And now, it's time to welcome "Spooky" season! My favorite time of the year. I'm really looking forward to the next coming months and excited to be working on games again. What will October bring? Keep checking back for more news & updates to find out!
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!
I mentioned in a previous announcement that the game was near complete and my estimated release date was going to be at the end of March. March is over now and I never released the game. I was running through the game one last time to clean up any missed bugs and so on.
Anyway, the game is fully completed now and ready to be released. I plan on releasing this game sometime tomorrow, April 1st, 2016. Probably sometime in the afternoon. It will become available over at itch.io and maybe other indie gaming sites in the future. What bout steam brah? This game hasn't even been up for a full month yet on Steam so it might be awhile before it gets green-lit. I have a finished game and I want to get it out, so I am not exactly waiting for it to be green-lit before I release it. If it does get green-lit down the road that would be awesome. Thank you to all of you who have voted Yes for this game and are interested in it. In the future maybe Potato Thriller will make the Greenlight. Until then, the game will be available on other sites. I will keep you all updated if that happens.
It has been a while since I posted here on the blog. As usual, sorry for the lack of updates. I did mention that I would be posting more about major updates about my Almond-Hill project here on the blog though and today I talk about some major changes I am making to the project and also reveal the first teaser trailer of the game.
I usually post updates about the game in my work in progress thread on the unity forums here and often they are smaller updates about the game. If you have seen my posts on the unity forums then you might have already seen the trailer I put up a little earlier. Also, if you have been following my WIP thread on the unity forums you may have noticed that I am constantly changing the game and keep adding and removing from it whatever I see fits the game better. If you haven't checked out my recent posts on my WIP thread that's alright because I will be talking about all these changes and what not in this blog entry.
Lets start off with the first trailer for the game for those who have not seen it yet.
It is a very short trailer and it does not show anything at all really. I would love to show some more later on and I will have other trailers up as soon as I get more done in the project. I hope for now that this trailer gets you excited.
Today, what I really want to discuss is the changes I have been making to the game. After creating so many different things for the game like characters, systems such as traps and what not I ended up deciding not including them in the actual game at all.
Removing unnecessary systems from gameplay
Those of you who have seen my updates in my WIP thread are familiar with the various systems I came up with. I have made a traps system for capturing ghosts, a potions systems for using different abilities, a coin system for buying things in game and other things. I even have some videos up demonstrating these systems and they work great. Having all these cool systems would of greatly contributed to the gameplay and made this a very unique horror game. So why have I decided to remove all of them? Its because I think that in the long run, the final game would be much better without them. That is exactly my goal with this project. I want to have a great game at the end. I said this many times before but this game project is different from all my previous ones. This one is serious. I am considering this my first "professional" game project (even though I am still no professional)
Removing and replacing characters
Ok this next one is important. When I first started this project I revealed the character Leon Coffeebean. I said he would be the main character for this new Almond Hill game. After doing a lot of thinking and planning I decided that Leon is no longer going to be the main character. There is going to be a new main character and I will be revealing and talking more about him soon once I finish him. If you watched the trailer I just put up you saw some gameplay with Leon Coffeebean. I am not taking Leon Coffeebean out of the game. As a matter of fact he is a very important part of the game and its storyline. You do get to play as Leon in the game but not the entire game. Leon still serves as the same character, the grandson of Grams Coffeebean. Sent out to search for their missing cat named Almond. Aside from replacing Leon with a new main character, I also decided to take out those ghost characters I revealed. They will no longer be in the game because they serve no purpose to the storyline.
Changed Storyline:
I will admit, when I first started this project I had a vision for what I was going to do with it but it was not very clear. I did not fully know how I wanted this game to play out. I just started making all of these things like systems, characters, etc and said that they were going to be part of the game somehow. As I began to actually develop the game I started realizing more and more how I wanted the game to play out. So I started changing everything I was going to do with my original vision for the game. Now I know exactly how the entire game will play out and what I want it to be. I have greatly modified the storyline to fit the changes I have made. It is still about searching for your missing cat named Almond but, it is also about other things. There is a lot more to the plot of the game now. If its one thing I want this game to be great for it would be for its storyline and characters (ok thats two things). The storyline is pretty crazy now and it has many twists. I think it will truly separate this game from other horror games making it very unique.
Gameplay:
I said many things about gameplay. I know how the levels will play out like and I can't really explain the gameplay to well because gameplay might change throughout the game often. I think having a variety of different gameplay will make this a much more unique experience. So I can't really say much but I hope to soon show you what I mean in the future.
Playable demo coming soon
Finally, I just want to say that I will be putting up the very beginning of Almond Hill Silent Meow real soon as a playable demo. I don't have an exact date for when I will be putting it up, but definitely sometime soon. I hope you look forward to it.
I am having a great time creating this game and am very excited about it.
Please check out my WIP thread on the unity forums here and my blog for more news and updates.
