What have I been working on? March Update

     Hello everyone, as usual it has been weeks since my last blog post and a new post is long overdue so here is a quick update of what I have been up to lately. Quick short answer, all I have been doing is just creating. Constantly creating. Juggling different projects and making weird stuff. Not necessarily games. But anything from some pointless YouTube videos to 3d art to unity engine related work. I'm never really working on just one thing. Although I don't update daily here on the blog, I frequently share what I am doing on my twitter and pretty much all the stuff I am going to show here is stuff I already shared on twitter over the past couple days. 

News on the next Steam Game?

     Just a quick recap - the last "big" thing I was working on and talking about was my next game project "Samer Hills" which is still up over for voting on Steam GreenLight (That's right, as of this post Valve's GreenLight program is still up for all you indie developers out there who want to try your luck and submit your game for voting if Direct isn't really your thing) 

     Kind of getting off topic. I will talk more about GreenLight/Direct down the road and post updates sharing my thoughts once Valve shares some more information. As for my current GreenLight game, "Samer Hills" currently still has not been greenlit and it's kind of just sitting there at the moment. Anything is still possible and I do believe that there is still time for games to pass GreenLight so don't get discouraged if you are interested. Anyway, I will definitely share updates if game doesn't pass in time and the GreenLight system is replaced with Valve's new Direct program. 

Taking break.

     After creating an initial build of some of the early gameplay for "Samer Hills", creating the demo trailer, and posting the GreenLight campaign, I took a break away from that project. I'v been working on that for months now and i'm sure this is a common trait between all indie devs, but you just get tired and bored of constantly working on the same project everyday. Sometimes you just lose motivation or want to do something else. This is what happened to me. My problem is that I always tend to want to make development complicated. I have this vision for a game project but then I end up wanting to create a larger world with different characters and multiple unique environments etc. Very similar to how I developed "Potato Thriller" which surprisingly had a little over 90 unity scenes and although not everyone liked that game, I spent so much time and put in a lot of effort into creating it. I always appreciate the feedback I am given for my work but sometimes I hear the word "team" thrown around and although I have said this before, I just want to remind people that I am just one guy. I don't have a team or a studio or anything. Just one solo developer with a passion for creating games and sometimes missing the point that projects don't need to be over complicated. 

  Anyway, I am starting to just rant at this point and get off track. But I'm just taking a short break away from "Samer Hills" so that I could focus on some other smaller sized projects which I will get into more detail in future posts. I'm not saying that I am canceling "Samer Hills" so don't get the wrong idea. I will eventually go back to it, finish it and release as I already put in so much work and created most of the assets for the game. I'll keep the blog updated. 

What new projects are coming?

     At the moment, I am planning on working on a smaller scale game. Something I can release in a shorter development period than one of my larger game projects such as "Samer Hills". I will share more info in the future, but I might definitely have a new game out before I go back to working on "Samer Hills". Other projects I have been working on are just some misc 3d work and videos. I plan on bringing new content to my YouTube channel such as tutorials for 3d modeling and using the unity game engine, etc. Maybe some short animations. I also want to start doing some more development vlogs and hopefully have a new "Making Of" coming soon of a new character model I have been working on. 

That's about it for now. I will be sharing more in upcoming posts. In the meantime here is some screenshots of my most recent work. Some weird, some bad and some is just random. More to come!

Estimated release date? This Month.

Hello everyone. Wanted to post a quick update for the game. I am currently finalizing "Potato Thriller"  Putting the last bits together and everything and then doing a quick polish job. Currently, I am aiming on finishing and having the entire game released before the end of this month.

As of this post, my game hasn't even been posted to Steam Greenlight for a full month. You might be thinking "He just recently posted this and now he is saying that it is almost complete?".

Actually, I have been working on this game since October 2015. So it has been a couple months. Although it is a pretty silly, random game horror game that many people might not take seriously - I did actually put in a lot of work into creating this. This isn't a game that I just did overnight. Anyway, I wanted to wait until I had just the right amount completed before I posted it to Steam.

I posted this game to Steam Greenlight on March 6th (my birthday). Obviously it still did not get greenlit. Of course I wasn't expecting it to get greenlit in one month. This is my first time posting something to steam and I did read prior that it could take a while for games to get greenlit on steam and in some cases even years. I read about this one developer who said that after about 4 or so years, he finally was informed that his game was greenlit and ready to get published on Steam. And I get it. I understand that the process can take a while. New games are posted to Steam daily. Deciding what gets Greenlit and what does not is probably a very time consuming process.

Anyway, since I am nearly complete with this project, my goal is to have the entire game finished and released before the end of this month. No estimated release date yet but, definitely sometime before the end of March. Greenlit on Steam or not. I will have this game finished and released real soon. While we wait for the Greenlight on Steam, I will have the game available (once completed) on sites like itch.io and maybe a couple others. I'll get more into this later on when I am preparing for release.

Anyway, this is all for now. Thanks for reading. Thank you for those of you who have voted for the game so far on Steam and more updates coming soon. Real soon. Peace.

If interested (and this will probably be the last time I post this link) go vote for the game on steam over here:

http://steamcommunity.com/PotatoThriller

Snowconesolid Minis

     A while back I had a number of small game ideas I wanted to create especially for mobile platforms. Over the past couple weekends I have been creating a new small mini game for Android devices in my free time. To keep this post short, i'll just cut to the point and not wright an entire novel like I usually do.

Anyway, I have plans for a number of small fun mini/micro games that I want to develop over a short period of time. Instead of spending months and months developing these 3rd person styled complicated adventure games like I usually do and as much as I love creating these types of games, I want to focus on much smaller scaled, fun simple games that I can create in a much shorter development time span.

As I mentioned above, I have been working on a small game project for Android over the weekends. I have been posting development screens on my twitter (I know, I should really start updating my blog more often)

Dev Screens:
Of course these are not from the final game. This is all mostly prototype stuff. But I like to share progress anyway and think that a blog post needs some images instead of being a wall of text.

I'll share more details about this project in a later blog post but for now here is some basic information about the game:

1.) It will be a game for mobile devices (Android platform)

2.) It will be an endless/infinite game (Actually, my first endless/infinite game project ever!)

3.) It will be a fun cool dynamic game with physics, amazing graphics and awesome controls!

4.) It's a game with flowers and bombs. 

5.) It will be my first Unity Pro created game project (Thats a big one! I better do this right.)

6.) I plan on finishing and releasing this game to the Google PlayStore sometime this month (March 2015) therefore, this game will be my first release of 2015! whoooooooo hoooooooo

Also, you can check out a playable prototype demo I made a couple weeks ago on the webplayers page or right over here. It's a pretty simple demo. A lot has changed since I made this prototype. The idea was just to try and create the logic behind an endless styled game (which was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be). That was the entire goal of creating the prototype in the link above. Once I got that down I started to just continue working off it and now my new project is near complete. 

I look forward sharing more progress on my upcoming small game project soon in future post. I also already have plans for what games I will create once I finish up this one and get it out the door. These next few months are going to be very exciting! 

"Hide-n-Seek Winter" is finally finished, Releases tomorrow!

      Wow, I can't believe we are already in March! Sorry for the lack of updates here. There was nothing really else for me to show, or I guess I didn't really want to show any more screens or anything because I have been spending the rest of time since my last post finishing up the game, adding a little extra polish, working out some features I forgot to add like a save system, etc.

So I haven't updated in a couple days but I have been working on it non-stop. Or whenever I had a chance to.

As you might know from my previous updates, I originally planned on releasing this game early February and then that eventually led to releasing it at the end of February, and I promised to release it before the end of February. But as usual, things never go as planned. I had run into some issues, I needed to add some extra features and I needed to work on the final game. Also, I haven't had as much free time to work on this project for the past couple days because of life and other non game dev stuff. So I decided I needed a little extra time, just a little, to really finalize my game because there is no point in releasing a broken or unfinished game right?

Anyway, I have good news. Finally, after taking the extra time I needed, I finally finished the game. It feels great! This has been probably my biggest and most serious game project yet and I ran into a lot of frustration while building it, for the most part it was smooth though. But finally, its done and I feel really good about it.

you see? Preparing the final builds as we speak. :)

So its done, when are you going to release it?

Actually in a couple of hours. I will release the game March 6th (Tomorrow) sometime in the afternoon or so. Like my previous projects, I am releasing this 100% free. It will be available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Why don't you just release it now if its done?

I'm going to do some final test to make sure everything is working right, (even though I know it is since I tested so many times in frustration) but I have to double check. Also, the main reason I decided to release it tomorrow is because tomorrow is also my birthday (going to be 21, starting to feel old mold). So I want to give you guys a present on my birthday. :)

Ok thats all I have for now. I am really excited and looking forward to finally releasing my new toon game. I will probably post a couple of updates frequently with other stuff up until I release it tomorrow. So stay tuned!

(In case you are wondering, yes this is the update I just posted in my works in progress thread on the unity forums here: Link) So I copied and pasted my own update. But this is an important update for my game so I decided to post here on the blog as well.

I am really looking forward to releasing my game tomorrow! see you soon!