Snowconesolid Productions V2 (Relaunch + Recap)

     Snowconeoslid Productions has been in limbo throughout most of 2021. Fast forward to the beginning of October and I finally started to post updates to my Twitter again. I've been busy throughout the year and have been away from the game dev scene for a while. But, that wasn't going to stop me from setting up to relaunch Snowconesolid Productions and return to game development full time. We are going to pick up where we last left off. Creating the Samer Hills game series. Today, I'm proud to announce that Snowconesolid Productions has successfully relaunched and is back in business.

     With new branding, an all-new boot-up logo, a new slogan, and just all-around new. You can basically call this "Snowconesolid Productions V2." It's the start of a new chapter for the studio and this blog post will cover the relaunch and give a recap of the announcements from this month. 

     First, let's get right into the relaunch and check out the new boot logo for Snowconesolid Productions.

Snowconesolid Productions is a low-budget independent studio bringing you daily spooks, scares, & screams fresh from Samer Hills. Creating short novelty horror games & 3D artwork.

https://snowconesolidproductions.com

Samer Hills

Samer Hills is an anthology series of one-off, spooky, self-contained, short, novelty horror-comedy games. Strange & creepy things happen here & you’re invited to experience them! Strange & creepy things happen here & you’re invited to experience them! Enter the ominous, enigmatic world of madness & explore this spooky anthology if you dare… Welcome to Samer Hills!

Website: https://snowconesolidproductions.com/samerhills/

Samer Hills blog post: http://snowconesolidwho.blogspot.com/2021/10/samer-hills.html

Warning - Health & Safety

Warning - Some games/software/applications or other pieces of media from Snowconesolid Productions may contain loud noises, flashing lights, and content that may not be suitable for everyone.

For more information visit:

https://snowconesolidproductions.com/healthsafety/

Samer Khatib Official Seal Of Quality

Look for the "Samer Official Seal Of Quality™" in all of my games! Samer Khatib games, made with love, passion and, magic.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And in case you missed it, leading up to the relaunch there were a few announcements regarding older games and other content from Snowconesolid Productions. Here's a full recap.

⭐️ First, The Samer Khatib Legacy Collection is now available for free and you can get it off itch here:

🔴[itch.io] https://snowconesolid.itch.io/the-samer-khatib-legacy-collection

⭐️ Second, Potato Thriller is now available for free across all platforms it's available on. This includes every version of the game as well. (Steam, itch, Google Play Store)

Add it to your library today!

🔴Potato Thriller Steamed Potato Edition

[Steam] https://store.steampowered.com/app/486650/Potato_Thriller/

🔴Potato Thriller Portable (Mobile Port - Android Only)

[Google Play Store] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.SnowconesolidProductionsSamerKhatibGames.PotatoThriller

🔴You can also get Potato Thriller Steam Version and Potato Thriller Classic Version on itch.io

[itch.io] https://snowconesolid.itch.io

⭐️ Next, Giraffe Town is now only $1.99 across all platforms forever. This includes Xbox, Steam, and itch.io.  Here are the links.

🔴[Xbox] https://www.xbox.com/en-us/games/store/Giraffe-Town/9NKBD9CV0PH6

🔴[Steam] https://store.steampowered.com/app/941480/Giraffe_Town/

🔴[itch.io] https://snowconesolid.itch.io/giraffetown

⭐️ Lastly, my most recent game, "The DeBug". This game has always been free, but I thought I would just throw it in here anyway since it's the perfect game that transitions the studio's focus onto what's to come next and that would be the Samer Hills series. 

🔴[Steam] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1437550/The_Debug/

🔴[itch.io] https://snowconesolid.itch.io/thedebug

⭐️ And finally, I'm very pleased to announce that all of my Unity game asset packages are now available for free. And yes, you can use these in your project commercially as well. So, get started on your Unity project today with these free-to-use original 3D assets from Snowconesolid Productions. Ranging from unique character models to silly props. You might find something useful for your project in these game-ready asset packages. Enjoy!

🔴Free Game-Ready Assets (Unity Asset Store)

https://assetstore.unity.com/publishers/12449

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This concludes the recap and relaunch of the studio. Snowconesolid Productions is excited to be back and we look forward to bringing the Samer Hills series to life and creating some spooky new content! Thank you for your support.

More soon.

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!

Working with landscapes for games

     Okay, I know what you are thinking. My last blog post was in the middle of December. I said that the plan was to get enough of my new game finished and post the greenlight campaign to Steam by the end the month. Obviously this did not happen then I just disappeared from the blog ever since.  And now I come back, in the middle of January and this is my first update for 2017!? Talking about landscapes!!! Are you kidding me!? What  great way to start off the new year right? Okay, joking aside, I have been working on my new game, I have been making a lot of progress and I will have a proper update blog post later on to talk about my plans for 2017, give more info on the new game project and so on. But for now, I want to talk about working with landscapes in a game project. 

   I was working on a new scene for the game that features a piece of land that is split down the middle. This can work as a river for example. I was happy with the results and I thought that I just had to share this on the blog. In games or just 3d modeling in general landscapes can be very tricky to work with. The Unity game engine does have its own terrain system which has a ton of great features and tools to help you create massive terrains for your game. Personally, I hate Unity's terrain system based on past experiences with it trying to create good landscapes for my games. It can be very time consuming to sculpt in main features like rivers, you end up with these giant empty terrains that look messy, constantly switching between brushes, adjusting sizes, erasing over areas constantly to try and get something looking right is frustrating to do within the Unity engine. You get all this unnecessary geometry/increase in poly count that could take a hit on your games performance, etc. I can go on and on about the many flaws the terrain system and tools the Unity engine bring. If you are a Unity developer and have used the terrain system or even if you used a terrain system in a different engine you might understand what I am talking about.  

     I figured, instead of throwing in this giant unnecessary piece of land into the game, why not just focus on the important features of the land that the player will actually get to explore? Before I continue, just know that this is more of a personal design preference and depending on the kind of game you are making, this might not be a proper solution for you. For example, if you are working on a huge open world game that's all based on terrain like MGSV for example, then you might want to actually sculpt and entire terrain. But for my case, I am working on a linear game that is broken down into smaller scenes with loading times in between. Anyway, I realized that just focusing on the important parts of the landscape such as rivers, canyons, etc is all I really need to create. I can save a ton of time and polygons by just putting in the parts that matter, and then make it feel seamless or give it that seamless illusion in post such as covering the area with fog, decorating it with trees, foliage and other props to make the land feel more believable and adjusting the camera clipping so that the player never sees past the edges of the world. There is no need to create a massive landscape that would take the player time to traverse. That would just be filler. Just cut straight to the main parts of the game. 

     So in the screenshots I am posting I am showing this grassy type land that is split down the middle which shows the under side of the earth. This can be used as a river, I can re-texture it as a canyon or really any kind of land-form that splits. This literally only took me about 5-10 mins to model and texture in blender. It is very low poly, it looks good in the Unity engine and just works for my game. Here is a breakdown of the mesh so that you can see and get a better understanding of how it was made. 

Here is the actual mesh inside of blender. The wireframe shows that it is actually very low in poly count. The loop-cuts/edges/vertices/faces (whatever it is you call them) are very clean and form the mesh very nicely. 

Here is the textured mesh. (Still inside blender) Everything was done in blender then exported to the Unity engine. About the textures - it can be very tricky to texture landscapes because they have all these different materials blending into them like dirt and grass and wet mud and rocks and so on. If you are using a terrain system like Unity's terrain system you can easily just paint and blend textures directly onto the terrain and make it look seamless. When you actually model a piece of land like this that has very few polygons, texturing and blending can be tricky to do. What I did for this is created two different materials. Grass and dirt. I applied these to the model on the appropriate uv coordinates. The trick to making everything blend together is within the mesh itself. It is very important to make the right amount of polygons for the model. Just focus on the silhouette of the landscape first. Model in the areas that are needed then you can apply you're textures. If the model looks right without the textures and you can visualize where the grass needs to be placed or where the mud needs to be placed, then texturing will be simple because you know you have the right amount of polygons and it will look fine.

The best part about this particular model is that it is modular. Meaning that I could just reuse this river/landscape split over and over again. I can extend the river and make one huge seamless formation. I can use it for different environment and so on. 

Here is a screenshot of just a simple lighting test done in blender. 

     It won't be perfect and that's okay. Keep in mind when working on games there are so many other things to take into consideration besides the graphical appearance. Poly count, performance, gameplay, etc. The landscape won't be perfect. Mine is not perfect. Up close you can see a very straight line where the grass and mud separate. The trick with games is, you can get away with this kind of stuff because most likely the player would never even need to get that close to notice anything. Plus as mentioned before, these small things will be hidden by other game elements like foliage, fog and so on. Don't focus on making something perfect. Just focus on making something look believable and acceptable then move on. Remember there is still a lot of other stuff that needs to be worked on in a game. So never dedicate too much time to a single piece. You can get away with these things. I was thinking about how older games like Zelda Ocarina of time handled landscapes when the hardware was so limited. I looked at a couple of screenshots from various parts of Hyrule and noticed that those landscapes seem to be modeled very similarly to how I modeled this river example I am showing above. It wasn't perfect at all, but it just works and it still felt like I was in this believable game world even with some of the obvious seam lines. 

ONLY $1 WOW!!!!!!

Need some 3d characters or environment props to quickly populate your Unity game but don't have the art skills or don't want to waste anytime making your own!?!? Look no further! As of today all of my asset packages that are available on the Unity Asset Store are $1 and less!

Beach props, rubber ducks, blocky looking characters, cartoon models, etc! Its all there! everything you need to make a game!!!! (Well not really, but you could use all of these for the art aspect of your game at least)

Check out my Unity Asset Packages here on the Asset Store: https://goo.gl/tctGqd

New Vlog series - "Cookin Games"

Hello everyone. For many years I have been posting updates about my game projects and random stuff here on my blog in written format. However, vlogging (video blogs) have been around for quite a while now and is a pretty popular format especially for youtubers and even gamers. 

I believe that people like visual stuff. We enjoy actually seeing and hearing about things more then just reading text silently in our heads (I know that I am definitely a more visual type person) so I decided to create a new video series called "Cookin Games" and all this is, is just me rambling on and talking about my projects and sometimes even off topic random stuff. Its kind of like a blog podcast with a visual element in the background. So as I commentate in the background, footage of something I created like a early prototype from a game or project I am working will  also be shown. So with these two very important elements (Visual) + (audio) I think a much more special experience is created then reading text off of a blog. 

My goal with this series is to showcase some of my newest work and discuss and share it with you guys and hopefully even entertain and interact with those of you who are watching or leave feedback in the comments section. 

This is something that I have been planning on doing for a while now. Becoming more active on my youtube channel. So I look forward to creating more dev vlog videos and sharing. As for this blog, I am not replacing this blog with my youtube channel. I will continue to post updates on here as well of course. :)

I have just uploaded the very first episode. You can check it out here:

I am not really much of a youtuber and don't really have high expectations or am aiming to build like a giant youtube channel with tons of subscribers. Thats not the case at all. I just thought this would be a fun way of better interacting and posting updates. Creating silly indie games is my main thing. Apologies for the constant "umms" and "ahhhs" and sometimes long pauses. Still new to the vlogging thing. Hopefully I will improve at it.

What happened to Potato Thriller for steam?

I did not forget about this. Actually, getting my recently greenlit game Potato Thriller released on Steam is my primary focus at the moment. I have been working on it. It is all I have been working on. I am working on an updated version for steam and adding extra content and stuff to it because I want the steam edition to be special and cool. I will have more updates on that in the next blog post. I actually recorded and created the very first episode of this new vlog series about a week before Potato Thriller was greenlit on steam. So I thought I would just upload this real quick to kick off the series then get back to work on PT. But I will have more updates about that in the next post. Thanks everyone once again and more soon to come.

New Asset pack: "Block People"

   
      My newest Unity asset pack "Block People" now available on the Unity Asset store.
"Block People" is a pack of simple 3d humanoid block shaped colorful toon styled characters. You can get this new asset pack and throw it into your Unity project today from the asset store over here:

Unity Asset Store - Block People

Package Info:
- 3 different blocky characters

- 12 Skin variations

- Male and Female genders of blocky characters

- Mobile and Desktop versions of all character prefabs (12 desktop prefabs and 12 Mobile prefabs, 24 prefabs total)

- 18 different animation poses.

- Mecanim ready animator controller. Easily add your own animations to the controller and watch Blocky People animate!

- Optimized compressed png texture maps (1024x1024)

- Example scene with all characters.

-Works with both 3D and 2D projects

-Mobile Ready!

-Unity 5 Ready!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Price Reductions

I have also reduced the price of "Crazy Cats Toon Pack" to $3 and "Super Rubber Duck Pack" to $2.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

     Its been a while since I put out  a new asset package on the unity asset store. Block People was a nice package to make to get back into it. If i'm not working on a game its probably on an asset pack. I don't know it depends. I have ideas for a lot of games and ideas for a lot of packages. So every now and then you might see me release a new package to the unity asset store. I will definitely always post an update when I do so here on the blog as I always do.

Thanks for reading. More updates soon.

Still making games? Yes. Blog update.

    Just wanted to post an update here on the blog to let everyone know that I am still alive and that yes I am still making games (*background* "Nobody cares, your games suck!")

Yes yes thank you everyone. It feels great to be back. Well I was never really gone. I just wasn't working on any new games...

Anyway! My last post was back in June, then I kinda just left and enjoyed summer break. So I think an update over here is long overdue. I have been working on a new game over the past few days. I don't really want to say to much about it at the moment cause i'm not really sure where I am going with this project. It is kind of like a random making it up as I go kinda game. But so far I like what I have! As you can see by the screenshot above, my next project is a little bit inspired off of something that might seem familiar to many gamers.

I don't really want to go on and on like a usual blog post. So I will keep this update short and just leave it here. Also, I am thinking about starting to post vlog updates about my games in the future. Maybe show some behind the scenes stuff, show some in game footage on camera, etc. I don't know yet. Stay tuned.  I will post more updates soon.

MORE DEV SCREEN SHOTS!

Awesome Space Guy Toon Pack Now Available On Unity Asset Store

     My new asset package "Awesome Space Guy Toon Pack" is now available on the Unity Asset Store! Package includes 5 colorful rigged, mecanim/animation ready low poly toon Space guy character models to use in your Unity project!

Get it here: http://u3d.as/gDS

Screens:

My next game project and the expanded and improved blog

Hello everyone!

Finally I am back. (I never left) but I mean I am back to developing my games. After releasing my first Android game "Revolver Finger" back in February I took a while off from developing anymore games to spend more time improving my skills and learning so I can produce much better quality games. Its been almost three months and I have greatly improved in many areas (mainly my 3d art skills but a lot of other areas as well such as game design). I have learned a whole lot during the time I was gone improving my skills such as new techniques, the proper ways to do certain things, etc. While I am still no professional, I learned how to do things in a professional way. So from now on I have set standards for myself and I promise to release the best quality games that I can. I guarantee that all my next game releases will be a hundred times better than any of my previous game releases from now on. I have matured a lot as a developer since I first started two years ago and will take all my next game projects much more seriously because I want to have great releases.

So I am now ready to make more games once again. Since we are still on the topic of developing games, I want to announce my next game project today. My next game project will be a horror game. This is something I have been planning for a while and now I am finally working on it. I have really high expectations and goals for this new horror game of mine and believe it will be my best release yet. There is really not much to say or show about it at this moment because it is still early. Once I get a good amount of work done on this project I will start to reveal it in future blog post so stay tuned.

By the way, have you noticed anything different with my blog? I recently had my blog set to private for the past two days while I worked on renovating/expanding it. Its more organized now and I added in a lot of new sections such as a section for my 3d art work, game trailers, etc. Just look for your self above in the tabs.

One of the coolest new things I recently added to my blog is the new "Welcome" page. This is a welcome page like no other. I actually created a very small platforming game for this page just for my blog. You can play this game directly in the blog to, so no need to go to a different website or download anything. It is a very simple platforming game that is only about 2 - 5 minuets long and it welcomes visitors and introduces me, the developer to them and it gives visitors a better idea of what this blog is all about. If you want to check it out just click on the new "Welcome!" tab above.

That is all I have to say for now. It feels good to be back working a new game and I hope to share more updates on it soon.

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.