If you'd rather listen to this in a format more akin to a really freakin' long fireside chat (you don't have to watch, there's only one time that something that isn't just me talking is on camera, and it's just a ghetto phone-VR headset that I have, it's not anything significant, so feel free to listen to it in the background or something if you choose), feel free to check out the link to that here: https://youtu.be/-qbssWWORp4 though there are a few things in here that I don't talk about on the video and vice-versa. Also, if you wish to message me, please don't do it on Gamejolt or Reddit, I don't check those super frequently, please do it either on that video, my Twitter (twitter.com/Qimsar), Instagram (@ qillerqimsar), Discord (@ coolguy123#3508), my Twitch (twitch.tv/cromwellsimon) or Snapchat (@ flyinglaptop).

Speaking of Reddit though, as a very random request, could somebody help me find out this TOMT post from Reddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/comments/dbiwg3/tomt_instagram_story_9182019_or_9192019_what_did/

The video was recorded on 12/2/2019 while this post was written on 12/6/2019, so if there are some things that don't line up from the video to the post, it might be because of the date.

Howdy, long time no see, fellas. Last time I was on this website was a little under a year ago when I was still making very few and far between updates to some of my cute going-ons (apparently, that’s not a real phrase. I use ‘going-ons’ as shorthand for ‘things have been going on’) and responding to a freakin’ ton of comments. However, I haven’t touched this site any since then which maybe left a few people wondering what’s been up. Did I end up actually doing that internship with Konami? Was I hired by somebody? Did I quit game development? Did I start another project? Did I die?

No-ish (it was kinda downgraded (or upgraded depending on who you asked) to just a trip, not an internship), no (but I’ve had a lot of ‘job offers’), no (but I’ve been thinking about it), yes, and no are my answers to each of those respectively. I’ll explain more on each of them apart from the ‘did I die’ in a bit. If you like to read, then this post should be a blast for you because I have a whole lot to say. If there’s something in here that I don’t talk about that any of you all wanted me to talk about, unless if I explicitly state why I don’t talk about it, odds are that I literally just forgot and I’m willing to talk about it to whoever asks about it and I can edit this post to include whatever else.

So after PT for PC had been taken down, I had said that I would go about finishing it so that my dad could play it, and I actually continued work on it up until about late October of 2018. I ended up getting it as close as possible to completion as I could get it (even adding VR despite it being pointless because it'd never be experienced by anybody else and I don't have a particularly great VR setup myself), stopping short at

fully finishing the 7th loop, being able to look through the peephole,

multi-language subtitles, and adding the cockroaches, which ironically seemed to be the bane of all the different PT remakers (and I think that was it). However, despite me showing my dad some of the ropes around first person games with the Portal games and Superhot just 3 months ago, in the end, my dad has yet to end up playing my PT remake at the time of me writing this for reasons that I won't get into lol

After the start of my senior year of high school though, I kind of just stopped worrying about game development and I began living my life, which is obviously something that not everybody has access to, but if you're in school and you're reading this, please make the most of your time in school, you won't regret it, trust me. At the start of high school, I tried focusing a lot on using Blender, but after a while, my interest waned and the only game development-related thing I really did was take a Java programming class which was ez pz and I also took a stupidly-basic (for me at least, I had to help a lot of people in that class) game development class that my school had started offering just that year (which included things like Scratch, Paint 3D, Construct 2, and the Fusion Engine). Apart from that though, my senior year of high school was, apart from a few very well documented low-points (don't ask lol), fantastic. I had finished taking Accutane (hardcore acne medication) at about the time that PT for PC had come out, and the combination of that with PT for PC being so successful for me, I had gained a freakin’ crap-ton of self-confidence for my senior year, and my reputation in my school was already alright prior to my senior year, but man-oh-man, senior year of LaRue County High School was something else entirely, it was beautiful for me and if any of my school peers are reading this, I want to let you all know that I love all of y’all for making that such a great school year (for the vast majority of the time at least) for me.

Interestingly enough though, for me not being a particularly social time at the time of PT for PC’s release (which I blame for me dealing with some balls-to-the-wall acne at the time and, despite my good reputation at my school, I was picked on sometimes for "looking like a satellite view of Hawaii" or "the top of a pepperoni pizza" at school which, looking back at it now, I laugh at, but holy crap some people were brutal to me lol), I think bar-none my most favorite thing about PT for PC existing was all the people that I got to talk to, whether in the Gamejolt comments (on which I had successfully responded to nearly every single comment up until late 2018), on Twitter (@ Qimsar), Instagram (@ qillerqimsar), Snapchat (@ flyinglaptop (probably a really easy way to DOX me lol)), Discord (@ coolguy123#3508), Twitch (twitch.tv/cromwellsimon (also, I have good upload speed now, rejoice! I plan on restarting my Pro Game Dev Guy series just b/c my old streams were very, very low quality)), Steam (I won't put my Steam here b/c I only add people that I know. If you want to add me on Steam, hmu on any of the things above and let me know that you want to add me and I'll be happy to add a fella), or meeting the folks at Konami in Japan, and I sometimes wish I could relive all the people that I spoke to at the time of that coming out, as it brought a lot of enjoyment to me. There were a lot of comments that stuck with me, from people telling me that they took their first step in game development after hearing about PT for PC to people asking me some of the dumbest technical support questions like how to open a .zip file and why PT for PC was running at a framerate lower than 60FPS on their R7 240 at 1080p, and I loved responding to all of them, but one comment in particular that really stuck with me was a comment from a man by the name of agaputo on Gamejolt (which you can actually read if you so desire, it's on the post called "Oof?") who basically told me that he felt that I was riding off of the work of (specifically using the term “backstabbing”) SmoggyChips and everyone else I had credited on PT for PC because without their contribution to the PT community datamining the assets, I wouldn’t be where I’m at right now. I started a conversation with him, and he ended up telling me that one of his good friends, had almost killed himself because of how ridiculously competitive the entire tech-based (games included) job market is, and that I should be hugely grateful for where I’m at right now. Here’s the last paragraph or so of his conversation with me:

We live in a global, Internet connected, terribly competitive world these days. Eastman and Laird, creators of the self published Ninja Turtles series, explained recently how it would be downright impossible for them today to triumph the way they did back in the day. Miyamoto himself even said that there's no way he would be hired at Nintendo with the hiring standards and filters the company has today. Criticising the way the selection process discards unmeasurable talents and bases itself on quantitative information rather than a real proof of skills and talents.

I don't want to overwhelm anyone with sob stories or stuff like that. what i want to convey is that there are lots of people who want to work in the field, some of them have tried for decades now, but today it is harder than ever, so a chance, ANY chance at all, is a blessing.

So I guess that what I mean is that I'm glad you edited your post to thank the people who helped you, and that you took the time to clarify stuff. Take the chance that you've been given, but never, never EVER forget to thank the people who support you and the one that may do in the future. And please don't forget how unusual it is for a chance like this to show up. Please, be super thankful to all that's fair in the universe for it. Most people never even have a chance at all.

That is pretty much all I have to say.

360Fov responded to the entire conversation we had saying:

You obviously care a lot about what the community thinks - that says a lot about your character (in a good way). Your youth is evident, but that's a good thing - you will look back at this time as a maturing process - how to handle things, even how to learn to ignore things (even if it seems like a bad choice - but you can't please everybody).

Stay honest, determined and don't be too hard on yourself regardless of what people say - their words, come from their perspective - and their perspective isn't necessarily fully-informed, so they might make accusations that simply aren't true - that's not your problem all the time. Don't burn yourself out emotionally, it will cost you time and energy and slow your career-progress down - equally, it will work in your favour to stay open and reachable by the community.

I believe regardless of how far you'll go, judging by how invested you are in your roots, that you'll come out as an indie success story - and all success stories have some troubles, and good people get vilified (because everybody is used to people being selfish or manipulative - again, that's perspective and it's not your fault or problem to deal with - just deal with being the best version of yourself and you'll be all good!).

Best of luck to you.

And all of that hit me really hard, and honestly, despite my lack of involvement with game development throughout my senior year of high school, I thought about that conversation all the time, but despite how harsh they felt at the time, I grew to appreciate them. Before that appreciation though, I tried to justify myself by thinking that “well, it’s not a great idea to be a full-stack developer in game development. In almost all game dev environments, there are dedicated programmers, modelers, texturers, sound designers, animators, etc., so if the role that I intended to fill was ‘programmer,’ then I succeeded in filling that role, right? So what’s the issue?” And yeah, almost all the time, a programmer won’t also be doing other things, and being a full-stack developer isn’t a particularly worthwhile investment of time in game development because it ends up making things take so much longer, but I dunno, he was right, SmoggyChips and everyone else were never contacted by Konami, just me. Yeah, I was the guy who went through and put everything together which was time-consuming on its own but had the other fellas not datamined those assets, I wouldn’t be where I’m at now, so yeah, I did feel pretty guilty about that. And so because of that guilt, I felt the need to do something to possibly prove myself, to prove that I’m not just a random jack-all beginner programmer who just got lucky, and so hence, Elevator: Unity.

Elevator: Unity is a remake (yeah, I know, another remake) of the classic Garry’s Mod map, Elevator: Source made by (as they were formerly known as) sunabouzu, jimonions, sam, and zoki from PixelTail Games. In Elevator: Unity, in addition to adding VR support and making it for Unity, I also remake every nearly every single asset in the entire game (there are a few that I didn’t make, it’s not much but I’ll talk about it some more in a few paragraphs). Before I go any further, the reason why I’m choosing to do yet another remake instead of an original project is because I honestly believe that remaking something is a fantastic way to go about learning how to do something, and I wanted to teach myself about game art. I used PT for PC as a way to teach me how to program and how to use Unreal Engine 4, and I’m using Elevator: Unity as a way to teach me about Blender, 3D modeling, texturing, some sculpting, animating, and learning more Unity and C#. In fact, prior to Elevator: Unity being in Unity, it was actually originally going to be in CryEngine because I already had an okay-ish amount of experience in Unity (~60 hours in Unity versus my, like, 2 to 4 hours on CryEngine or whatever), and I wanted to do CryEngine despite all of the negative things I’ve heard about working with it because I felt it would be a good excuse to learn Lua. However, when I first started using CryEngine, I found out that Lua was being deprecated and being replaced for C#. However, “deprecated” doesn’t necessarily mean “fully removed,” so I figured that I might as well just deal with whatever features Lua would be missing and I would continue my work on CryEngine. Then, however, I found out that CryEngine doesn’t support PBR in the traditional sense (it uses Specular instead of Metallic) which would’ve meant that I would have to redo all of my textures and I figured "well, screw that!" and I switched to Unity.

The reason why I chose to do a remake of Elevator: Source in particular was because if anybody reading this has played the map themselves, would know that there is a freakin’ ton of variety in the assets throughout the game. One minute you’re in an

underground dungeon or a robot factory, and the next minute you’re in a noir detective office or Jurassic Park.

I figured that the extreme variety in everything would make for a pretty good challenge for me and that, surely, by the end of the project, which I started on 8/7/2019 (everything related to this project is in 2019, I just like adding the year at the end for anybody reading in the future. Or the past). As of me writing this particular paragraph on 12/6/2019, holy moly I think I seriously underestimated how much of a challenge this ridiculous amount of variety would be for one person. Using the Steam version of Blender to track my time, I started the project with only about 20 hours on Blender. As of now, it’s up to 530 hours, and that doesn’t include all the times I opened Blender not from Steam (i.e. through opening a .blend file through the Windows file explorer which tends to happen quite frequently), which I’m sure could easily add another 20 hours minimum. Another reason why I chose this game was because, given that I already knew a lot about programming from PT for PC, me needing to learn about programming wouldn’t be quite as necessary as it was, so fortunately for me, the gameplay in this game is dead-simple. The gameplay is literally just an elevator.

One thing, however, that’s been on my mind a lot as of recent weeks after seeing how much time I’ve spent on this over the past nearly four months is that I feel like I’m wasting a ton of time for a game that’s not that long. This game is only about 45 minutes long from start to end, and PT for PC, which I didn’t do any asset creation for but nonetheless, was about 2-and-a-half hours long on your first playthrough (although I loved how that PT for PC video that showed up on the front of all the articles with the picture of the jacked-up pre-textured baby in the thumbnail was only like 45 minutes long b/c the dude that recorded it sped through the game lol. He told me he played through it one time prior to recording the game (except for the last hallway) to just see if the game was legit and that I wasn’t lying, but holy crap dude, you couldn’t, like, slow down a bit lol? No hate though, I just thought that was funny), yet I only spent about 150 or 160 hours on it at time of v0.9.2. That number has probably gone up to about 200-ish (give or take) since I finished adding the animation, final cutscene, VR, and whatever else. Regardless, 530 hours (at the moment, that number is certain to grow) for a 45 minute game (which, it might even take longer to read this post than it does to finish Elevator: Unity. The video most certainly does, you can finish the entire game 4 times over in the time it takes to watch that fireside chat video at 1x speed) versus 150 hours for a 2-and-a-half hour game, and man I kept feeling really disappointed in myself. And I know that was part of the challenge I gave for myself, the variety-to-time ratio is stupidly high in Elevator: Source, but I kept feeling like it wasn’t worth the time I was putting into it. In addition to that, I also figure this probably won’t be as popular as PT for PC was, and while popularity isn’t as big of a deal as the learning experience for me, not gonna lie, I really liked the popularity for, as I stated before, being able to meet so many new people. So with my dealio with this project probably not being as worthwhile to people despite me putting way more time into it, I am going to release the entire project file for Elevator: Unity and with every single asset that I made (literally everything except for 1. Sounds, 2. Anything pertaining to Alpha textures or any obvious photographs, and 3. Human character assets), I will declare to be CC0 (idk if that requires me to go through a registration thing or something with Creative Commons, but I don't feel like it so just let it be known that I'm personally considering my assets to be CC0) so anybody can use anything I made for personal or commercial use if they desire (also, please be sure not to use my reference images for models, those are not my reference images, I got them off of Amazon mostly). Heck, feel free to take my assets and sell them on the asset store or something with a fresh coat of paint, I don't care (although I would like some credit minimum, but you don't have to, I'd just think it'd be kinda scummy to do something like that lol, and feel free to deal with some legal issues if multiple people did that, you'd all be suing each other for selling the same assets but in the beginning all came from me lol).

I figure I can bring a lot more value in this whole project by open-sourcing (or, as “open-source” as I can make it. Not gonna slap a GPL or MIT license on the whole game or anything because I don't know what all I have to do in order to make that happen, I’m just making the project files public and feel totally free to do whatever you want to with my assets) because, again, this game is not very long, and I’m sure for 99% of people, it’s just a one-and-done experience but I really hope that I can make somebody out there really freakin’ happy by doing this with my assets.

So the reason why I remade every single asset apart from 1. Sounds, 2. Anything pertaining to Alpha textures or any obvious photographs, and 3. Human character assets are because:

1. I just don’t have much experience with sound design or anything lol, I also don’t have particularly great audio equipment for that and while I make some bangin’ music on https://soundcloud.com/user335715484/nicholas-vasquez-is-my-friend (also, shoutout to the guy who messaged me about PT for PC on Soundcloud. I didn't get that message until like 3 months later lol, I would seriously recommend not sending messages through Soundcloud if you want me to see them), it unfortunately just isn’t the exact type of music that would fit in with this game lol. However, I am very interested in learning about sound design and making different types of music, so I fully intend to start doing that after I’m done with Elevator: Unity.

2. Again, similar to my reason for the sounds, I just don’t have very much experience with photo-editing, and making designs don’t work very well using Blender’s procedural textures (which I used for this entire project and all of my textures. As some Blender users may figure, it was definitely a pain, texturing was definitely my least favorite part of this entire project, especially since Blender 2.81 came out and screwed up bump-related performance. More on this later). I very-much-so intend to learn GIMP and/or Photoshop but I will do that after I’m done with this.

3. And finally, for the same reason as the two prior, I didn’t do much human sculpting on this (though I did other types of sculpting), but I totally will after this is done. I was actually originally going to just get good at human sculpting (I’m currently very amateur at it, but I can do it) and go through with making all the human assets, but I wanted this to be done before my birthday on 12/26/2019, and I literally will not hit that deadline if I try to go through and remake alllllllll the different humans. However, again, I very-much-so intend to do a lot more human sculpting, clothing, and whatever else, but specifically after I’m done with this. But I did do a lot of non-human sculpting :)

One other reason why I chose to go through and be essentially a full-stack developer (apart from those 3 things listed above) is to see what it is in the game development industry that I like to do. I can say that I like programming and I like modeling, but for texturing and the non-human sculpting that I did do, I was not very fond of it. I’m sure it’s partially because I made all the textures procedurally using Blender’s Shader Editor (which I'm sure my Susbtance Designer boys are puking in their mouths hearing rn, I'm sorry, I can't make the $150 investment rn lol), and also probably because I didn’t start making tileable textures in Blender until stupid-recently (didn’t realize I could do them well until Lance Phan's video that he made on 12/1/2019, as in legit 5 days ago as of me writing this lol) so I ended up making textures for nearly every single object and level individually. However, one neat thing about Blender’s procedural texturing was the lack of necessity to do any UV mapping because the textures are all completely math-based and they scale innnccrreedddiibblllyy well, as in you can zoom in literally as much as you want to and it will never, ever start to pixelate or anything like that because it’s all generated through math. However, those benefits start to go away after I baked the textures into images lol. But after a while, making the textures for every single asset individually started to get really, really, really boring, which is probably why I would’ve liked it a lot more if I relied a lot more on tileable textures. Also, just as a heads-up for anybody reading, if you see a texture in the game that you like that you want a tileable version of for your own use, watch this: https://youtu.be/RIWBSrTahGs or use my "SeamlessVector" node group I made under "ProceduralMaterials.blend" (it's the same thing as what he makes, but it's good to watch it just to understand how that node group works) and bake the images onto a 1m x 1m plane.

I’ve found that throughout my time working on this, the things that I did and didn’t like had a lot to do with objectivity vs subjectivity. For example, I currently like programming and modeling. In programming, if you need to print out something that says “Hello World,” there are a freakin’ ton of ways going about doing it, some more efficient than others (and some a lot more efficient than others. For example, I could make a program that calculates Pi and it could just go through until it found the binary for “Hello World” and print out those series of letters, and that would be stupidly inefficient), but in the end, you will still get “Hello World.” With modeling, just like programming, there are a lot of ways going about doing it, but in the end, if I’m trying to make a chair, once I get the four legs, the actual seat, and the backrest, then it’s done, there’s literally nothing else I could possibly add to it, it’s a chair, that’s it. The only other thing with modeling is polygon count, but the Subdivision Surface modifier with creases and edge-loops makes that largely trivial. However, what I’ve found in my time texturing and sculpting is that there is a lot of subjectivity to it, and, for example, the procedural wood texture that I made was my 6th total re-do at making a wood texture, and it wasn't even mine, I based it off one I found online. I can make something that looks like wood and I could ask people if it looked like wood and they’d say that it did look pretty wood-like, but it could always just look weird. Idk, it’s odd, I felt that same way about sculpting, but probably not as bad about texturing. I have tried sculpting humans, one of which is on my Blender Files, under the folder “HumanGeneric”, and I planned to make it look like Justin Bieber, but if you look at it, it doesn’t look like Justin Bieber lol. It clearly resembles a human, but you can’t say exactly what’s wrong with it. It’s a lot of things that look off, but it’s not very cut-and-dry. Just like my wood texture, it’d probably be easier to just redo the whole thing from scratch and start anew. Because of what I’ve found from my time programming, modeling, texturing, and sculpting, I’m willing to bet that I’d probably like UV mapping, rigging, and maybe sound design stuff (given that I’m already fond of making music, despite how dumb some of my songs are lol, I'm gonna plug my Soundcloud again just in case if you haven't checked it out: https://soundcloud.com/user335715484/nicholas-vasquez-is-my-friend). I’m willing to bet that I probably won’t like making art through Krita or GIMP or something like that, animating, and anything else with a high amount of subjectivity. Another thing I have an issue with regards to these subjective things is handling my time. Remaking my wood texture 6 whole times is, I feel, a lot of times just for a basic wood shader, and making my human took about 8 hours and like 4 whole documentaries playing in the background for me to finish. I’m sure if I practice more at it I’ll get better at both it looking right and managing my time, but one thing I realized is, for example, Leonardo DaVinci didn’t have to stop where he did on the Mona Lisa. He literally could’ve kept working on it until the day he died and he could’ve still not been done with it in his eyes. I probably just need to learn how to get better at declaring that something is ‘good’ and being done with it. Idk, it’s an interesting thought I had.

But anyway, what happened with me and Konami? Well, some higher-ups at Konami and I spoke and while initially, I was supposed to be apart of an internship, by the time I ended up getting there (September of 2019), they didn’t want to do any internships with anyone because they were looking more to hire than to intern. They didn't hire me obviously, but some fellas there did say they were interested in seeing how much I'd know by the time this project was done, so that doesn't necessarily mean anything but idk, just some food-for-thought. So my time in Japan changed from being an internship to just a trip, which I guess some people could debatably say was an upgrade but idk, I liked it in Japan, I wouldn’t have minded staying longer despite my lack of knowledge of the language (which made me feel like I was being a jerk by having everything be translated but yeah, definitely my bad lol). So instead of 1 month, 2 months, or 3 months or whatever, it ended up just being 1 week, but man even though it was shorter than I initially expected, I still hecka appreciate them flying me down and all that, that was very cash-money of them. For people that wanted to ask me if they were working on any huge AAA games, from my time there, I personally did not see what they were working on and I couldn't describe it, but they obviously had workers... working. So I really doubt they're just twiddling their thumbs doing nothing lol, but I just don't know what it is. Apparently, me going to Konami HQ was a relatively big deal b/c I was apparently the first “student” to ever visit their HQ, and I got to meet many people whose names I forgot (I'm so sorry lol), but I got to meet the sound development team who had been working their since at least MGS4 and they worked on PT and they showed me some dev-builds of PT and MGS4. I'm personally not a super-PT-fanboy or anything and I don't believe in any of the Kojima conspiracies or whatever else, but man, it was really neat of them to show me that stuff lol. Regardless, I assume they're working on something for next-gen. Idk what, but a pretty clear-cut sign of that is them having workers which tend to signify that they are doing something. I don't like dwelling on things too much and over-hyping myself about things, so I'm content with just waiting and seeing what they have in store. If any of y'all from Konami see this post, どもありがと。わたしわげんごおもっとしらないでごめんなさい。

Since my time working on Elevator: Unity, I’ve had multiple weeks in which I couldn’t work on it and I’d have to set back the project for another time. I remember one week my cousin came to visit me and he likes to socialize with me at all times of his waking hours, and at that time, my drawing tablet came in. So, whenever he was asleep, I spent my time learning how to use my drawing tablet without a screen by memorizing reading and writing the Japanese Hiragana, and this was about 2 weeks before I left for Japan. I didn’t work on my week in Japan, and a few weeks later, I had to sell my hard drive (that had Elevator: Unity on it) to one of my friends and replace it with an SSD. During my time backing up all of my files, I memorized reading and writing, you guessed it, the Japanese Katakana. I don't really know what any words mean, but I, at the very least, can read and write all non-Kanji Japanese if you asked me to. I read like a pre-schooler probably but that's better than nothing lol. And then earlier this month, I moved in with my sister, and the packing/unpacking prevented me from working much on it at all. But something that I kinda realized with this project is that it’s good to take breaks, like fr, whenever I did PT for PC, I worked on it every single day over the course of like a month until I was done, or as done as could be. With this project, I figured I could do something similar because if I spent more time working on it, then I’d be done sooner. I figured that since it’s a pretty short game, I wouldn’t need to spend much time on it (and as I talked about earlier, that definitely wasn’t the case), so throughout most of the time of me developing this, I worked every single day, not taking weekends off. Before long, I ended up stupidly burnt out, and a lot of my good friends that I play games with online (who also have jobs of their own) like to jock on me for how I’m too cool for playing video games with them and all that b/c I spent so much time working on this, like Andy from Toy Story 3 going to college, except I'm not going to college rn lol. Over the past two weeks, I’ve spent 118.5 hours on Blender (in the video, it was 80. I've stayed up really late these past couple of days lol), and during my period of working on textures (October and November. I just very recently finished texturing everything), I had been working a bit less because I am finding this texturing stuff to be so stupidly boring (again, probably because of my own screw-ups, my own workflow problems, and b/c I'm not using software that is particularly fantastic for texturing but whatever, feel free to donate me a copy of Substance Designer and I'll gladly accept). I feel like I’m gonna get some comments somewhere saying “Oh, boo-hoo, 80 hours over the course of 2 weeks, it must be so hard being a texturer while I'm here breaking my back doing construction work for like 120 hours a week,” and heck yeah if I get a full-time job in this industry, you can bet that I won’t be doing texturing full-time for them lol, at least not the way I’m doing it rn, I’ve been having a lot of un-fun doing this, and remember that my financial incentive for this is literally 0. I remember a few people (and by 'a few', I really do mean 'a few', like less than 5 people) hitting me up during the times of PT for PC and them asking me why I had a Patreon and PayPal donation link, and that also being kinda scummy b/c the dataminers never put up any donation links, so why should I? And I thought about that a bit to, and I was contemplating whether or not I should still have my Patreon and PayPal donation links up, and I eventually figured that I should because, if you all like what I, personally, as Simon Elijah Cromwell do, then you can donate. That's literally it, it is totally optional, there are no tiers or anything of that sort, it's just like a humble tip or something like that, and it's not like I made much money, like, AT ALL from this. The net total I have made from Patreon and PayPal combined is $15. $0 coming from Patreon, and $15 coming from PayPal. That $15 donation came from one person. A single person named Matthew. Matthew, if you're reading this, thank you so much for donating, that meant a lot to me. You all don't have to donate, but my PayPal donation link is paypal.me/Qimsar and my Patreon is https://www.patreon.com/Qimsar and again, you all don't have to. I will not be giving any sort of rewards or anything to anyone who donates, everything that I'm giving away, I'm giving away completely free, no exceptions, it's all on that Google Drive. So, if you donate, you won't get anything special apart from a genuine, heartfelt 'thank you' for helping a homie out.

Also, speaking of comments, I remember a lot of people commenting on the various news sites whenever PT for PC first came out saying stuff like “Well, if this kid is so good at making games,” (their words, not mine) “why not make an original game instead of a remake like this?” and I thought I explained in my original posts about it, but maybe not? The reason for me doing the last remake was to learn how to program and get good at UE4, and this one was for me to learn about making assets in games. I chose both particular games for specific reasons (PT because of the drama that surrounded it, because the assets were already datamined, and its gameplay meant that I could learn a lot from programming it. Elevator: Source because of the stupidly large amount of variety of assets. If I could do remake Elevator: Source, then I could probably do anything I set my mind out to), and both, again, were meant to just be learning experiences for me. I also got some comments from those other websites saying that I should’ve released it when it was done instead of releasing it early. I went over that in my posts as well, but I assume they probably didn’t read it lol, I don’t blame them though, I make some pretty long posts. But just to reiterate, I released it early because I was looking for somebody who’d be willing to donate the animations. I probably could’ve gone around asking but I had no idea where to start, that announcement post was my very first post ever on the r/SilentHill subreddit and wherever else I posted it at. To be fair though, I probably shouldn’t have posted it in so many subreddits, I think I posted it in like 5 or 6 whenever I really doubt that anybody in the r/UnrealEngine or r/HorrorGames subreddit had access to those files lol so that was horribly dumb on my part, I’ll totally admit that, I think I was attention-seeking a bit at that time or something like that, I wasn't thinking. The game ended up getting more popular than I expected, then the news sites starting making articles, and then next thing I know is that Konami is hitting me up, so yeah, I did not expect that by any means whenever I made it.

Something else I'd like to talk about is the harsh state of indie game development. I don't think this was as much the case whenever Steam Greenlight existed as it does on Steam Direct, there is an absolute ton of shady stuff going on in the indie development scene, and I didn't realize it until after PT for PC came out. There are some bigger YouTubers that like to cover topics like this such as BigFryTV and DueRag, but holy actual moly, I didn't think it'd be as rampant as it is. Shortly after PT for PC came out, I received numerous amounts of offers to work with other indie people, and I had largely ignored all of them until one was kinda forced into me. I know that sounds weird, like "how do you get forced into working with someone, especially over the internet?" but trust me, there's some weird stuff going on in the indie game dev scene. I don't want to go into details (which there are a TON of) because if I did, it'd start a freakin' ton of drama, but man oh man, let it be known that, in the indie game dev scene, there are a lot of people that truly do care about their passion, and there are a lot of people that will take advantage of you literally any way they can. This includes in crowdfunding campaigns, a lot of times when a project ends up getting in development heck and never comes out, a lot of times that means that some reeeeeaaaallll shady stuff happened in the background. I always figured it was just the management running out of money or something like that, but no, sometimes, there are some really bad things that happen. I personally find the story of the fellas that I had been forced into doing stuff with (which, I actually never did any development for. It's complicated, really really complicated) really funny, but it's tough seeing people being taken advantage of so easily, it's terrible. Like, after seeing all the crunch-time stuff of game developers in the AAA scene and comparing it to my own experience seeing what's happening to some of these indie game devs, it's freakin' nuts how different their problems are. The AAA industry seems to have a problem with overworking people, while the indie game dev scene seems to have a problem with actual, legitimate scam artists. Scam artists who get people to work for them without pay with the promise that in the end, something will come out of it, but with there being no end in sight forever, despite numerous crowdfunding campaigns and numerous setbacks and all that, with the scam artists being the only winner in the end, like some sort of pyramid scheme. Again, it's not always like that, but it is very surprising how many times it is like that. If you're a game developer out there looking for work right now or whatever, watch out who you work for, especially if there isn't some sort of guarantee for income. Working by yourself or with some homies and all of you being unpaid but splitting whatever incomes co-operatively is good as well I'd imagine.

Another thing I'd like to talk about given my time working on this project is "which do you prefer, Unreal Engine, or Unity?" and to be honest, I gotta go with Unreal Engine for 3D definitely. Unity makes an effort to bring a sort of union to everything (hence the name) with the Component system (which I guess is getting replaced but still), and sometimes it works very well. Other times it's incredibly annoying, like with trying to update a game to use HDRP like I did just yesterday. They chose not to build some stuff in like Post Processing into stuff like camera because I think that'd break their design standard that they have, but oh my gosh that crap can get so annoying sometimes lol. Sometimes it's really, really cool, like being able to have a script that, say, rotates something and then also having a script that moves something both on the same object. I don't think you can do anything like that with UE4 (at least with Blueprints I think) but it's stupid-easy to do in Unity because of their components system, but their efforts to put basically every single thing as a component can be so freakin' backwards sometimes, it's ugly. So, Unity's component system has some positives and negatives and their graphics, using just the regular version of Unity, can be very, very bad relative to the same scene in UE4 until you update your entire game to HDRP or whatever else which can be annoying (so I'd recommend starting off with your project set to HDRP or LWRP if possible). Even stuff like area lights, which you can make in UE4 pretty simply, does not exist in Unity without HDRP. Another thing about UE4 that I'm particularly fond of is both the visual shader and visual scripter editors. Unity allows you to make your own shaders using an offshoot of HLSL (which allows you to make some actually really advanced shaders), and with HDRP or LWRP, they have finally let you start making shader graphs without need for plugins. However, I'd imagine most people prefer using visual shader editors instead of programming them, so UE4 has a very, very good shader editor of its own. Like, UE4s shader editor is, in my opinion, almost up there with Blender, maybe even passing it, with how much stuff you can do with the shader editor, it's nuts, and there are some things with Unity's shader editor that I tried doing that I figured would be trivial but alas, they ended up actually being impossible which is nuts to me. Something else is that UE4 updates their engine to add crazy-neat features really fast like ray-tracing or SSGI and whatever else, but Unity tends to be a lot slower to the punch, presumably because of Epic Games probably being a lot bigger of a company than Unity's, but geez, it's wild how fast they can add stuff. This'll sound kinda weird probably but I honestly feel really, really bad for Unity because of Epic Games. I don't know if you all remember this, but late last year, at about the time of me writing this, Improbable Inc., a company that has some multiplayer solutions for game engines, had a fiasco with Unity after Unity changed their TOS and apparently Improbable Inc. violated something in the new TOS and so Unity told them that if they didn't align with the new TOS, they'd have to stop supporting them. Improbable Inc. made their debate public, and very shortly after, Epic Games swooped in and them and Improbable Inc. made a $25,000,000 fund to help devs move to 'more open engines,' as if that's not a super crazy obvious "subtweet" (as the kids call it these days) to Unity. Then, the whole Epic Games Launcher fiasco where Steam announces their new pricing scheme for developers, and then literally a single (I.e the number 1, as in "one") day later, they announced the Epic Games Launcher with only a 12% cut, and then as if to make matters worse for Unity, if you make a game with UE4 and launch it on the Epic Games Launcher, you do not have to pay a single dime in order to be able to use UE4. It is literally, totally free to use, while also noting in a nifty little graph that they made that with Unity, you still have to pay their licensing fees. And then, finally, the cut for the Unreal Engine marketplace was cut to 12% (although that was a mid-July of last year), so at this point, the incentives to use UE4 just keep growing and growing. I feel as if they've mastered the subtweet and being passive-aggressive to other companies, it's actually crazy. So, at this point, for 3D, the incentives are absolutely lined up to use UE4. 2D kinda sucks with UE4 b/c UE4's Paper thing died, so 2D is another story but I don't know enough about 2D game creation to judge. And this goes on to my next point.

I feel largely disappointed with my textures. I did like my modeling though, but there were a couple of things that I somehow forgot to model? Ngl idk how that happened, but I'll probably add those things back in if I have time before my birthday, it's not a lot. But there were a few points in the game in which I took some creative freedom and made textures that didn't line up with the original for the sake of being different, but I honestly think I should've done it more often. I think the odds were definitely stacked against me too, with me using Blender's procedural shaders, and then Blender 2.81 coming out just like 2 weeks ago, and then Blender 2.81 killing performance of using the Bump node on Blender on procedural shaders (holy nut, the day before 2.81 came out, I was getting like 40FPS flying around with procedural shaders on Material Preview. 2.81 comes out, and I have dropped down to legit like 8FPS. That update absolutely annihilated my performance, and because of it, I'm now using Cycles to material preview because now, using Cycles is literally just faster than using Eevee for me now, and even then, using the Object coordinates have screwed up some of my textures on my ProceduralMaterials.blend file, I think I'm stressing the shader engine too hard), but man, whenever I see Blender shader gods like Lance Phan and Simon (ayy) Thommes, I get so ridiculously jealous of them because they are so good at their craft, it's freaking crazy. I think I like my prop texturing more than my level texturing, and it hurts, even more, to see just how readily available stupid-high quality level textures are online, completely free to use, CC0. I could use them literally whenever I want, at the cost of $0 and me having a moral obligation to just give them a credit. But I made it a goal of mine to do (apart from the transparent ones and photographs) all the textures myself, but idk, it's nuts. And then, in the middle of me doing level texturing work, and Epic Games buys Quixel, and their entire megascan library is free to use... if you're on UE4. Like, hooooooollllllllyyyyyyyy moooooollllllyyyyyy, are you kidding me (but Quixel Mixer is free for anyone I think so I might cop lol)? Like, the temptation is seriously high to just start getting these textures, but I have to stop myself. It feels like it's cheating if I use them because I, myself, didn't make them. Which goes on to my next point lololololololo

So I find it ironic that I'm talking about using external level textures and saying that it feels like cheating for me to use them, but here I am donating a freaking ton of models, textures, scripts, and (eventually) animations for public use. So am I saying to not use my assets? Not if you care about having the privilege to say that you made all those different things. It feels great to be able to pull up a level from this game, and say "Hey, everything you see here, I made all of this. (apart from the Unity engine of course and the things that I'm excluding as me having made)" (and yes, I include the phrase in parenthesis in the quote) But at the same time, me working in this manner is very inefficient. 4 whole months for 45 minutes of gameplay from what is essentially just a movie? Are you freaking crazy? Sometimes, I see games that have a few assets from the Unreal Marketplace and I see people say "grrr this entire game is an asset flip!", like PUBG. I remember something about a playground set or whatever that they use that they got off the market for like $50 and people were freaking out because it was an asset from the marketplace, but, like, bruh, think about it like this. If a very good game designer (emphasis on "very good," this analogy doesn't work too well with beginners who are learning lol) is getting paid like $40/hr to make that playground set, and it takes him like an hour or two to model everything, and an hour or two to texture everything (if he's using procedural stuff that he already worked on just with some tweaks. If he's starting off fresh or if he's hand-drawing the materials, then that number goes up), then boom that's like anywhere between $80 to $160. Why would you spend that much time and money for something that literally already exists? Why reinvent the wheel every single time? Again, my goal throughout this project was to learn all the various stuff. Well, now that I know how to do all this stuff, I all of a sudden have nothing to prove because, in the realm of modeling, texturing (both prop and level), and programming, I have definitive proof that I can do those things, and it's this game right here. So, for my next project that I'm going to work on (given that I'm not hired for some company by the time I start or something like that), I am looking at making the game with the Godot engine (looking for an excuse to learn Python and just another engine), and I'm looking to use CC0 assets as much as possible, and if I get to a point where I can't use a CC0 asset for something (actually, not that many CC0 models exist lol, the only things I can find are like things from museums but apart from that, there isn't a TextureHaven or CC0Textures equivalent to modeling, maybe Sketchfab and then sort by CC0, but yeah, I'm thinking I'll be doing a whole heck-of-a-lot of modeling and prop texturing lol) or if it's not high-quality, I'll just make it myself. This next project that I'm looking at will be quite a monumental task, being easily much larger in scope than PT for PC and Elevator: Unity, but it should be fun, especially if I'm opening myself up to using the vast amounts of stupidly good-looking textures available from TextureHaven.com or cc0textures.com . Thank you Greg Zaal, Rob Tuytel, Lennart Demes, and everyone else for contributing to the open source community, I hope I can make an impact as well. My goal for the next project that I have in mind (if I'm still independent by then) is not necessarily 'do all the modeling' or 'do all the texturing' or whatever, my goal is just to make everything open source so you know that if you look at something and you really like it, you know that you can go into the game files and use it whenever your heart desires, even the game engine itself (Godot is open source for those who haven't heard of it. I'm going to wait until Godot 4.0 comes out with Vulkan support, which will probably be a long while, before I start development). Hopefully, you all are content with that because level texturing in Blender for as long as I did made me want to rip my eyeballs out, it was fun at first, but then it started getting a lot less fun as time went on. Also, thankfully my internet is actually fast enough to upload this all of these files, it'd be very awkward if I had a situation like with PT for PC :)

Speaking of texturing some more, I would like to talk about the growing concern about larger game install sizes for just a little bit because it influenced by texture making throughout. I forgot to talk about this in the video, but I would like to bring it up. This isn't a hit-piece on PC Gamer or Kotaku or anything like that, but I'd like to argue over this article: https://kotaku.com/pc-game-install-sizes-are-ballooning-and-im-scared-1838956525 (which then linked to https://www.pcgamer.com/how-game-sizes-got-so-huge-and-why-theyll-get-even-bigger/ ) and in the article, they say that "As outlined by PC Gamer in a 2018 investigation, textures keep getting more complex and, therefore, bigger, and there's not a practical way to compress them sans loss of fidelity in the same way there is for, say, audio." The MP3 was made by the Moving Picture Experts Group, Matsushita, CCETT, Phillips, and some others as a way of compressing audio by taking out audio that a homo sapien cannot realistically hear. For instance, an easy one, the range of human hearing is about 20Hz to 20kHz, so with the MP3, they can just remove all sounds that go above or below that range. Throughout the PC Gamer article, they say that videos in games can be compressed through h.264. h.264 works through a stupid-ton of algorithms to determine when and where to move specific pixels or to allocate a certain amount of bandwidth to a certain part of the video (I'm simplifying a lot). However, in the article, in which they interview Stardock's lead developer, Nathan Hanish, and he says that .jpg compression in video games would be too noticeable for use. Now, the JPG file was developed by the Joint Photographic Experts Group, IBM, Mitsubishi, Electric, AT&T, and Canon as a way of compressing images by taking out parts of a photo that a homo sapien cannot realistically see. For instance, another easy one, in the eyes of a human, the color that we are most sensitive to is the color green. So, in a JPG (and maybe this isn't something they do, I'm just assuming but somebody can prove me wrong), the color that is given the most attention is the color green. Less of the data is dedicated to the color blue, which the human eye is the least sensitive to. Though, JPGs also support Black and White compression if you select it. So, a lot of game developers are completely okay with using MP3 to compress audio. A lot of game developers are also completely okay with using h.264 to compress video. However, they cross the line at using JPGs for textures? Huh? The quote from Kotaku where they say, in regards to textures, that "there's not a practical way to compress them sans loss of fidelity in the same way there is for, say, audio" when the JPG literally does that exact same thing. It feels like the "Do I look like I know what a JPG is?" meme from King of the Hill. There is a time and place to use a PNG (any alpha textures, or anything with crisp text or line graphics), and there's a time and place to use a JPG (literally anything you'd see in the natural world, anything that is 'organic' (like a painting or whatever)). Using PNGs for everything is not a good idea, and using JPGs for everything is not a good idea. Knowing when to use one over is very beneficial for compression. JPGs compress better than PNGs in organic textures, but PNGs compress better than JPGs in crisp designs. So, throughout this game, I used largely RGB JPGs for Albedo textures, BW JPGs for Roughness textures, and instead of using Normal Maps (which JPGs would hugely screw up), I would use Bump Maps converted to Normal Maps through Unity's import properties, also largely in BW JPGs. Everything else, I used PNGs for. And because of that, my "Blender Files" folder (the folder where I stored all of my personally-made models and textures) is only 3.64GB, which, of that, according to WinDirStat, of the 2705 files in there, 582 files, taking up 2.3GB, were textures. And furthermore, get this, every single prop texture was 4096x4096, and every single level texture was 8192x8192. 582 4k and 8k textures, only 2.3GB. Of those, 74 were 8k textures and they took up 1.1GB, so you can do the math for the remaining 508 4k textures that only take up 1.2GB of space (lol). Again, I'm not saying use JPGs or PNGs for everything, because neither one of them are one-size-fits-all. PNGs have their place and JPGs have their place. Please be smart with it, for the sake of our hard-drives and SSDs. The only reason I didn't use PNGs more is just because all of my textures that I made are very organic, I made almost every single material of mine procedurally through Blender, and through Blender, it's not exactly the easiest thing to do to make procedural text or line art or something like that lol. I tend to find that 90% compression for JPG works pretty freakin' well tho, if there's a one-size-fits-all character in this 22-page-long-story-according-to-Google-Docs-at-Arial-in-12-point-font, it's the 90% compression for JPG instead of 100%.

Oh, last thing I wanted to talk about is some of the other PT remakes. I know both Artur Laczkowski (Other Worlds/Playable Teaser/PT Emulation (don't ask why he has so many, it's a very long story lol)) and Radius Gordello (Unreal PT). I haven't talked with Artur in a bit since he asked me about some PT stuff like 3 months ago, but Radius and I are pretty good homies, we even had a streak on Snapchat for a while but he couldn't keep up with it so it ended up dying :(. I just wanted to say that I'm personally not very fond of being told "your version was better than Radius'" or "Artur's version was better" or whatever, I get that y'all are trying to show support for me or Radius or Artur, but that's someone talking to Carson and Calvin, who are brothers, and saying "I like Calvin better than Carson" or "I like Carson more than Calvin" or "Oh no, not Carson-guy, I want Calvin!" like, idk, it feels weird to me. I'm not even offended when someone says that the other person's is better, it's just weird-feeling being compared to other people. On that note, Radius sent me this and vro this crap had me laughing so hard lol:

and not gonna lie, I also thought that crap was freakin' hilarious lol, it still makes me so mad that the one 45-minute long video of v0.9.0 ended up being like the front cover of my game in all the articles but, but whatever, that meme was worth it all, that had me dying lol. It's probably easy to imagine that I'm being sarcastic because I'm not putting "sksksksks" or something like that but holy nut, trust me, that was actually really funny lol, I liked that one. However, Radius doesn't really like being asked about PT-stuff at all anymore, I think that's just a chapter of his life that he wants to let go (not, as in, ignore it ever happened, but, like, "what's done is done, this chapter of my life is over." Like being reminded of the hardships of high school or college or something is what it seems most relatable to). Artur seems to reeeeaaalllllyyyy like his PT stuff, but I think I'm more in the middle of them. I get asked about PT stuff all the time and I really like it, though not for the sake of talking about PT, but for the sake of talking to other people. I've found that my interest in all of that waned over time, but absolutely feel free to hit me up or whatever about anything, if you need help with a programming question or idk, a school problem or you just wanna have a conversation or even if you want to talk about PT (although I'd rather converse about something else, but I'm okay with that too), hit me up whenever you want to I'm available to talk to anyone whenever. Just remember to do it on either YouTube comments, Twitter DM or comments, Instagram, Snapchat, or Discord, and the relative links and whatnot are at the top of this post :)

Well, I think I have exhausted every single thing I have wanted to say for right now. There might be something else, but I've been writing this for the past 6 or 7 hours at this point, which I could've, and maybe should've, spent working on the project some more, but alas, I chose to do this instead. From what I can think of, the things I have left to do are to 1. animate, 2. add VR support, 3. program the AI, and 4. touch up the lighting and whatnot. Once I'm done with those things, if there's any time left in between now and my birthday on 12/26, I'll rework the textures and some other stuff. Phew. Feel free to check out all of the project files in the Google Drive here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1p0fhtVhWDq2m1NANEuHZYsZ3JaN3meYx?usp=sharing and again, if you want to send a comment or a message, please use either YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, or Discord and preferably not Gamejolt or Soundcloud lol. For anyone who's wondering why I use Gamejolt instead of itch.io, it's because when I was making PT for PC, it couldn't go on itch.io b/c of the 1GB limit that they have, so I've been using Gamejolt which has a 3GB limit which I might end up reaching with the final build of this game so I bought Google One when I started typing this and began uploading all the different backups on there. Ironic that just last paragraph I was talking about the wonders of using JPGs and PNGs in cooperation with one another instead of using exclusively JPG or PNG, yet here I am, buying online storage to store my game, but whatever I guess lol. Don't forget to try responding to that Reddit post at the top, and if anybody is interested (and by anybody, I really do mean *anybody,* if any single person lets me know that they're interested in it, I'll do it), I can stream my progress for the remainder of *Elevator: Unity*. Thanks for reading :)