Today we have 4 things in one blog post, so enjoy : ) Here are a couple of WIP (Work In Progress) images from our engine.

Image 1. Says it all. It’s an overview of what our codes look like.

As seen in image 2 we maximized the engine’s capacity, using enemies to see whether it would crash or not… It didn’t. It’s vital hence the amount of enemies we’ll use in the game. Not that many enemies as shown but still. Maybe the new Serious Sam on arcade :p

We also wanted to give you a glimpse of our AI pattern as shown in image 3. It’s a simplified view of the enemies’ movement in the game. Depending on your action and location, the AI will try to find different approaches to get you and hopefully the enemy won’t get stuck behind a tree.

Last but not least the 4th image shows you hit boxes. Blue circles show where the character/enemy can be hit, as the red circles show what parts that will deal damage… Poor piggy died by the hands of Kimo.

So we made it, we just send in a early “build” and a trailer of “Penalty of Heroes” to SGA (Sweden Game Awards). So all we can do now is just hope that the jury likes it : )

There’s a couple of hundred games at SGA  so the competition is quiet hard and also we send in a early “build” so we shouldn’t really expect anything. But who knows : )

Stoffer our Narrativ guy put it like this:
Oh My God! If panic had a face it would surely have looked all of ours on May 24th. Deadline for Swedish Game Awards 09 (SGA) and we made it=). Everything was going according to plan, kind of. We had to make some last minute changes, and of course by then it was almost time’s up. Anyways, everything worked out and we believe that the demo is gonna kick ass.

Of course a demo wasn’t enough. We had to send them a teaser too. Or two as a matter of fact. One PoH teaser not longer than 30 sec and one 30 sec Exhaust teaser. Both which I had to edit with some great effects made by the one and only Dopefish. The PoH teaser is also edited after our latest song made by Pontus. Overall I can say that I’m satisfied with the teasers even though some of the ingame footage wasn’t final.

I’ll be back with more blogging once things have settled down.
Thank you for reading.

Whaaaaat! Already 200 blog posts!?! Well it looks that way in the “post count”. Our goal in the beginning was to post once a week, but then it grow to 2-3 posts a week and when we got into production after new year we felt that one post a day wasn’t hard to do. So we decided to post daily : )

We really hope that you enjoy reading our blog because we do this for you : ) So if you want to know more about certain things just send a mail about it : )

Here’s a selection of some nice blog posts “down the memory lane”:
All the characters of Penalty of Heroes
Cramp in the jaw
Ernest W Adams visit Databox office and tried Exhaust
Starbreeze QA test Exhaust
Working is super nice
The evolvement of a character
Exhaust: the most popular community game on XBL!
Databox Games was ahead of Guitar Heroes!
First concept art
First blog post

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!

As Håkan just wrote we were supposed to had our final “game panel” presentation yesterday. This time around we shouldn’t really present anything … we would just let them be the first one to try “Penalty of Heroes”! So piece of cake? Well not really.

It turned out that none of them got the “beta build” to start so the game panel testing were canceled : (

My girlfriend (worked as test manager at a big Swedish telecom manufacture) though solved the problem. To bad she found the bug 2 hours later. The “bug” was that the game didn’t start if you had a controller, mouse, keyboard or any other external things plugged into the computer.

Anyhow my girlfriend then got the be the first “victim”. I showed her the jump, hit and change character buttons, then I she played the game none stop for about one hour until it crashed. She really enjoyed it.

The “fact” here is:
- The game is in early beta
- She never play games (well just “Wii fit” & Wii sports)
- We thought that the game is more for the hard core audience

I know that should never ever say that your game is fun or anything like that. The fact is that she have heard me talking about PoH for about 5 month daily and she was pretty tired of hearing more about it. So she was prepared that it would pretty much suck ass. Maybe that’s why she enjoyed it : ) If you think something will suck and then it’s “ok”, then it becomes great.

Hmmm, here’s our new “marketing strategy”:
-”Penalty of Heroes is shit and will suck, we are amateurs and Swedish! Don’t expect anything great from us!

In a way that’s true, our game won’t be the new Gears of War 3, Mafia 2 or Diablo 3. We just make a game that we hope will some people will enjoy : )

Yesterday was a hard day, I had to abandon my own child, “the ninjas” and the student unions regular ninja party. I had looked forward to this party that I and dwarf once started and still lives on.

The reason I made the sacrifice for free beer and free absinthe as the younger member of Databox now attended to (BASTERDS!!!) are because of our deadline. Yesterday we have to have our first  demo version ready for game testing, how much I love my child I have to let it go. I have a new target in sight that still demands a lots of works and I’m not gonna allow it to fail.

After six beer and code crank, me, Ninja, Dwarf, Nixi, Andreas, Jens and Jakob successfully build a satisfying demo, 15 min after the closing time of the pub, crap

We had some requests about two week ago that people wanted to have a look at us working at our office. So here’s a video, though from our old office (we just moved), of us at work. This is how it looks like when things are running smoothly and everyone is in.

At first you’ll see Nixi working on some concept art, then a quick look at Jona texturing, over to Jakob coding, to Dwarf making level art, to Andreas play testing, back to Jakob, and then to Jona and Nixi again. The man with the camera is King Klepot aka Håkan.

So, time is starting to run out and the things to do starts to really pile up and in the middle of is half of the team is going to Nordic Games next week.

Code
- Sound & Music (Jakob)
- Change diffuse light (Baba)
- Calibrate particle effects (Baba)
- Optimize code (Jakob & Baba)
- Vertex shader (Baba)
- Game over screen (Jakob)
- Movement & camera (Nixi & Baba)

Animation
- Collision boxes (Tobbe & Jona)
- Frame on character that will detect damage (Tobbe & Jona & Nixi)

Level optimization
-Level 1 (Dwarf)
-Level 2 (Dwarf)

Trailer
- Content (Stoff)

Exhibition booth
- Get all measures & printing details (Stoff)

Other thing
- Gameplay test on Friday, demo done on Thursday

Yes, that’s right, we have put up a new web page on the official “Penalty of Heroes” web page at www.penaltyofheroes.com : ) It’s not the final one and it’s better than the last one. Also there are some content such as concept art, teaser trailer and SCREENSHOTS! This is our first officially released screenshots of Penalty of Heroes, so we hope you like them : )

The screenshots are work in progress and will be adding more features before the release this fall. So the final game will look better than the screenshots that we just released, though we hope you digg them : ) We’re grateful for feedback on them, if we don’t’ get any feedback (good or bad) we don’t know what we should focus on : )

Last week me (Håkan) and Jona sat down and started to focused on animations in the game engine. It’s a task that we have reserved a lot of time for and it looks like we did the right thing since then more you work with it the better it gets.

Almost everyday there have been fist flying against the computers and words that I shouldn’t write here have been yelled at how bad 3ds Max is. It’s a big problem (generally) that the 3d in 3ds Studio Max never looks exactly in the game engine . It’s a process of trail and errors that Jona and Tobias (the 3d artist) really have and is working on.

The more we work, the better we get. The good thing now is that it’s about tweaking, … play/try the game see what works and what’s not and then try to fix it.

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.

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.

We haven’t talked so much about the new people on the PoH and what they will do. So I think feel it’s time to present them now : )

Programming
We haven’t really been on track with the programming for about 2 month and we have been about 2-3 weeks behind scheduel constantly. So we had to do something about it. That “something” was Andreas. Andreas will join the programmer team (Jakob and Baba) but he will focus solely on AI programming, this so Jakob and Baba can focus on all the other stuff such as engine optimizing, shaders, gameplay code and so on. Our producer Håkan has also step in as a programmer and he will program about 50% of his time (about 1h/day :p).

Music & Sound
We have the “know how” in the team but not the time to focus on music and sound, since it takes quiet some time to make. So we invited two new persons to do this.

Pontus Rufelt will make all the music for PoH and you have already heard a bit of it in the “teaser trailer” (yes it’s his music, it’s not music taken from Hans Zimmerman). Pontus is the first “external resource” that we use, but when we heard his creations we all said that he was the guy to make the music.
Josef will make all the sound effects for the game. We know and have worked with Josef on other games such as “In Other Words”.

So welcome Andreas, Pontus and Josef!

Before I post what we discussed on todays weekly meeting, I just want to post a picture of the “Databox team” (we who makes “Penalty of Heroes”).  Some people are missing though, from left to right, Dwarf, Jakob, Baba, Jona Nixi, Stoffer, Håkan (in the tree).

We had a short meeting today since we have a lot of things to do. Things we discussed were the use of shadows in game (we have done some research of it), when we should release screenshots (more “tech” is now in and it starts to look more like the final game). We also discussed how we should divide the programing tasks (we are 4 programmers now) and the sound fx and the music in the game.

Today and tomorrw we will have some nice visitors at our office, so we planed a bit of that and we also cleaned the office : ) We probably post a post in here about the visitors in a few days.

* It’s great spring weather right now in Sweden around 20+ Celsius (68+ Fahrenheit), blue sky and it’s been like this for about 2-3 week now (I’m outside right now, really nice to have wireless broadband)

The last weeks we haven’t had weekly sprint due to Easter and also because we had to finish up things we haven’t completed. Now it seams that we’re starting to get back on track and in the near weeks you’ll be able to see that : ) Our team is also growing a bit, but we’ll tell you more about it in the next few days.

Code:
AI programming
Get shadows to work
Sync normal maps in the engine
Vertex shaders
Basic collision

2d:
Help to fine tune 3d models

3d:
Fine tune animations

Level editor:
Fine tune bloom
Make levels more complete

Narrative:
Research

A couple a weeks ago.  Me, Jona and Baba decide to take a break from PoH under the weekend. We did that by entering Gotland Game Jam and thereby force to crunch 48 hour to succeed to crank out a new game.  The theme for the Game Jam was “the world is not big enough for bout of us ” and ”has to be a co-op game”.

Because of the time pressure we fast decade to make a simple balance game where you have to work together to achieve high score. Try to keep the balance between four player(has to be a co-op game) is not the only issue. If a player hit a fallen object of the same color he will gain weight and grow bigger and there by push out the other player (the world is not big enough for bout of us)

We “almost” reach our goal ”one more hour plz”. We never got the time to implement the gameover screen and some sound effect.

We won the price for best graphic (Go Jona) .

Here are a ingame video of the game and a 2d animation in 3D studio max by Jona.

Music By Pontus Rufelt

During the last week I’ve done extensive testing on how to implement 3D animation. There are two ways to go about this: Write everything from scratch, which is hard to do because of the limited time we have for this project, or use an existing library. I have found three libraries that work on both PC and Xbox.

KiloWatt is by far the best library. Fast and versitile, but with the drawback of beeing complicated to use and it having no documentation what so ever. Is took me about a day to write a wrapper for KiloWatt. The wrapper makes it really easy to load and play animations.

Many people using KiloWatt have had problems with playback of short animations. If the animation contains to few frames, the last frame is padded to get the correct length. This makes the animation ”freeze” once every loop cycle.

The problem is actually caused by the XNA .X importer and not KiloWatt. There are two ways to fix this. One is to filter out and remove duplicate frames in the content proccessor and the second ,easy but uggly way, is to change the NumFrames field in the KiloWatt animation class when loading the models. The padded frames will still be there, but they will not be played.

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.

The meeting started for the first time at the given time : ) Maybe because we had a lot to discuss today.We discussed one really big thing that just had come up and we decided that we would bring that up again after easter so everyone could have a good think about it. We also discussed what things that on schedule with and what things we’re behind in. Since we haven’t been able to get on schedule with the programming (the programmers have had other school assignments) we had some suggestions on how to get on track again. This was the two main discussions at todays meeting. Now it’s back to work all easter long : (

** Today in Sweden it’s kalled “skär torsdag” and the “folk tale” says that today is the day when the witches goes to the island of “Blåkulla” (here in Sweden) to have a gathering. So today many children in Sweden dress up like witches and go from door to dor to get candy (kind of Halloween)

I wanted to share some of the work I’ve been doing in the Story document. This is where everything is explained and later put into each level. It is a guide, me and the other guys in the team, can use while working on the game. But it is also a minor Lore of Penalty of Heroes. I tend to find lore from games I like to be very interesting and somewhat addictive. Therefore I want the Lore of PoH to be well written and intriguing for the people who will enjoy our game and want to find out more after playing it.

This is an early example of one of the creatures/enemies of the game that I would like to share with you:

“The people/creatures living on the mountainside of Jedna were the aboriginals, who later became the founders and the citizens of Jedna. They have a xxx like appearance and have grown fur over centuries from experiencing rough weather and tough climates. Compared to the previous people/creatures of the xxxx and the xxxxx, the men in this mountain are fairly neutral and will not attack outsiders who enter their territory. However if someone would disturb their peace and threaten them, they will be attacked. The mountain men are collectors and are not afraid of the changes happening in xxxxx; such as the xxxxxx. They collect the spare parts thrown off Jedna, which they use to build huts and weapons.”

Ps: X=Secret.