Once in a while when I design the levels it comes to the point when it seems like a good idea to make a mood painting of the surroundings. It could be in the beginning of the research or for the writer to have something to relate to, for commercial uses or just for the hell of it.

Anyhow, the main idea is to give an overlook of the referred level and it’s core-elements, color setting, general feeling and so on. Here are some samples of such pictures, in this case mainly for presentation purposes.

Last night I had some trouble sleeping so I decided to start work on some 3d instead. Its been a while since I worked with 3d modeling so I was happy to feel how fast I adapted to the workflow. It took about three hours to complete the base model and it ended up using only about 1,7k triangles. That is very low but the result looked pretty good considering.

I continued to work on the rig during the day, first skinning the low poly and then adding a turbosmooth modifier which automatically subdivides the mesh and makes it smoother. The skin adapted very well to the new mesh and I could begin animating, but a model needs textures and textures needs a good unwrapping, which should be done before you start with the rig. Luckily I figured out a way to solve this problem by simply saving the skin and adding it later to the unwrapped model. Its still wip and stuff like weapons, clothes or armor will be added later.

I learned a lot of things making this model and Jona showed me a couple of things I’ve never used before, mostly biped animation tips and tricks. Thank you.

I was bored and needed something red colored for external screen backgrounds so made a new bk,,, wrong colors on the logo perhaps, but it do the job for the mode I want on the desktop, maybe someone else would find use of it also:p

Anyhow, I have also some old desktops that are more official, they are not being released on the DataBox site yet though, but I bring them up here to so you can check them out.

An arcade Hack ’n Slash game without big bad bosses wouldn’t live up to the genre name. Luckily Penalty of Heroes does have that very important ingredient and on one level the players will encounter Maag. He is big and he is bad, he wields two brutal swords and is covered with armor making him almost invulnerable to all attacks. An attentive player however might discover his Achilles heel and use it to take him down, it wont be easy but I promise it’ll be fun.

Here’s the earliest sketch of Maag. I first thought of posting the final concept art, but I thought that we won’t show everything in the game just yet ; )

The shield of one of the main character has taken quite some time to create, not because the modeling is particularly difficult, but because we had trouble getting a design that we could agree upon down.

Here are some of the late versions that we sat and chose between.

I’ve been putting a lot of time into the start screen lately, trying to give a more impressive feel to it, something that reflects the awesomeness of what to come when starting up the game. I want to spend even more time to it but this will do for now. Its fairly close to what you will see in the actual game except that it will be much more vivid when all the shaders puts into use, such as moving leaves, clouds and flags and more. Without saying too much you might get a glimpse of that quite soon..

It’s been a while since my last contribution to this blog and I know that Jens is very mad with me. I can hear it in his voice and now my fear of facing that anger is forcing me to write. Luckily he works from a distance so there still might be time left before he unleashes his great anger upon me. Better get started.

Last week I worked with several things; enemies, the gem system and the start menu. Today I’ll show you the final concept of the very first two enemies the player will encounter, the forest troll and a mount animal. You might recognize the troll from some of my earlier sketches. I’ve polished it and thought about its behavior.

The troll can come as one or riding on the pigs back. When mounted you can hit him so that he dies and falls off, this will change the way the pig acts and it will go berserk and start charging wildly across the screen. The player will unfortunately not be able to use the pig as a mount. That would look funny though.

* Jens comment *
I never get mad at you Trixi ; ) I only frustrated :p You have to ask/tell the people around 10 times before they start to blog. Then when they do, you get 10-20 posts to sort out. The “blog rule” here at DataBox is that each person should post 0.5-1 post/week. This so the people reading our blog knows what we’re up to.

Would be cool if you could eat that nice little piggy and gain heath from it after you killed it (guess I put that on the “wish/reject” list :p)

I know that we haven’t showed you so much from the actual game. But I promise you that in the next month we’ll be showing of some in game shots and maybe even some videos.

So I thought it was time to show you how the drafts and sketches of the first level in the game looked like.

Stoffer (narrative) and Håkan (producer) told me that the start of the game would be in a grand city (the heroes hometown) and it would later transcend into a nearby forest.

As reference material to the city I used pictures from Minas Tirith, the ruins in Oblivion, the Roman Empire, and inspiration from modern cities. So it’s a mixture of all of that : )

The inspiration material for the forest I used different pictures of forests. The main object for me is to make the forest more interesting and alive that in normal “forest levels” in side scrollers.

Making a good logotype is never simple, in this case it took a couple of iterations before I was somewhat happy with the look.

The main issue was to get it uptodate with the new weapons, also to get a more feel of action and arcade. To do that the former true type had to go, also as I noticed most game logotypes in comparison to regular company logos was much more graphically rendered.

So generally that’s the main issue I had to solve, also to get it easy read, fantasy-impression, working 2-color, smalprint accessible, not to different from before and somewhat good looking of course :p
Most issus come to be the font (probably because I believe that custom made fonts for logos are the only right thing) and after that the rendering and color that never seemed to hit the spot.

Well, it took a couple of tries before it could be called the new logo.
Here are some of the later iterations that didn’t made it.

Yes, you read right. Our logo for Penalty of Heroes is going out the door and a new one will take it’s place. There we’re several reasons for this change. The two main reasons are that the weapons in the background of the logo have changed and most of the team members wanted a more “edge” to the logo and make it more original. So in a few days we’ll reveal the logo and we’ll also change the logo on all Penalty of Heroes related pages.

The new logo is a bit different from the old one, but we really hope you’ll like it!

Back to work on Llaknel again, the scales have been set and today I’ve rigged and skinned him.
The rig is an ordinary Biped and using fewer bones than I would have prefered I’ve gotten the skinning to work, seems the model was a success.

When the skinning is 100% done I’ll start ranting about animations.

Well, the most annoying part of him is at the very least, gotta skin him as well but that won’t take long also I’ve been busy dealing with “undisclosed as of now”.

Now I’m gonna get back to the latest secret that has been added into the game… It’s gonna be really great.

Some jobs such as firefighters and police men have scheduled that they have to work out at work. Well we have just decided to do the same thing, but instead of workout we have to play lan game each day at 20.00 (8 pm) each day at the office for at least one hour. The reason we do this, besides that we love to play game, is to get a break from work, but also get inspiration and have fun : )

Yesterday I’ve finally fixed the last parts of Llaknel’s face mesh and after that was finished I had enough time to re-model his weaponry.

Today I might have finally finished the Llaknel mesh just gotta send it in for a final revision, I’ve made the arms into separate elements from the rest of the mesh, this should help in preventing weird artifacts during animation it should also make skinning the character much faster.

I feel pretty, oh sooo pretty. No, wait. I feel shitty. Didn’t sleep at all and there is no one to blame but myself. I never went to bed but stayed in front of my computer screen, painting my way through the night, then the whole morning and now I have dragged myself to the office for some reason. It’s gloomy and empty and I also got a new background from Tobias. He is upset about the coat one character is wearing and by using MS paint he has expressed his feelings about this matter. That poor boy needs my attention, as always.

So you might be wondering what I painted this night. Well, last Friday I started sketching on a new concept for the third character and that’s what I’ve been trying to finish during the whole day.

I think I’m going in the right direction and I feel quite confident with the design. I had a little different approach than I usually have. On my previous concepts I feel that I move too quickly from making line art to the coloring process. This time I really tried to be more accurate by starting with a rough sketch of the pose then moving on to the anatomy by adding layers and painting over the previous one until I got a nice and clean line art. Sure it takes time but I really felt that it helped me. I added a layer, made some rough sketches and when I was happy with the design, I refined the lineart just like I did with the anatomy.

So now I have a much clearer picture which makes it a lot easier to define the shadows, midtones and highlights. I create a new layer that I stack behind the line art and then I just fill in the values, without any shadows or highlights. When I’m done with that I copy the layer, change the brightness to a darker value and add a layer mask. By using a layer mask I can use black or white to hide or reveal the layer which the mask is covering, in this case the shadows. This is a good way to keep the consistency of the values.

When I feel done with that I simply add a color layer on top and start coloring. I will continue that tomorrow.

I arrived at our office somewhere around four a clock in the afternoon today. When opening the door the “air” hit me in the face like a wall, thick and heavy, filled with mixed scents of cheap fast food, old coffee and garbage from an overgrown trashcan. I sure as hell won’t take it out and I’m just as sure no one else will. Not to mention the bag stuffed with empty beer cans and cola bottles. If our game doesn’t bring us any money we might at least earn a small fortune by recycling. Yay..

Hi blog-minions, Jona speaking!
While other members of the team have been working their asses off. I’ve just been sitting around touching up some faulty geometry on the Laknel 3D Mesh.

Also I’ve finally finished all of the graphics for our tiny 48 hour deadline game, Dead Dictators Society. This second game isn’t really a serious project, DDS is just something we threw together during a small competition here at Gotland University. We are however going to show it off at SGA (Sweden game awards) just for the hell of it. As you can see I’ve posted an image showing off characters from both games so that you can see the difference.

At the weekly meeting yesterday I asked everyone to each give me some material for the blog. I just got this video from Nixi and he told me to put it on the blog. He said that the video shows how he and Tekie are testing to import a 3d model into the game engine. Well I’m not sure if he’s doing that or if he’s just telling me that I was annoying to give him that assignment or both*lol. Check out the video and you’ll probably figure it out. This won’t end up in PoH, unless Playboy buys Databox Games :p

http://blog.penaltyofheroes.com/wp-content/uploads/3d_import.flv

The modeling phase of XXXX (one of the main characters not to reviled just jet) is drawing to an end, and I must say it feels good. As with any game model I will probably have to redo a few things when we’ve had the opportunity to test the engine more, but the idea and shape is there. It all ended at about 10k tris.
Now I’ve got his weapon and quiver left to work on before I get to the UV-Unwrapping, and once that’s finished I’ll start working on the high-poly version that’ll be used as a base for the normal map. I’m looking forward to it!

That’s all for now, I hope you enjoyed it. You’ll get an update on the high-poly when it’s time to present the other characters of PoH : )

The first thing I had to do today was to remove our producer Håkan from my workstation. I wasn’t surprised to see that he, once again, had changed the background on my desktop. His argument was that it was his screen, and therefore he had the right to do this. What can I say?

I finally got to sit down and start working on the quiver for the crossbow. I grabbed my pen, opened a new document and started sketching on some designs. Thirty seconds later Tobias called me over and showed me that he had finished the crossbow model which I made yesterday. Goddammit, I thought I could lean back at least for today but no. The model looked good and there was nothing I could say really so I knew what he was about to say:

“I need a concept of the quiver.”

A couple of hours later I finished the concept. I know it won’t keep him busy for long so now I have to figure out what to do next. I think I’ll finish the concept of another of our four main characters and give him a color palette for the texturing. That’ll show him.