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.

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 : )

An old friends is back, mr “Weekly meeting”. It’s been a while but yesterday he was back. We only discussed the feedback we got from all the people playing PoH at GGA and what we should do about it. It was things from easier way to hit enemies, animation corrections, character tweaking to leveling suggestions. Some of the things will take about 1h to change/try while other things might take up to a week to change (for one person) so after we have put everything down on paper we’ll estimate how long it will take to do and what priority it has.

We also discussed how much people can work this summer and what time they will be away on vacations.

Just tried the particle engine out for the first time, decided to make some firey things, an explosion for some type of thrown bomb as well as the flames from some kind of dragons breath or a flamethrower, my vote and love goes to realtime, can’t wait for realtime voxel fires to really catch on and “true” realtime ray-tracing!

Sorry about the framerate… gotta get a better screen capturing application. The particle effects looks way better in the game engine. We’ll probably release some in-game footage in the next weeks

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.

Dear readers. As you might know, Penalty of Heroes is a hack ’n slash co-op title. A 4 player co-op title nonetheless. Hopefully our game will find its way to every categorized gamer out there and hopefully it will find its way to other than them. Because the game provides so much more than an arcade hack ‘n slash, I think future gamers would enjoy it too. It has story, critic, strategy, blood, explosions, action AND which I love the most: teamwork.

With all of this in one game I think that we can reach out to all of you and make you very pleased. Wow players (myself included) who are used with working together, calculating strategies and kicking a** should have a great time playing PoH, just like the casual gamers will enjoy, well everything which this game provides them.
Thank You for reading.

While coding the game play you always end up with unbelievable bugs, or is it a bug?

I have sometime built mini game upon bug I found, so all aren’t that evil. On behalf of that I now know decided to start a blog series with all off our bugs and feature there. You have to guess what it is, …. so now vote, is it a bug or a feature?

In this video we test the AI and collision system.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

While coding the game play you always end up with unbelievable bugs, or is it a bug?

I have sometime built mini game upon bug I found, so all aren’t that evil. On behalf of that I now know decided to start a blog series with all off our bugs and feature there. You have to guess what it is, …. so now vote, is it a bug or a feature?

In this first video we tested the camera.

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.

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.

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!