I built my own playable prototype using the navigation tools to create an enemy gameobject that follows the player around while at the same time avoiding obstacles such as walls. Its a very simple basic AI behavior but its very effective and of course much more advanced AI behaviors could be created.

Check it out over here

So I am in love with this feature that the game engine provides. This is a very important feature for me and my games and probably most game developers out there. Creating good quality AI behaviors for my games characters and enemies has always been a bit of a challenge for me. AI in general is a subject of its own and could be very time consuming work. In my past games such as "Revolver Finger", "Forest Soup",  "Hide-n-Seek Winter" and other game projects I could never quite create good quality AI behaviors. I managed to create my own AI behaviors for enemies and such in the past but they were never really good AI behaviors. For example, the enemies in my forest soup game and revolver finger game would follow you around but also they wouldn't avoid obstacles, they would go through walls, they would not follow the player around accurately and sometimes even float above the ground when they aren't suppose to. The AI would even break sometimes and behave weird. Getting to the point, the AI behaviors I created for my past games were very poor quality and not professional.

However, now that I have the power of Unity's built-in navigation tools I can create much more believable AI behaviors, much more smarter AI behaviors and much much better and more professional quality AI behaviors. I am sure this will have a really positive impact on my future game projects. So I just really want to thank the devs behind the Unity game engine for making this feature available to everyone.

The AI/navigation tools use to only be a feature available to pro licensed users. However, a few recent builds of unity 4.xx ago this feature became available to users using the free version of unity and that is just awesome. Those of you who have been using unity might of already known about this feature for a while now and I did to, but I just recently started using it and am really impressed by what it could do.

Anyway that's about it. Once again a big thanks to the people behind the Unity game engine for giving users another pro feature for free. If you haven't played around with the Navigation tools yet I highly encourage you to it is a lot of fun.

I know this post isn't really about my next game project but I will have news on that down the road so stay tuned. Thanks for reading.

What I have been working on (Announcing my next game project!)

   

 Sorry for the lack of updates. I know it has been a couple weeks since my last post. Of course while I was away from the blog I have been working on something new. My next game project actually. If you follow my twitter you may have seen me post various screenshot over the past couple days.

I'm just going to get into it right away. I would like to announce "Escape Ocean Zero" 

Or at least that is what I call my new game project. Who knows I might change the name later down the road. Anyway the title is not important right now.

It is still very early in development so I won't get into too much details about the project right now (I don't have very much to show anyway) so I will save that for a later post.

I did however already create and animate the main character and even built a small simple prototype that you could play right now in your web browser (Its nothing fancy though.)

Play it here (Link)

So, in this game you run around and shoot stuff with your beach ball cannon. (A gun that shoots out beach balls) Off topic: I do believe that my game will be the first game ever to feature such a type of weapon.

The Beach Ball Cannon: A toy looking gun that fires beach balls...

You play as "Beach ball shooter", the main character of my next game. I actually created this guy a little over a week ago.

Anyway, going to leave off with this and keep the post short. I will have a lot more updates and info on my next project down the road. I am looking forward to showing off some of the actual levels and other characters, etc later on so stay tuned!

I do plan on rapidly developing this game and finishing it fast (maybe like a one month time frame or so). Of course I am also going to really polish it up as well. I already think this might be my best looking game so far (graphically)

Summer is coming up and I think my new project is perfect for it.

Silent Meow Demo released!

     Just as I promised yesterday, today I released the very first playable demo for "Almond-Hill : Silent Meow". My latest horror game project. This demo is actually the very beginning of the game which takes place in the Almond-Hill forest. You play as Leon Coffeebean who is equipped with only a flashlight and begin searching for your cat Almond. I do not want to say to much about the story because you will find out about it yourself as you play. The demo is pretty short but I hope you enjoy it and it keeps you wanting more after playing it. I created some pretty cool cinematics (I think they are cool at least) for this part of the game to tell the story in a much better way.

The menu screen you see below is just for the demo and the actual game menu will be much more polished for the final game which won't look anything like this.

Anyway, here is the first playable demo for Silent Meow. I hope you have fun. Also, any comments, thoughts/feedback about the game so far is welcome. Actually, your feedback can help me make it better.


Play Demo Here!


Keep in mind that this is only the opening of the game. After this part of the game, the gameplay will switch completely because the new main character Detective Pekoe will take lead role and the players will play as him from that point on. The Almond-Hill forest is only one location in the game so don't get the idea that the entire game will take place in a dark spooky foggy forest. There will be a variety of other locations in game.

Thats all for now. I can't wait to have more work done on the project and I look forward to posting more news and updates as I create it. So stay tuned!