What I have been up to in 2019...

     Hey everyone! I wasn't really expecting to come back to this dev blog in 2019 and make another blog post again. I have been away from blogging for so long. I decided to just quit doing it because it felt like a waste of time and I wanted to focus all my energy on just making the games instead of talking about them. But you know what? I was wrong. Blogging isn't a waste of time. I built this thing up over the years and it's a great way to keep everyone updated in detail on what I have been up to. I don't do youtube vlogs or really keep track of my "evolution" as a game dev really well. And posting tweets on Twitter about progress and whatnot can't really fill that role. Also, I have a lot of history on here and this blog kind of fills as my personal archive and journey as a game developer. I still can't believe I started this way back in 2011. I have learned so much and changed a lot as a game developer and 3d artist over the years. It's crazy to look back at my older posts, artwork, and games.

     Anyway, let me just get right into it and give you guys an update on what I have been up to all this time. First, I would like to say that I am not dead. I'm still very alive and very obsessed with game development. More obsessed with it now than when I first started.

     I know that 2019 has been a pretty dry year for me so far. At the beginning of the year, I launched my official website and ported my most recent game "Giraffe Town" to Xbox. That's it. Other than that, I kinda disappeared. By the way, Giraffe Town originally came out October last year. It's pretty old now for being called "my most recent game". That was the last game I made. So, it's been almost a full year now and I haven't even hinted at a new game. Nothing new on my Youtube channel and I haven't been very active on Twitter lately. (But then again, I have a special rule for myself when it comes to Twitter. And that is to remain secretive and not post screenshots, footage, teasers, early wips, dev images or anything from my new game project(s) until they are finished. I don't like to share any of that stuff until after a project is finished or released. I'm just weird like that.)

     So what gives? Why haven't I done anything this year? Did I just get bored with game development and decide to quit? Did I run out of ideas? Did I get a new career as a hot male model instead? No to all of those things. I know 2019 has been a pretty slow, unexciting and dry year for "Snowconesolid Productions" aka the "greatest independent game dev of all space and time" so far but, that doesn't mean it has been an unproductive one. As a matter of fact, I feel like this has been one of my most productive years ever so far. But a different kind of productive. Not the kind of productivity I can show publicly in an end product like a new game release. It's more like, "behind the scenes" or I guess "under the hood" kind of stuff.

     No, I haven't been spending all this time just working on one new game or my next "big idea". Instead, I have been working on all areas of myself as a game developer and an independent studio. I feel that I have made it pretty far as a small-time game developer from when I first started years ago. This is something that's actually my career now and I would like it to remain so for as long as possible because I sincerely love creating games and have so much respect for the art form that is video games. I'm really fortunate and grateful to be where I am today and have the opportunities to do what I love doing. So, if I want to continue to pursue this thing, I wanna do it right. While I'm proud of my previous game, "Giraffe Town" and it was a major step up from my first game on Steam, it still showed a lot of my weaknesses as a game developer and designer. Giraffe Town showed a lot of flaws and many areas that I could still improve in. I've really started to take my career as a game developer more seriously after that game. Giraffe Town was a big milestone and a major turning point for me.

     Instead of reusing assets or mechanics I have made for that game and just quickly cranking out another new slippery controlled game in a shorter time to ride off of that momentum, I decided to take a step back and rethink how I approach making games and completely just rebuild myself as a game developer. I've said before many times that quality and polish are super important to me. I don't want to be seen as another hobbyist developer that just threw a game together and put it on Steam but, instead, more of a professional who knows what they are doing. I really want to deliver cool experiences and games that are enjoyed. I'm trying to step things up and I think rebuilding myself (I am a machine) is a good first step.

     So, what have I been doing this year so far? I have been planning and becoming more organized. I have been learning and re-learning, researching and experimenting with new approaches to game design, game techniques, optimization, improving my skills, trying to create my own unique 3d art style (I think I have found it). I have been building a pipeline for my own style of production instead of just being all over the place so that I actually have a good format to work off of so that I'm not always confused and lost about what I was doing. I have notepads full of ideas I want to create and I have started several new game projects. I created a ton of brand new 3d art such as new characters, environments, and props that I have never shared and so much more. So, pretty much, I have just been setting myself up for the future and getting ready to really operate like a game developer. I haven't been thinking about my next game (that will come in time), but instead, I've been thinking about where I want to be and what I want to accomplish as a game developer. Just really putting in a lot of thought into everything, how I can accomplish creating an idea a certain way and so on. I have so much cool stuff planned and things that I'm working on. I really feel like I have come a long way and really improved a lot since creating Giraffe Town and hopefully, that will really show in my next projects. I've really invested a lot of time into rebuilding myself and I think it's all worth it if it means my creative output will result in better quality games.

     So, although I might have been a little quiet this year with nothing new to show so far, I promise you will hear a lot from me down the road. I haven't abandoned game development and I'm really excited to eventually start putting out new content. If you read this far, thanks so much for sticking around and listening to a crazy person ramble on. This has been a super long post and I normally don't like spending time typing up big blogs that are just all talk like this but, I feel like I had to post an update. From this point on, I probably won't ever make another blog post like this again though. And, I still probably won't post updates here very frequently. Just going to keep hammering away on the actual projects from now.

Before I go.
I shared these screens on Twitter a while back, but here they are again in case you didn't see them. A couple examples of some of my newer 3d work and what you can expect my next game projects to look like. I'm very proud of this 3d style. If I had to describe it, I would say that it's a weird mix of cartoony/stylized and early uncanny "realistic" computer graphics. Think early 2000's (maybe a little earlier) 3d game promotional art. The renders of promotional art you would find for Super Mario 64 or Banjo Kazooie or Donkey Kong for example. I loved that kind of look and that's really what I'm kind of trying to go for.

Alright, that's all for now. Thanks, everyone who still visits and reads the blog!

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!