My girlfriend Zenobia ( queenzenobia.deviantart.com ) got inspired when she saw some of the artwork for our booth at GGA and played around with some pixel art.

I thought it looked really nice, I’m sure she’ll get hired once PoH is to be made for the NDS.

She kept telling me it’s not done etc buuut, here it is!

We posted some pictures before of Llaknels evolvement in concept art.

So I thought we post some pictures now of Llaknels evolvement now in 3d.

As some of you people might remember John Romero did a “great hype ad” for his game Daikatana in 1997 (3 years before release). Personally I think that the game wasn’t that bad as many claimed it to be, but it was rated this way because John had hyped Daikatana to be the best game ever, … and it wasn’t. So it was a “text-book” case of  “do not hype your game unless it’s great”. Although it must be one of the most sold - “lowest scored” games of all time since it sold well over 200 000 copies the first year.

So while “over hyping” isn’t good, it seamed to work here. Though today many of the games have to “hype” their” game becasue if they don’t, no one will hear about the game at all. That’s why it’s really important for games today to have a USP (Unique Selling Points). It means that the game has to have a unique feature that no other game has. USP can be Max Paynes “bullit time” (one of my favourit USP), it’s a feature that you “push” in the marketing and that you hope that all the gamers will love.

I made this “art” (Llaknel about to make you his b****) some month ago and thought that I post it as a joke/tribute to John.

Before you start to make a 3d model out of a concept art you should have made some different versions so you can chose the best one. Here are 5 versions of the troll that Nixi made before we chose to go with troll number 5 (bottom right). We might include some of the other versions later in the game, but that’s mostly up to if we get the time to do it : )

Here’s some of Nixis concept art of the main characters for Penalty of Heroes. This and some other collages were Nixis contributions for “Best effort in art” at the Gotland Game Awards, last week. The larger versions of the characters on the sides are the newest versions of the main characters. There’s also some smaller sketches at the bottom of different moves of the characters

Be prepared Sweden, Malmoe and all you game developers because Databox Games is going to Nordic Games this weekend. We’ll be showing Exhaust and maybe also a little “Penalty of Heroes”, but we’ll probably only be showing that for selected people or if someone asks for it : )

At this years event there will be a lot of great speakers at the event so I hope I can catch some of them. One of the bad things is that some of the speakers have their  seminars at the same time, so you can only catch on of them. But as we’re four people we might go to different seminars : )

On my “want to see” list is:
Keijl Inafune (Capcom) - “The Capcom Philosophy”
Ian Bowden (Rockstar Leeds) - “It’s a small Word”
Calle Lejdfors (IO Interactive) - “Designing a flexible content pipeline”
Ilari Kulittinen (Housemarque) - “PSN rock crushing & casual golfing on XBLA”
Ryan Schneider (Insomniac Games) - “Does community even matter?”
Lars Gustavsson (DICE) - “Innovation - Making a leap of faith”
Suda 51 (Grasshopper) - “The birth of No More Heroes”
Jussi Laakkonen (Everyplay) - “How to start your own game company”
Harald Rieger (Sproing) - “Managing multiple development teams”

We will be posting updates about Nordic Games every day, so check out our blog this week for the latest!

New office, yay!
I got a desk next to a window through which you actually can see what the weather’s like. That’s nice even though its been kind of cloudy today compared to the past week. But for the moment, I feel a slightly tingling sensation of temporary happiness in my chest.

Enough chitchat, WORK has been executed this day, right here, in front of my gargantually, enormously, penisenlarging screen. I’ve made another iteration of the HUD and I can’t recall that I’ve written about the previous ones so here we go. I begun with a dark vector shape created earlier, just like in a cooking show. I added a new layer and started to play with details and colors, trying to find something that works with the art style I had in mind. I have to add that making interface is really not my thing, I knew this before I started and now I’ve learned that it’s also quite boring.

Anyway, here’s the result of today’s work, the resolution is far too high compared to what it’s gonna be ingame but I’ll deal with that later. Forget I said that.

Is there anyone out there who doesn’t enjoy blood and gore in movies, games or comics? Yeah okey there might be a few but they don’t ever have fun and many of them also hate when you have fun. But today, they stand powerless as I play with our particle editor, creating fountains of blood and gore that would make even the toughest character in mortal combat cry. Here’s a sample.

Today I’d like to share a new recording. Like the previous one I posted, this video demonstrates the process of drawing and coloring an enemy concept in photoshop. All I knew when starting was that it should be a quite heavily armored average male warrior controlled by Maag, the leader of Jedna. His equipment will vary but in this case I felt that it would be cool if he wielded a large shield, making him suitable for a little more dynamic and interesting AI. I didn’t use any reference whatsoever, I’m painting directly from my head and experimenting with different shapes to create an interesting armor.
It took about three hours to finish but the video is at high speed as usual.

Part 1

Part 2

Every Monday now for the past four weeks we have presented each of the heroes in the game. So I thought it was appropriate to post a picture of all of the characters together.

Here’s a round-up of all the facts about the heroes:

Llaknel
Llaknel is a young and skillful fighter and fight with two Katars. He was born and raised in the city of Era in the land of Nimo. He’s the current general of King Salo’s army and the princess’ personal bodyguard. Llaknel’s father was the late general who died protecting the king years ago and therefore Llaknel does not feel comfortable following his father’s footsteps. Llaknel also finds Kimo to be naive, but stays loyal to her and the King as he hopes for a change in Nimo. He is the leader of the party and reconsiders every action very thoroughly.

Zedwig
Zedwig is a short but heavily built man who wears thick armor and fights with raw strength. He doesn’t use weapons, but wields his shields which he smashes his enemies with. Zedwig is a cocky man, but trusted amongst his friends. He was born and raised in the city of Jedna, but fled to Era when Maag enslaved his people. He seeks revenge and wants to set his people free and get rid of Maag once and for all.

Kimo
Kimo is the youngest one of the four heroes and is trained in politics, combat and healing magics. She is the heiress of King Salo’s empire and loves the people of Era. She is in love with Llaknel, but is aware of the complications with him being responsible for her as he also figures as her general. However she finds it amusing to tease him, making his position awkward. Zedwig and her share friendship and the same sense of humor.

Darwin
Darwin is a skinny old man, who always carries his crossbow with him. He fled his hometown of Giza as it was enslaved and corrupted by people that gave false promises about a better future. Darwin has lived in Era for just as long as Zedwig and knows all of them very well. Though he is old fashioned and somewhat an outsider in the party, he is still a good friend and a skilled armsman.

After a lot of nagging from one of the 3D-artists I decided to make a concept of Darwins weapon, a crossbow. Darwin comes from a place a place that lies ahead in the development of machinery and therefor he has a technically more advanced weapon than the other main characters. The crossbow is equipped with a small magazine of bolts and a scope, mainly to make it look more interesting but also so that it makes sense that he doesn’t have to reload after every single shot.

Darwin is a skinny old man, who always carries his crossbow with him. He fled his hometown of Giza as it was enslaved and corrupted by people that gave false promises about a better future. Darwin has lived in Era for just as long as Zedwig and knows all of them very well. Though he is old fashioned and somewhat an outsider in the party, he is still a good friend and a skilled armsman.

The references for level 3 are mainly mountain and rocky ground, the path to the city of Jedna that is located on a high mountain. Then you travel further in the level also more and more of the outbound city industry mechanics are to be seen, also a path/transition to the industry area are going to be implemented near the end of the level.

Inspiration for this is mainly regular rocky terrain and real life steampunk looking engine and structure. Well, some of the level design visuals are not finished (mostly the graphical style of architectural environment, that I’m actually going to research later today) but here how it looks at the moment at one point of the course. (Have in mind its a draft and not the end visuals)

* Jens comment *
Dwarf wrote this post some month ago, but it wasn’t posted back then because we didn’t want to show so much of the different environments in the game back then.

Kimo is the youngest one of the four heroes and is trained in politics, combat and healing magics. She is the heiress of King Salo’s empire and loves the people of Era. She is in love with Llaknel, but is aware of the complications with him being responsible for her as he also figures as her general. However she finds it amusing to tease him, making his position awkward. Zedwig and her share friendship and the same sense of humor.

Been modeling another enemy today, total time from Nixi’s finished concept to all but finished 3D model 2hours and 40minutes, it’s incredible how much faster you can get when you model a lot.

This little guy will serve as a tough opponent, charging into the ranks of our heroes in hope of gouge their inards out… time will only tell if it’ll succeed or if you’ll turn this unstopable force into an immovable object.

It currently consits of 2700triss, which hopefully means that when game testing starts for real, we won’t be able to see Llakel for all of the pigs! Llaknel has around 10 000 triss.

Here’s Nixis concept art of the piggy.

This week, stating today, we’ll publish a little series of connection posts that will show you how we make a character/enemy from start to finish.

Finally, I’m back at the island after a couple of smooth days back home. It was nice to eat three meals a day and do nothing at all, just dragging the feet behind me and enjoying friends, family and the wonderful weather. Thank you easter bunny and Jesus Christ.

The video below shows how I work when making a concept: in this case an enemy rat mixed with a kangaroo and a velociraptor. I knew that it had to be small sized, come in hordes and perform some sort of jumping attack, making it more vulnerable and easier to hit if you get the timing right.

I started off making a couple of quick sketches to find something that could work. As reference I found some hideous pictures of the African nude mole rat. It’s probably the ugliest animal on the planet and when you see it, you instantly want to kill it. This creature looks like as if someone copy pasted a human penis, gave it eyes, legs and a nose. It didn’t quite feel right to keep that body type so instead I decided to move towards, as mentioned, the kangaroo/raptor direction.

It took about 2-3 hours to complete but luckily the video is like 8x speed. I hope you enjoy watching it.

Zedwig is a short but heavily built man who wears thick armor and fights with raw strength. He doesn’t use weapons, but wields his shields which he smashes his enemies with. Zedwig is a cocky man, but trusted amongst his friends. He was born and raised in the city of Jedna, but fled to Era when Maag enslaved his people. He seeks revenge and wants to set his people free and get rid of Maag once and for all.

The level two was decided to be a swamp kinda level, mainly composed by swamp elements, but also with a cross fade from the forest in the beginning, the swamp would even stretch a bit into the level 3. Actually most levels will have similar planning like that to ease the transition between the environmental graphics.

The feeling of the swamp environment was changed after time, from the beginning a muddy section of the open forest area to the up-to-date widespread evil and dark much more strange looking area it has become at this point.

The references for the latest sketches are mostly made up, the trees thou have partly influences from actual far east swamp vegetation but they are much more exaggerated and mutated of course. Well things still are to be added (mostly minor items thou), anyhow not grouse enough for the moment:P but overall a glimpse of that to become can be found in the sketches.

Llaknel is a young and skillful fighter and fight with two Katars. He was born and raised in the city of Era in the land of Nimo. He’s the current general of King Salo’s army and the princess’ personal bodyguard. Llaknel’s father was the late general who died protecting the king years ago and therefore Llaknel does not feel comfortable following his father’s footsteps. Llaknel also finds Kimo to be naive, but stays loyal to her and the King as he hopes for a change in Nimo. He is the leader of the party and reconsiders every action very thoroughly.

I know that we haven’t showed or told you so much about the four main characters of Penalty of Heroes, but starting next week we’ll change that. The first “Character of the week” that we’ll present/reveal is Llaknel, that we have showed a bit before. With every “character reveal” there will be a concept art of the character and some information about him or her.