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.

At the risk of making myself look like a huge nerd… that train probably left in most people eyes when I decided upon becoming a game designer, anyhow, here’s the nail in my nerd coffin.

Frostmourne

This nail is what I just received at our office on Gotland, the sword Frostmourne from Blizzard’s Warcraft universe.

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.

Here’s a list of all the main programs that we use to make Penalty of Heroes.

The game engine, level editor and other stuff (scripting & collision system, shaders and so on) is done in-house and our programmers write everything in C# (The engine and the level editor both use XNA 3.0 and are developed in Visual Studio 2008).

Our concept artists use Wacom drawing boards to draw the characters in the computer in Photoshop.

Our 3d artists use 3d Studio Max for modeling and Mudbox 2009 for texturing

Here’s from an on-line meeting using Marratech

Additional programs:
For the web we code in HTML and Flash and for the blog we use Word Press (HTML).
For communication we use MSN, Skype, Marratech and related programs.
For documentation/project management we use Word, Excel and Google document.
For video & trailers we use Premier Pro & After Effects
Also our narrative guy mr Stoffer uses MS Paint to draw his ideas.

Hmm I think that’s about it : )

As you might already know, a friend of ours is making the first teaser for Penalty of Heroes. It originates from a sketch we made a couple of months ago. So far we have seen two teasers/trailers that use the same concept, both video game trailers and trailers from movies. I had not seen them before we started working on our teaser, so I can gladly state that the concepts were not stolen, but right for 2009. We’ll release this teaser very soon : )

Anyways, we are currently sketching on another trailer. The trailer has more of the story to tell obviously, but we tend to keep it short and none spoiler wise. There’s nothing more disturbing than watching a trailer that slaps you in the face and says “this is how the movie ends” or shows the last boss in action. No one wants to see that and we’re planning to keep it that way. However, we need to find something that’s interesting. And believe me; not giving away too much, is going to be tough.

* Jens comment *
We’ll see if this “story trailer” will be made (I hope so). It’s more about having time or finding someone to do it and also convincing the other on the team that it’s a good idea (hope our teaser making friend can help us out). This trailer will tell the “pre story” and set the mood for the game and the time frame for it to be done is about the beginning of the summer (June). We also had thoughts of doing a one minute movie about each character, but we haven’t got the time to do it as good as we want it to be, so we decided not  do it. Though we’ll present them on this blog in a similar way in this following month. More of that in a few days : )

Well, the 3ds max test renderings of the levels have actually been done a long time ago, it was one of the first things I had to do to test the preferred perspective for example. Even if the first renders did not lock acceptable they still served the purpose of being somewhat of a draft that could be related to.

I will attach two of the oldest renders and two of our last renders before we started building levels in our level editor so you can see the progress more easily.

Last night I had some trouble sleeping so I decided to start work on some 3d instead. Its been a while since I worked with 3d modeling so I was happy to feel how fast I adapted to the workflow. It took about three hours to complete the base model and it ended up using only about 1,7k triangles. That is very low but the result looked pretty good considering.

Forest enemy 3dmodel

I continued to work on the rig during the day, first skinning the low poly and then adding a turbosmooth modifier which automatically subdivides the mesh and makes it smoother. The skin adapted very well to the new mesh and I could begin animating, but a model needs textures and textures needs a good unwrapping, which should be done before you start with the rig. Luckily I figured out a way to solve this problem by simply saving the skin and adding it later to the unwrapped model. Its still wip and stuff like weapons, clothes or armor will be added later.

I learned a lot of things making this model and Jona showed me a couple of things I’ve never used before, mostly biped animation tips and tricks. Thank you.

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.

An arcade Hack ’n Slash game without big bad bosses wouldn’t live up to the genre name. Luckily Penalty of Heroes does have that very important ingredient and on one level the players will encounter Maag. He is big and he is bad, he wields two brutal swords and is covered with armor making him almost invulnerable to all attacks. An attentive player however might discover his Achilles heel and use it to take him down, it wont be easy but I promise it’ll be fun.

Here’s the earliest sketch of Maag. I first thought of posting the final concept art, but I thought that we won’t show everything in the game just yet ; )

The shield of one of the main character has taken quite some time to create, not because the modeling is particularly difficult, but because we had trouble getting a design that we could agree upon down.

Here are some of the late versions that we sat and chose between.

Today I installed a monstrous coffee machine at our office. By my calculation it will increase the work flow by 12% and make the team members afford to buy six more beer each week (because the coffee cost 1 euro at the machine outside our office). Thought it will also increase the time used for toilet visits by 5% :p

EDIT good news everyone our WC have finale bean completely restore and are ready to use.

The model to the right is from the game “Hellgate London”.

I’ve been putting a lot of time into the start screen lately, trying to give a more impressive feel to it, something that reflects the awesomeness of what to come when starting up the game. I want to spend even more time to it but this will do for now. Its fairly close to what you will see in the actual game except that it will be much more vivid when all the shaders puts into use, such as moving leaves, clouds and flags and more. Without saying too much you might get a glimpse of that quite soon..

The second iteration of the start screen

It’s been a while since my last contribution to this blog and I know that Jens is very mad with me. I can hear it in his voice and now my fear of facing that anger is forcing me to write. Luckily he works from a distance so there still might be time left before he unleashes his great anger upon me. Better get started.

Last week I worked with several things; enemies, the gem system and the start menu. Today I’ll show you the final concept of the very first two enemies the player will encounter, the forest troll and a mount animal. You might recognize the troll from some of my earlier sketches. I’ve polished it and thought about its behavior.

The troll can come as one or riding on the pigs back. When mounted you can hit him so that he dies and falls off, this will change the way the pig acts and it will go berserk and start charging wildly across the screen. The player will unfortunately not be able to use the pig as a mount. That would look funny though.

* Jens comment *
I never get mad at you Trixi ; ) I only frustrated :p You have to ask/tell the people around 10 times before they start to blog. Then when they do, you get 10-20 posts to sort out. The “blog rule” here at DataBox is that each person should post 0.5-1 post/week. This so the people reading our blog knows what we’re up to.

Would be cool if you could eat that nice little piggy and gain heath from it after you killed it (guess I put that on the “wish/reject” list :p)

I know that we haven’t showed you so much from the actual game. But I promise you that in the next month we’ll be showing of some in game shots and maybe even some videos.

So I thought it was time to show you how the drafts and sketches of the first level in the game looked like.

Stoffer (narrative) and Håkan (producer) told me that the start of the game would be in a grand city (the heroes hometown) and it would later transcend into a nearby forest.

As reference material to the city I used pictures from Minas Tirith, the ruins in Oblivion, the Roman Empire, and inspiration from modern cities. So it’s a mixture of all of that : )

The inspiration material for the forest I used different pictures of forests. The main object for me is to make the forest more interesting and alive that in normal “forest levels” in side scrollers.

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.

Just got a 23 page document with questions from our main teacher Troels (aka mr T). The good things with these “question documents” are that you get  insight about why you’re doing things and what you might should consider doing differently. The bad thing is that it takes some times to get these documents right. Anyway I hope that in the long run it will be worth it : )

This document is mainly about our target group and “ultimate gamer” and how to reach them. So it’s mainly about marketing (I know the ugly word :p)

Here’s a snip of text from the document:

Market segmentation is the process of classifying a market into distinct subsets (segments) that behave in similar ways or have similar needs. The segmentation process in itself consists of segment identification, segment characterization, segment analysis and target audience selection. If a segment is fairly homogeneous in its needs and attitudes, it is likely to respond similarly to a given marketing strategy.

Guess this document takes away 2 working days for me and Håkan. Håkan is by the way in Denmark today and I think he would also have a meeting with mr T (yes our main teacher is Danish and also lives there).

Making a good logotype is never simple, in this case it took a couple of iterations before I was somewhat happy with the look.

The main issue was to get it uptodate with the new weapons, also to get a more feel of action and arcade. To do that the former true type had to go, also as I noticed most game logotypes in comparison to regular company logos was much more graphically rendered.

So generally that’s the main issue I had to solve, also to get it easy read, fantasy-impression, working 2-color, smalprint accessible, not to different from before and somewhat good looking of course :p
Most issus come to be the font (probably because I believe that custom made fonts for logos are the only right thing) and after that the rendering and color that never seemed to hit the spot.

Well, it took a couple of tries before it could be called the new logo.
Here are some of the later iterations that didn’t made it.