Everyone has more than their hand full and on top of it Easter is coming this week. Which probably means that we’re losing some work days since some of us are going to visit our families. Also we might have to present last weeks canceled presentation. Well that’s life : )

This week sprint looks something like this:

Code:
Continue work on shaders
Implement other features

2d:
Concept art for bosses
Concept art for alternative enemies

3d:
Continue making enemies
Put textures on 3d models

Levels:
Continue making level

Narrative:
Explanations for all people and enemies in the game

Marketing:
Sleep and fishing : p

Today I finished writing the last level. Yeehaa! As usual I can’t say much about it, hence spoiling the goods. But some interesting new story elements have been brought in, as some new events in the game play. These events will hopefully give the players a taste of what our definition of hack n slash is all about. I really do have high expectations of this game. Everyone has been working their /&%¤# off so far and we still have A LOT more to do before releasing PoH.

Today we had one of the shortest weekly meetings in the history of Databox. It was about 45 minutes including the “ordinary” 15 minute delay.

Today we discussed next week “game panel” presentation and who is gonna make it and if we needed any new layout (or use the last one). We haven’t heard which people or from which game companies that will be present, so it might be the people from last presentation (better ask mr T).

Since we stated “major sprint 4″ this Tuesday we went though what went right and wrong in sprint 3. The coding is still a bit behind, but that’s mainly because Baba and Jakob have had programming classes the last 2 weeks. The 3d modeling is also speeding up and we’re on track there.

Sprint 4 is a pure production period, no more testing or concepting. The game is up and running, the level editor is stable and it’s just about putting content together and make a game.

On Tuesday it’s the end of (major) sprint 3. So this week will be testing all of the thing we’ve implemented and done the last weeks.

On Wednesday (major) sprint 4 begins. This major sprint (divided into 4 weekly sprints) will focus on coding, implementing of shaders & particles, level design, 3d enemies and play testing the games all new features that were added last major sprint.

Some people in our team spent the weekend doing a “game jam” contest at Gotland University to have fun and relax form the development of “Penalty of Heroes”.

Game jam = when people get together for a short period of time and make a game from scratch.

The game we made was called Whiplash and we will make a post later on showing you the game.

No, this is not Sparta and this not cliché-ish naked men with painted abs. This is “Penalty of Heroes”, where each of the four characters has his/her very own background and motive in their quest for glory.

But don’t worry old school lovers. We’re not gonna let you down. This IS a hack ´n slash game and we’re gonna keep it that way. But if you wanna find out what PoH really is about, I suggest you pay attention to the story. But once again, don’t panic. You will still get the same maximum amusement if you don’t. The choice is yours : )

So, having that said I believe I can move on and explain the title of my post. First of all, I LOVE 300, so don’t get me wrong about the whole deal with clichés etc. I mentioned Sparta because we have a lot of remade quotes from modern day media. Hopefully you’ll recognize and be recognized as you and your friends make progress in the game. But where it’s bright, you will also find darkness. The game touches some issues that I hope you will enjoy just as much as the fun parts. It’s the best of both worlds. We have black, white, AND gray. Totally ran out of metallic green though… Enjoy.

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.

This weekly meeting started just 15 minutes late :p The work hours was discussed … again (mostly so everyone work at the same time).

Today we mainly discussed the enemies of Penalty of Heroes and if we can make different versions of them to get more types of enemies.

On Tuesday it’s stop for “major sprint 3″ (each “major sprint” is divided into 3-4 weekly sprints), so we discussed which tasks are done or behind schedule.

So it’s was time for the weekly big meeting. As usual we stared the meeting about 20-30 minutes late. Today it was due to the heavy discussion that went on for about 30 minutes. The discussion was which girl is the best looking, not gonna name any names but there were actresses , porn stars and artists in the discussion. Today we mostly discussed the contract for Databox Games and future of Databox Games for the next 2 years. We also discussed:

• Discussing the enemies
• Dangers/threats for PoH being released
• New things on the “wish list”

This meeting was extra long (nearly 4 hours), but it was mainly to solve everything with the company.

Just as last weeks “weekly meeting”, not everyone was there (some had lectures). We really didn’t had an agenda when we started, but after a few minutes of talk we suddenly had a lot to talk about. It was very much talk about what will happen in the next few month, about how we’re doing (compared to our scrum plan) and what will happen this summer (holidays, work and so on). We also discussed what different trailer/videos we will/should have.

This meeting also cleared a lot of things for the future so, now we know what we’re aiming for and what to expect (a bit cryptic, I know :p)

Yeah, we also got conference microphones after about 3 month after ordering one. This so that people that attending the meeting though “Skype”/Marratech

* We also have some new news about the music for the game, but we’ll tell you more about it in a few days.

As I told you a few days ago we were in the middle of changing the Penalty of Heroes logo. So here it is. Hope you like it : )

Project that have more then two people should  have a system to handle all the files, milestone and responsibility to easy and early get an overview how to project are  progressing. Content management system isn’t it always an advantage because it can cost more time to handle everything without one.

Due to our group are bigger then two, we decide early go get one. There by the past two week I have gone true probably 20 different management software both free and commercially and I haven’t found any to satisfy me.

In the end and two weeks of waste time  it turn out that we use what we started with. Wiki, FTP,  Google doc and old school “post it”.  Actual I have decided to write  an application named SAMSFSTDR (scrum and content management system for small team done right) this summer because there arn’t any one out there.

Yesterdays weekly meeting was shorter that it use to be. This was mainly because we were only 4 people present (some people had lectures) and the things we had on the agenda was with the people that weren’t there. The main thing we discussed was how the main page for Penalty of heroes is going to look like.

As always on Thursdays we had our big weekly meeting today. Today it was the first time we discussed all the things that had been written down on the “wish list”. There were around 15 ideas and I think it was only 3 suggestions that were put away directly, 4 were considered to be implemented and the rest was considered “ok” (Ok = will be implemented if we have time).

We discussed the progress of sprint 2 and the beginning of sprint 3 (starts next week). We also discussed that we might divide the “major sprints” into smaller “weekly sprints”, this so that it becomes more of weekly goals instead on “monthly goals”. The risk of having a “monthly goal” is that you might focus and work 3 weeks with one thing and when the last week of the sprint comes you suddenly realize that you haven’t done all the other stuff you were supposed to do during the whole sprint.

We talked about motion capture (which we should try tonight : ) and what type of script function we would like to have in the game.

There were also some other smaller stuff that we discussed today.

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.

Today we had a on-line meeting/seminar with Kjartan Vidarsson that now work as a producer at NDS, he worked previously at Deadline Games and IO Interactive.

Kjartan first talked about his experience with Scrum and then let us talk about our game and how we use Scrum. It was very productive to discuss how we use Scrum with a person that handled over 100 Scrum teams over the years. We mostly discussed how we used Scrum and how we could manage things to get more effective.

Some of the things he suggested were:
- We could get in trouble because our team is around 10 people and the ideal size of Scrum team is around 3-6 people.
- We should have our daily Scrums meetings earlier than 14.00 (2 pm)
- We should have a voting system for what new features we should implement and focus on.
- We should modify our release plans and have more “test released” planed.
- We should define and have a protocol where we could measure if a task was done or not in a Sprint.

One nice thing was that when Kjartan got our main “scrum document” (we send it to him in the middle of the meeting) he was quiet for some time and we asked why he didn’t say anything and he said that he was really impressed by it. Though he didn’t really understand some of the not used (filled in) pages we had in the document. When we told him that it was “burn down charts” (that we didn’t really use) he was even more impressed.

Kjartan also told us that he was looking forward to hear and see more about Penalty of Heroes. It’s things like that that makes you work even harder : )

* HERE’s an old blog post how we use scrum in development of PoH

The best game from the last millennium was with out doubt Secret of Mana for the SNES and Golden Axe for the Amiga 500. The reason that I like those game was because of the co-op mode that let me play a long adventurer with my friend instead of trying to beat them all on verses game. I rather after school try to beat one more chapter in SoM, or progress longer on the hard mode on Golden Axe with my friends, and i still do today.

When the time come to build my latest game in game design education it felt pretty natural to mix game system form my favorite childhood game and there by crate a new one. Another big reason are that I haven’t find any other game that have the game system that i like about SoM GA and TMNT in time.

On the meeting tomorrow we’ll have a lot of different things to discuss such as how big the characters will be on the screen, coming events (such as SGA, GGA, Nordic Games), the music (new music guy on the team), the narrative and different things regarding the level editor.

On Friday we’re going to have a very interesting on-line lecture/seminar mainly about Scrum with Kjartan Vidarsson that has been a producer at Deadline Games (Chili con Carnage, Faith and a .45, Total Overdose) and he also worked at IO (Hitman, Kane & Lynch, Freedom Fighters). He’ll have a look how we use Scrum when we work on PoH and he’ll come with suggestions how to improve things (there’s always room for improvements).
It’s going to be really interesting.

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.