Been playing around with different ways of making trees.  For anyone who's familiar with 3D, the lighting on these trees is actually done by editing the normals.  So, I made a mesh that's basically a ball of branches (like a tri-cross except a little more complex), then I edited the normals to all face the same direction.  I duplicate the ball a bunch of times to make a tree shape, then rotate the Z axis to simulate shading.  Since the normals are all pointing up, the branches in the ball are all shaded the same, and rotating it increases shading on the whole thing.

My facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/LucasPaakh/

These trees look a bit nicer.  I think with a bit of editing on the texture they'll work really well.  The best part is the leaves are all made up of the same mesh, so hopefully I can do big walls of leaves kind of like how the rococo painters made their landscapes: http://www.artble.com/imgs/2/6/6/933850/the_swing.jpg  I like how it's kind of just a big sea of foliage and you can't really tell where the trees and the ground separate from eachother.

Here's my facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LucasPaakh/

This worked out fairly well. It's actually very similar to how I did the leaves in WandS 2. Big leafy orbs just stacked on top of each other (except 3D). These are basically cubes that I subdivided once (so, they had their corners flattened into a ballish shape), then I pulled triangles out of the sides. At first I just shaded each triangle to be one really big leaf, but after playing around with the transparency on the edges a bit I think I could make the individual leaves a bit smaller. Maybe give them a maple leaf shape.

I've been playing around in Unity for a while, and I've been having lots of fun making 3D assets and playing with their terrain tools.  I've always really loved making 3D art on the computer, so I've been considering making a William and Sly game in unity.  Technically speaking, it should be very easy to do.  They alreay have pretty much everything I need programmed in already, so all I'd have to do is make the art.

I made a facebook profile a while back and have been posting updates there once in a while.  You can follow me there for more updates.  I'll try to post here more often too. :)

Yeah...

EDIT: Due to some miracle, the title of this post on the FP looks very wrong.  All around success, I say.

Well, I just launched my latest game "Blast Magus" and it'll probably be my last flash game.  Might even be my last game - I haven't been working on anything for a long time, really.  Unity has been fun to play around with, though, so maybe I'll do something in there.  I definately won't be doing anything profit-seeking at this point, though, so maybe I can just have some fun and not really think too hard about it.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/663492

EDIT: How do I make the fancy link?

A lot of my motivation in the past came from an emptying bank account, and now that I don't have some fear like that driving me to finish something, I'm not sure what exactly will get me motivated, haha.  I've been spending a lot of time drawing lately and I'm thinking it might be nice to go find some company to work for.  I really like having a regular paycheck, and it's nice to come home after work and just forget about work completely.  I was never able to do that before when I was supposrting myself with flash games.  I always felt the clock ticking down on me.

Anyway, not trying to be depressing, but if someone is reading this in the distant future trying to figure out what happened to me, I'm probably just relaxing on a couch somewhere, not worrying about what project I'm going to make next, haha.  I guess we'll see what happens.

Haha, that heading looks like spam.  Anyway, does anyone else think the weird chicken dog thing from The Last Guardian looks like the final boss from Chrono Trigger?  In case you forgot the WTF final boss:

http://www.nonfictiongaming.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/chronoboss.jpg

...and here's the chicken dog from The Last Guardian:

http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/558974d969beddec6cf6781f-1200-706/bi_tout_lastguardian_16x9_v1_1.png

Is this something from Japanese mythology or something?

P.s. inb4 "IT DOESN'T LOOK ANYTHING ALIKE" - well I'm talking about the chicken footed dog part of it, not the exact character design.

I'd like a program that does animation without vectors - like animating in photoshop.  I know Toon Boom can do this, but I don't want to spend any money.  Anyone know of a good open source project or free program worth learning where I could make a complete animation with rasters?

Hey guys,

I made a facebook page to replace my old blog that kept going down.  If you'd like to keep up do date with stuff you can follow me on there. :)

https://www.facebook.com/Particlasm

Hey guys.

So, I'm looking for a good 2D game engine that will minimize the amount of coding I have to do to make top-down and platforming style tile based games.  I've found Cocos2D (which is free, sooo...awesome!) but are there other options that are better, easier, or more robust?  I haven't looked at Cocos too deeply yet.  I'm just throwing out feelers, here.  I'm looking to make a desktop game in the near future and flash just isn't my cup of tea any more...

EDIT: I'm downloading Game Maker right now too. :)