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)

Hello there dear readers, this is Tobias dropping in for an update.

Lately Ive been doing a lot of texturing and animation work which generally isn’t a very fun process to watch since it involves alot of smaller tweaking and jumping back and forth between different applications.

Part 1

Now on the other hand, I have the honor of showing you a short video of when I’m modeling the base mesh of one of the grunt enemies in PoH.

Generally, modeling a base mesh isn’t very troublesome since Ive made a habit of studying concept images and discussing any question marks with our lead artist before I start. The problems with creating a character start later on when more of the technical matters come into picture.

Part 2

I guess the biggest issue I had with this character was to get the right proportions. Getting the right chest-leg and chest-arm ratios and so on. Other than that, hands are always a pain in the *** to model.

Enjoy!

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

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.

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

Here’s the third part of the Velocirator series, where you get to follow an enemy all the way from first concept to a finished and animated 3d mesh.
Once again I have in co-operation with Håkan compiled this little video, it shows my workflow as I rig, skin and textur the Velocirator (Ratociraptor?) in 3ds max, at 12 times the original speed.

I will make sure to keep my camera rolling when I animate it as well, look forward to it! Please!

I’ve been working on a new enemy which Nixi has drawn, I want it to be called a Velocirator, mainly because it’s a rat with a Velociraptor’s body, but also because it rolls nicely off of one’s tongue.

Now for the real reason of this rant, this is the second in the four part series about the enemy, which started out as nothing more than the “tiny foe”, the less than dreadful, Velocirator!

Using Håkan, I’ve compiled this video where I model the Velocirator from start to finish.

Enjoy it!

Nixi and me work quite closely, once Nixi has finished a concept he hands it to me so that I will be able to start modeling it, during the time I work on the model I often take Nixi away from new concepts and make him give me some critique on my model.

Then when Nixi and I agree upon the model being finished I UVW map, rig and skin the model after that I usually put a really basic texture onto the
model and start to animate.

Being more of a technical artist I do find general anatomy to be my main issue while modeling things, especially human anatomy, which luckily is something that Nixi is quite good at.

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.

Next week, starting on Tuesday, we’ll be posting a series of posts that are connected to eachother and showing how we work . We will do this using one of our enemies. First of is Nixi, our concept artist, that first shows how he draws two versions of the enemy. In the Next post Jona, one of our 3d artists show how he makes a 3d model using Nixis concept art. In the third video Jona is skinning and texturing the 3d model. In the last video you’ll see the enemy move.

Here’s a little “pre taste” video of Llaknel being textured in Mudbox.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.