Sometime everything is against you, like today I had to do a  lots of paper work for our company and bank so we  finally can  get pay for our other game Exhaust. It’s god dame boring but have to be done, it’s 30+ Celsius (86+ Fahrenheit) and all the girls are running around in there new summer clothes outside dozenth increase my concentration either,  maybe i well grade myself i swim in the ocean after this.

Oh I forgot, the politician weekend this week and then your not allowed to go through the  town naked :/ to bad

Today it’s “Midsummer eve” here in Sweden and no one is working because everyone is partying and celebrating summer, … in the rain :p

Since we have many people outside Sweden I first thought that I was going to tell you about how and why we celebrate it, but the text on Wikipedia was good so I though Wiki could tell you why : )

-”In modern Sweden, Midsummer’s Eve and Midsummer’s Day (Midsommarafton and Midsommardagen) were formerly celebrated on June 23th and 24th, but since the 1950’s on the Friday between June 19th and June 25th and the following Saturday. It is arguably the most important holiday of the year, and one of the most uniquely Swedish in the way it is celebrated, even if it has been influenced by other countries long ago. The main celebrations take place on the Friday, and the traditional events include raising and dancing around a huge maypole. One typical dance is the frog dance. Before the maypole is raised, greens and flowers are collected and used to cover the entire pole.

Raising and dancing around a maypole (majstång or midsommarstång) is an activity that attracts families and many others. People dancing around the pole listen to traditional music and many wear traditional folk costumes. The year’s first potatoes, pickled herring, sour cream, and possibly the first strawberries of the season are on the menu. Drinking songs are also important at this feast, and many drink heavily.

Because Midsummer was thought to be one of the times of the year when magic was strongest, it was considered a good night to perform rituals to look into the future. Traditionally, young people pick bouquets of seven or nine different flowers and put them under their pillow in the hope of dreaming about their future spouse. In the past it was believed that herbs picked at Midsummer were highly potent, and water from springs could bring good health. The connection to fertility is naturally linked to the time of year. Many young people became passionate at Midsummer, and this was accepted, probably because it resulted in more childbirths in March which was a good time for children to be born.”

So now you know more about Midsummer eve than most Swedish people :p

As I mentioned before it’s holiday time for some of the people at Databox and this weekend it’s also “Midsummer eve”, a holiday/weekend where you celebrate summer with eating and drinking and dancing around a giant XXXX.

It usual rains on Midsummer eve and this year looks like no exeption. Anyway I assume that there will be not so much work done on PoH the next 3-5 days.

… That is the question. And the answer is no. We won’t have booth babes on GGA, but we will have a nice looking booth though. We’re currently working with what to have and what not to have inside our booth on Tuesday. Calling all sorts of companies to get the right look, we’ve settled with A0 cardboard paper with images of the exteriors of the game to decorate our foreground. From the blueprint of our booth it looks good and I bet it’ll look even better in place.

* Comment by Jens *

Well, Stoff thougth that he was talking the truth when he wrote this post and I had no idea of a booth babe. Anyway one of our friends turned up at GGA dressed up as Kimo. First I saw a person holding a “wand” and I thought -”hmm, that looks just like Kimos wand”. Then I saw the pattern on her leg and I thougth -”shit that’s Kimo”. So that’s really sweet to actually have a person dressed up like someone we “invented” for our game.

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.

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

Let’s throw out the old saying and replace it with a new one. -”Word-by-mouth” has been and still is one, if not, the best way to get attention. When it comes to Internet  then it’s even more important. So let us change the popular expression”Word-by-Mouth” to the new invented “Word-by-Mouse”. The “Mouse” is the new refined form of the “Word”. On Internet the “click” on a page/url means exposure and when you sen urls to friends through MSN, forums, You Tube, Facebook etc you’re spreading the word like never before. To get the “ball” rolling is now the key to get major exposure.

Attention = Exposure = Money (yes I know the ugly “M-word”)

We at Databox had a little “taste” of it in March when Gotland University gave out a press release about one of the educations (IGPS - International Game Production Studies)  that some of us in the team are studding. The news was on some major gaming sites and we more than doubled the visitors to our blog in a day. Some of you reading this might got the news about our blog through that press release : )

So I would say “Word by Mouce” is the most important thing in marketing anything on-line today. So:
-”send our blog to 10 of you friends within 10 minutes and you’ll be the happiest person today. If not you’ll be cursed and you’ll start to dislike playing games” :p

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

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 : )

We have entered Sweden Game Awards with “Penalty of Heroes” and they have done a preview/interview with us where we talk about PoH development and related stuff. So if you’re interested in knowing more about PoH just head over HERE to read all about it.

The deadline for SGA is the 24th of May, so we’re working hard to have the game ready for them : )

* They have the earlier screenshots of the game (not the new one)

Well you didn’t expect that now did you? Our first preview of Penalty of Heroes we gave to our friends over at the great gaming site Evil Avatar. So head over there and get the first sneak peek of the game.

Read the preview here (you have to scroll down a bit)

Now, Penalty of Heroes, your new game is a quite traditional in its concepts. What titles have been particularly influential in the game design?
One of the reasons why we wanted to make a game like Penalty of Heroes in the first place was to take the elements that we loved in old school games and combine them into a new one. Games that we love and have influenced us for Penalty of Heroes are Golden Axe, Turtles in Time, Secrets of Mana and Diablo. The game design philosophy for Penalty of Heroes was to take the best features of old school arcade and console games and then mix it with next generation graphics and physics.

Describe the gameplay for us.
Penalty of Heroes have four unique playable characters (tank, healer, dps, range) which have different weapon, fighting style and magic. All of the characters are in play all the time, so in single player mode you can swap between the characters as you want. If you need a character with a range weapon you swap to the range character, if you feel you need more muscles you change to the tank character. So in a way you’re controlling all of the characters.

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.

So it’s time once again to let you know what we will be up to this week, by posting our “sprint of the week”, “project plane of the week”, “to-do list of the week” or just simple our focus area (work) this week. As last week this week will focus much on programming. On Wednesday we have a “game presentation” and we will show some gameplay of the game to some people in the industry. So there’s a lot of things that should be done before that.

Code
Make more AI patterns
Adjust player control (revive)
Enemy generator true triggers
Camera kontroll Concept (2d)
Menu & GUI (animation)
Particles

Level (2d)
Finalize level 1

3d
Make animations for foes

Narrative
Fraps animations for sound effects

Other things
Start to work on presentation
Sketch for trailer for GGA
GGA boot
Game play presentation

Today when we come the office, our beloved mascot Godan was laing dead before one of the coders computer.

We have no idea what have happen but we we strongly suspect the cleaner,  this is our penalty for  leaving food behind.

Grodans struggle will not be in wain. He will always someway appear in our game and so live on.

RIP Grodan

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!

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.

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.