New game & some freebies

In my last blog post I promised to announce my new game. I'm not ready to show the gameplay yet, but I wanted to post something anyway. So...

New game: Alchemist (working title)

A couple of months ago, I started working on this new game. It's a casual math-3 game. Some of you will probably say "oh no, not another match-3 game", but this one is very unique. I'm not ready to show the gameplay yet, need to finish it up some more and replace the programmer art. So, a little bit more patience for that ;)
The story of the game goes like this (will hire a copywriter to write the final story):
You are an alchemist, working for a king. However, in the 10 year you are working for the king you haven't produced any gold. After a few failed harvests, the country is becoming poor. People are hungry, the king can't raise anymore taxes, so eventually he decides to ban you. You can only come back if you find a formula to create gold. And to prove it, you have to make the country rich again.
So one day, you find a way to make gold, you return to your country, and start your quest (from city to city, untill you arrive at the king's castle).
For now I'm using the title "Alchemist", but I'm not sure. Maybe I'll change it into "An alchemist's quest" or something like that. Any ideas?
I already hired an artist, to start replacing the programmer art. This artist is doing a great job. Here's the main menu screen. The buttons will come horizontally at the bottom. The sky in the background is animated (scrolling):

As an indie, paying for the artwork hurts (coming out of my savings), but in the end it'll be worth it. I want this game to look as good as my last game, hopefully even better ;)

"Portfolio" back online
I used to have an online portfolio showing work samples like 2D/3D art, products, sites, etc. Its been down for 2 years, but the webstats indicate people are still visiting it. So, I really needed to put something online again... I didn't have time to create a decent looking design. But this week, I decided to just upload a gallery of some of my old 3D work. Becuase that's what most people used to visit the portfolio for. Becuase I didn't have any time, I just downloaded "simple viewer", a free flash gallery applet, configured it, and voila... www.multimediaportfolio.net
If I find some time I will create a design, and add more galleries (2D,3D, programming.... yeah, I do a bit of everything).

Freebies
I guess most of you are reading this becuase of the word "freebies" in the title of this blogpost ;)
While cleaning up my hard-drive, I found a lot of skybox collections. I made these over the years for my 3D game experiments, but never used them in a finished game. First I thought to create a content pack, but I decided to give them away for free. I have a lot more, but I picked out the best ones. I also have some texture packs, but those would kill my bandwidth heheh.

Skybox 1: colorfull fantasy skybox big planet


Skybox 2: space/night skybox, red nebula/fog


Skybox 3: space skybox with spacestation in the sky


Skybox 4: dusk skybox


Skybox 5: snow/storm skybox



I am giving these away for free, but they are not public domain. I keep the copyrights. You can however use them in commercial or non commercial projects. I would appreciate mentioning my name in the credits, or a small donation (details are in the eula.txt file), but you don't have to do this.


That's all for now. I hope to finish the gameplay of my new game soon, so I can post some screenshots or maybe even a video.


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