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Wednesday day before Thanksgiving ... By WoC | November 22, 2017 at 03:27 PM EST | No Comments

Watching Twitch game dev streams.Thinking of ways I can build the final version of the game with zero budget.Had an offer to cross promote on Kickstarter but the forums advise against it.There is a black Friday discount on my Catalina on TurboSquid.I advertised on a few You Tube gaming channels with link to my Kickstarter campaign.Attorneys on my floor are dragging very shady characters into the building and theywonder around pretending to be lost while scoping out offices to see what is in it.Not very happy about that but not sure if I can do anything about it.Worried about the net neutrality act that is threatened.Hopefully a stroke of luck will prevent this government destroying this country.Looks like this place is becoming more like Russia every day.

Shaky ... By WoC | November 19, 2017 at 01:12 PM EST | No Comments

Sending emails out to promote my Kickstarter campaign while the building is shaking with tremors. Nothing new to report really.I keep getting new views on my campaign's project video.Other than that just sending as many emails out as I can.I actually reached gmail's limit yesterday.I guess they stop you if you send too many out in a day.So for 24 hours I cant send email out from one of my gamail accounts ... but then I just switch over to another one HEH.Nothing can stop a determined spam bot with strong coffee as alley :-)

Milestones published ... By WoC | November 18, 2017 at 12:14 AM EST | No Comments

I just published the milestones for the final game project. Its on the "Milestones" page.

Offical start date for production for final version of game ... By WoC | November 17, 2017 at 08:17 PM EST | No Comments

My brother unboxing his new HP laptop ... By WoC | November 14, 2017 at 01:57 PM EST | No Comments

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Google analytics By WoC | November 12, 2017 at 11:51 AM EST | No Comments

Added Google analytics for my World of Clouds website and Kickstarter campaign for EfMS.

200 Billionaires ... By WoC | November 10, 2017 at 12:01 AM EST | No Comments

Once I am done with my mailing list I have the names and addresses of 200 billionaires.So I was thinking ... maybe I can sell that on my website or something.It took me 5 days to compile it really was a lot of work..... then the thought of 200 billionaires filing lawsuits against me popped into my head..... well maybe that is not a very good idea..... on the other hand it would make a great publicity stunt for my game ... :-)I told my brother he can just put legal fees on his credit card or something ...

62 By WoC | November 09, 2017 at 07:02 PM EST | No Comments

62 Letters to billionaires left to do and then its the next group.

Going after selected billionaires and angel investors ... By WoC | November 04, 2017 at 10:10 PM EDT | No Comments

Busy ... By WoC | November 04, 2017 at 05:18 AM EDT | No Comments

So really busy on my end looking for investors. I am working through Bloomberg's list of billionaires and millionaires and wrote letters to more than 60 of them so far. I am not even halfway through yet. Yes its a long shot but not laughable they have been known to respond. I am not asking them directly for money but for support. So that means they could pass my letters on to a friend or someone in their network who might be interested in investing. I found a list of venture capitalist companies which specifically invest in game startups. I finished them there were about 7 of them. Then I wrote letters and emailed a few other prominent CEO's of

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corporations who might be interested. I emailed an "incubator for gaming companies" group in Canada. They might not be interested in investing themselves but they help game startups. I found 2 or 3 websites that are crowdfunding for games specifically and I submitted online. I also applied for the Unreal Dev grant ( https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/unrealdevgrants ). That was roughly 2 weeks ago and they say on their site if your project is selected they will contact you in about 2 weeks. So haven't heard from them yet but lets wait and see what happens. The Unreal dev grants are between $5000 and $50000 on the average. Its money they give away with no strings attached. You can take the money and they want nothing in return. A very good deal if you get it :-) On a smaller scale I emailed friends and just told them about my Kickstarter campaign and I had 200 little cards printed up that I hand out everywhere in the neighborhood. For example I wandered into a gaming store last night and just handed out cards to everyone in there. They didn't even throw me out. I also wrote a letter to the city of Bellingham and asked them if they would be interested in investing in a game project where I would be hiring locally. No response yet. That's all for now. I also watch the news closely and if a name pops up I Google it and see if its worthwhile making contact and promoting the game project. I am considering revisiting this Kickstarter campaign this weekend to see if I can improve it but I might have a freelance visual effects rush job I have to crank out over the weekend. Another company bailed on the project and they need someone who can fix everything and who can actually do the work :-) You all have a great weekend. Its snowing buckets outside here in Bellingham. First snow of the winter. Tow trucks are parked in lines along the roads everywhere eager for the first slip and sliders :-)

First snow of the 2017 winter ... By WoC | November 03, 2017 at 02:09 AM EDT | No Comments

Its 11pm here in Bellingham and the first snow this winter is falling outside.

Angel investors next ... By WoC | October 24, 2017 at 09:27 PM EDT | No Comments

Completed my crowdfunding sites.Kickstarter, Indiegogo and Gofundme.Going for the Angel investors next.

Something nice I woke up to this morning :-) By WoC | October 23, 2017 at 12:55 PM EDT | No Comments

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ROG laptop taking a break ... By WoC | October 22, 2017 at 04:27 PM EDT | No Comments

Since I am now in a fundraising stage I decided to retire my ROG laptop for a while. I Dont need its power for mostly document work and its resting. I am launching the 4th crowdfunding campaign today and then hitting the angle investors.

Kickstarter and Indiegogo ... By WoC | October 21, 2017 at 12:10 PM EDT | No Comments

I did some remodeling on my Clikfoot and EfMS websites and I think its o.k. for now.I am going to build my crowdfunding websites now and we will see how that goes.I don't have much faith in crowdfunding sites but lets see if I get lucky this time.

Friday By WoC | October 20, 2017 at 08:02 PM EDT | No Comments

Fundraising is in full swing.I revamped the EfMS web page.I added an investor page to the corporate website www.clikfoot.com.Did all my laundry that is 2 weeks overdue.Busy putting Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns together.

Teaser is done fundraising begins ... By WoC | October 16, 2017 at 07:00 AM EDT | No Comments

Teaser is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUtaipgGZAQFirst big meeting that kicks off fundraising phase. 4 AM.

Right at the end ... By WoC | October 13, 2017 at 09:38 PM EDT | No Comments

I am on the very last things to do on the teaser.Dealing with a swarm of birds.I decided to build one bird as super simple skeletal mesh.Then I use the same animation for each bird but offset it slightly.Its working.I am using a sequencer node in Blueprint and have 62 pins so far and its working fine.I think the max is 250.We will see.Then all I want to do after the birds is 2 small fixes and a few extra touches.Then trailer is done.I should launch it on You Tube by tomorrow night.Hoping.

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Modeling birds for teaser trailer 1 ... By WoC | October 11, 2017 at 05:43 AM EDT | No Comments

Animation coming along ... By WoC | October 06, 2017 at 06:36 AM EDT | No Comments

Just saw Blade Runner 2049 .... By WoC | October 06, 2017 at 05:05 AM EDT | No Comments

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In Imax.Its been a very, very, very long time since I felt the way I felt when I walked out of movie theater.So relieved that someone can still make films. :-)

Welcome to rope animation ... By WoC | October 03, 2017 at 05:20 PM EDT | No Comments

Didn't know rigging and animating a rope would be so tricky. Of course there are better ways but for importing into Unreal reasons I chose to do a simple bone armature for rigging and automatic weights. That is fine but I found that I had to break the one long rope up into pieces in order to move the bones and make the rope move the way I wanted it to. Working but its tedious.

Kicking off on Roy's animation for teaser ... By WoC | October 02, 2017 at 11:45 PM EDT | No Comments

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Particles ... By WoC | October 02, 2017 at 06:39 PM EDT | No Comments

figured out my particles rendering issues.It was stuttering a lot during Sequencer rendering.I added a GPU component to my CPU particles and that solved the problem.Its rendering out fine now.I decided on a design for my title / logo for my first teaser trailer and will be building that inside Unreal 4 and probably render that out with Sequencer too.Other than that my bus this morning had the wrong route number displayed I told the driver and she changed it."Oh that is what is going on" she mumbled LOL

Cascade ... By WoC | September 30, 2017 at 03:50 PM EDT | No Comments

Learning Cascade in Unreal 4 today.Have to create smoke.

Compile test ... By WoC | September 28, 2017 at 07:38 PM EDT | No Comments

Did another compile test with all the detail added in level 1 for the trailer including the Catalina model with its 316 individual parts.Worked fine.It took a lot longer to compile the full game this time and I noticed it was mostly the new materials I added on level for trailer and the plane's parts.But compiling worked fine.

Tuesday and finishing up on Stone Hunter ship ... By WoC | September 26, 2017 at 09:52 PM EDT | No Comments

Putting last details in for the Stone Hunter ship. Looking good. I am confident that I will have the trailer done by mid next week.

Monday ... By WoC | September 25, 2017 at 12:24 PM EDT | No Comments

I am building the rest of the Stone Hunter ship. Leaving a narrow "rim" of faces around the front edge to allow a little blue light to "bleed".

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Sunday ... working on Stone Hunter ships ... By WoC | September 24, 2017 at 12:10 PM EDT | No Comments

Mountains are completed.I discovered something interesting about Sequencer in Unreal 4 and that is that when you do a complete build, you should have the main subject with most geometry and complex shadows in the viewer frame. If you do not and you render out of Sequencer for some reason you get "twitching" of the shadows. Upping the lightmap resolution helps but its definitely better to "view" the problem parts in the viewer while doing the build. I suspect its some kind of cache issue. I am happy with the way the mountains are looking right now. I had to simplify one of the narrow vertical crystal like mountains in the background because it was drawing too much attention to itself.For the darker further away mountain cliffs across the abyss I found what works best for texturing and that is that I use the same texture as the mountain that the Station is sitting on but I make it darker and tile it in bigger chunks. So technically they are "closer" to the camera because the texture is "closer" but it doesn't read that way. I had a funny feeling that might work and it did :-) In that way I can avoid using texture bombing and get around the "tiling" effect that you would see if you are looking at a mountain cliff further away and that covers a larger area in the distance. I had my brother shoot another animation reference for me for the character's walk yesterday. We just did it here in the building. I simplified the walk to a great extend to save time on animating. I am working on the Stone Hunter ships for the trailer now. I went back to sketching a concept design real quick.

Mill Mountain completed ... By WoC | September 20, 2017 at 11:26 AM EDT | No Comments

I had a few issues yesterday but I found solutions to all of them.First problem I had with doing a test render for the trailer was twitching shadows.I upped to lightmap resolution on the ledge's sand parts from 512 to 1024 and that took care of that problem.I also had huge temp files on my C drive and that affected my RAM so I cleaned all that up.Have to remember to keep and eye on that :-)Other issues were with getting the right brightness and texture on the frame left side mountain of the Mill Station. I discovered that if you just put one large mountain object in there the sunlight on it doesn't give the desired result. So I broke it up into two objects so the lightmap resolution could be more effective. Also just to get the shape of it right with smoothing and sculpting in Blender was tricky. When sculpting large objects like mountain cliffs I find those pointy features to be very annoying. It happens because you don't want to subdivide too much and then you get rogue vertices that sticks out and makes a sharp point in the mesh. It then looks "modeled" so you have to go back and smooth that point out. I also discovered that tangent space can only be calculated in Blender with triangles and square polys so you have to be careful when you subdivide after you triangulated to again triangulate the new subdivisions otherwise you get and export error. I first though it was a bug in Blender 2.79 but it wasn't. One thing I still have to figure out is how to match the smoothing in Blender with the imported result in U4. Somehow there seems to be less detail in the smoothing once inside U4. I am sure its just a setting I still have to figure out.Other than that I have to smaller rocks on the ledge surrounding the plane left to do on the Mill Station's side of the cliffs then its onward to the surrounding mountains. I also knocked down the lightmap resolution of the far away mountains to 4. Since they are practically silhouettes and its very foggy so there is no need for high lightmap resolutions.

Monday ... By WoC | September 18, 2017 at 09:25 AM EDT | No Comments

Two weeks left before I want to be done with my trailer.I find that works best for Mill Mountain is one big piece at the top, the ledge of gravel all as one piece and one big bottom piece.The subdividing the faces closest to the walking area for the character or playable area.Further up or down I keep the faces fewer and bigger.Smoothing on.Lightmap resolution set at 512 and seemed to be holding up.I pumped up the normal maps to make the texture more crispy.I installed Blender 2.79 and seems to work fine with my older scripts.

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Approach to mountains ... By WoC | September 17, 2017 at 03:50 PM EDT | No Comments

1. Knocked down the lightmap resolution for the moss on the station walls to 8.2. Moss do not cast shadows.3. The very bottom parts of the Mill Station's lightmap resolution knocked down to 4. That is the lowest a lightmap resolution can go on a static mesh.4. The ledge gravel is a closed mesh, fairly simple geometry smoothed.5. The texture of the gravel is tiled and fixed in world space.6. Lightmap resolution for gravel is 512.7. The vertical parts of the cliffs I am building with chunks with front faces only subdivided and smoothed. The back ends I keep really basic and flat faces.

Mill's wheel is in ... By WoC | September 12, 2017 at 12:29 PM EDT | No Comments

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Mill Station coming along ... By WoC | September 10, 2017 at 05:41 AM EDT | No Comments

Its my birthday today ... By WoC | September 08, 2017 at 04:32 AM EDT | No Comments

Will celebrate with cake, free Starbucks drink and lots of gaming. :-)

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Boolean issues ... By WoC | September 07, 2017 at 08:00 PM EDT | No Comments

I thought it would be fast to use a Boolean to punch holes into the Mill Station in Blender and that worked fine but ran into UV overlapping issues.Looks like you have to make sure that every vertices along the edges are connected.Now it works fine.

Crash on ROG and began modeling on the Mill station ... By WoC | September 06, 2017 at 01:22 AM EDT | No Comments

I had a problem with my battery meter on my ROG laptop yesterday.The machine shut off unexpectedly while my game project was open in the Unreal Editor.It came back up but my user preferences were set back to default. I had to reset the colors of my folders inside my project and I had to delete empty folders that popped back up. Some meshes were scattered around outside of their folders too. So I had some Q&A and cleanup work to do today. I did a build of every level again. It all seems to be back in place.The cleaner in the building was concerned that I used up all the toilet paper in the restrooms over the weekend. I guess he keeps a very good record on his toilet paper rolls. I rendered another version of the trailer out just to see how the plane renders out in its final state. No issues. Unreal did a fantastic job. Busy now on the Mill station itself.

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Plane is now done. Onward with rest of trailer. 3 Weeks I hope. By WoC | September 05, 2017 at 05:16 AM EDT | No Comments

Still building shaders and materials of plane inside U4 ... By WoC | September 03, 2017 at 02:00 PM EDT | No Comments

Its going well but very slow.Looks like its going to take 3 days to build them inside Unreal 4.I am deleting some of the smaller parts since the camera is pretty far away in the trailer shot and the audience will never see it.Watching the gameplay of Witcher 3 Wild Hunt.

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Building shaders of plane ... By WoC | August 31, 2017 at 08:56 PM EDT | No Comments

Going well just slow.My neighbor's office door was left standing wide open and I pointed it out to the management. They closed it.I met another game dev person who moved in on the same floor my office is at.Interesting :-)Watched some more Witcher 3 gameplay.

Building the materials and shaders for Cat inside unreal 4 ... By WoC | August 30, 2017 at 10:29 PM EDT | No Comments

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Imported Cat into Unreal and rendered a test trailer shot ... By WoC | August 30, 2017 at 05:58 PM EDT | No Comments

Next step towards completion of the trailer ... By WoC | August 29, 2017 at 12:04 AM EDT | No Comments

Is to position the Cat on the edge of the mountain cliff before I start breaking it up to make it a crashed plane.It took 30 minutes for the Catalina to import into Unreal 4 but it did import and no issues.

Setting course for the last leg. Finishing the trailer ... By WoC | August 28, 2017 at 04:13 PM EDT | No Comments

Pasted an Excel spreadsheet up against the wall. Schedule is worked out for every step towards the completion of the trailer.

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Finally done with the Catalina model ... By WoC | August 26, 2017 at 08:41 PM EDT | No Comments

Getting it ready for upload to my website now and adding PayPal button :-)

Rear wheels texturing done ... By WoC | August 26, 2017 at 12:19 PM EDT | No Comments

Front wheel greased ... By WoC | August 25, 2017 at 01:58 PM EDT | No Comments

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Bump maps, specular map updates and dirt passes going in ... By WoC | August 25, 2017 at 06:43 AM EDT | No Comments

Have three things left to do on Catalina ... By WoC | August 24, 2017 at 11:31 AM EDT | No Comments

1. Dirt pass. 2. Bump maps. 3. Updated specular maps with dirt added.Then its done.Looking forward to it.I just did a pack test in Blender and it seems to work. Packed all the external image fils into Blender script so I can back the whole project up in one script.

Added lights almost done ... By WoC | August 24, 2017 at 05:01 AM EDT | No Comments

I added lights.I have the following left to do:1. Dirt pass. 2. Bump maps. 3. Updated specular maps with dirt added. 4. Threads on tires.

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