I'm coming back...

And I'm bringing my new creations with me!

What? You thought I was dead and quit making awesome games?

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!

"Hide-n-Seek Winter" Coming Soon!

 
So, here is what I have been working on since mid November 2013:

As you see by the above title and teaser trailer, I would like to announce "Hide-n-Seek Winter". A toon game project I have been creating for a good period of time. Also known as the "secret game" I kept posting screenshots of on the unity forums and on my twitter.

I have been wanting to reveal this project for a while now and today I finally will. So lets get into the details of "Hide-n-Seek Winter"!

Story: Choco and his little sister Frosty are playing outside in the snow when suddenly an approaching car looses control of its breaks and crashes into the two kids. After being run over by the speeding vehicle, Choco suddenly finds himself standing in front of his house. Choco then receives a letter from his little sister Frosty. The letter asks Choco to search for his little sister because they are now playing "Hide and Seek", Frosty's favorite game.

This will be a short game that tells the story about a brother and his sister. 

Genre: Action/Adventure/Puzzle/Platformer
(with a mystery)

Style: Toon/Cel-shaded

Characters:

Choco: Main character of the game. Frosty's big brother.

Frosty: Choco's younger sister. Hide and seek is her favorite game to play.

In-game Screenshots:

 

  

 

Platforms: Windows, Mac, and Linux. (I might consider porting it to Android down the road, probably sometime after I originally release it on the mentioned platforms above.)

Dev:
As always, I am working on this game solo. I am making it with the Unity game engine, Unity Playmaker, and Blender3d just like all my previous projects. (my favorite tools of course).

So there you go. "Hide-n-Seek Winter" is my next game release coming real soon. It will be my first release of 2014.  I'll admit I have been working on it on and off. However, I am very motivated to finish it. Im very close to finishing it. As you could tell, I worked on it a lot before even revealing it. I plan on finishing and releasing it sometime in early February (which is sometime during this coming month. We are already near the end of January!)

My goal when I first started this project was to create an appealing "toon" graphic styled game. So far I think I have done a great job (of course I am biased towards my own work but hey, what indie dev isn't? :). Also, I am trying to tell a unique story through this game with very little dialog from the beginning of the game to the end. So that is another goal I am trying to achieve with this project.

As always, this will be another major step up in my games compared to my previous projects. I am working hard on this project and definitely working on it with a more serious approach, a more planned out approach then my past projects. I am aiming to deliver a well polished and good quality game. I am really excited about this one and hope you are too. I look forward to finishing it and releasing it and adding it to my list of completed game projects.

Stay tuned because more updates are coming down the road!

SideNote: I will probably start my own dev thread in the work in progress section of the unity forums real soon where I will post smaller updates more frequently than here on my blog. So you will also be able to check out my progress over there.

Thanks for reading. 

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.