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 : )

Yes, you read right. Our logo for Penalty of Heroes is going out the door and a new one will take it’s place. There we’re several reasons for this change. The two main reasons are that the weapons in the background of the logo have changed and most of the team members wanted a more “edge” to the logo and make it more original. So in a few days we’ll reveal the logo and we’ll also change the logo on all Penalty of Heroes related pages.

The new logo is a bit different from the old one, but we really hope you’ll like it!

Yesterday evening Håkan, Jona and Nixi were away and tried the mo-cap (motion capture) equipment that we have at our disposal. Here are some screen shots from the warm up videos. I wasn’t allowed to post any video, because Nixi had very strong fear about becoming the new “You Tube wacko” on the Internet. As Nixi puts it in one of the 100 videos we recorded yesterday -”this is definably Star Wars kid material”
The photos are screen shots from the videos we shot. That’s why the quality isn’t the best

When I saw the video of Nixi I thought that he had the mo-cap clothing on. So I said -”nice spandex you got on”. Nixi commented:
-”Those are my regular clothes, you bastard. Not as tight as the motion capture suit and not spandex but sure, they are tighter than your tailored grey suit.”
Nice to feel some love :p Also I don’t have a grey tailored suit, only a black one and I only use it for weddings and funerals.

* HERE’s some more stuff about the mo-cap room + video.

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.

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.

The office have always bean to small fore nine people bout that shouldn’t  stop us to make it nice for us self , now for once when we have it rather clean.  So me and dwarf printed some images PoH and stamp on the wall.

curtain someone ?

Approximately two a clock (2 pm), I arrived at our office. I was happy to see that the garbage had been carried out and that my colleges weren’t there. It was calm and quiet, no one making bad jokes or laughing out loud, showing video clips of dancing bears or fat chicks eating cat food. No one demanding anything or telling me how “emo” I am. Ah, good times. Of course this didn’t last very long and things went back to “normal”.

I thought that a concept for Llaknels knives would a good thing to start off with. Llaknel supposed to look and fight like an assassin or rouge if you like. At first I made two quite short knives with regular handles but later I changed them into something that you hold more like iron knucklers. I also got some feedback from Tobias and Kristoffer and they suggested that I added some sort of stabilizer. Sometimes, on very rare occasions, they actually have something useful to say.

Since I (Jens) moved to Gran Canarias for two week I take it easy and only work 6-8 hour a day, 5 days a week (at home normally 10-16 hours daily)

Here’s my nice day:
07.00-09.30 Getting up and work
09.30-10.00 Breakfast at with my sister
10.00-15.00 stay at the beach or the pool with my sister
15.00-18.00 work outside on the balcony (when my sister’s working)
18.00-18.30 dinner
18.30-21.00 work
21.00-22.00 Watch my sister at her music show
22.00 —- party, go to a bar, go in the city, eat, watch a movie

We should move Databox Game down here and I think I will address this at next meeting. No more snow, rain, cold, dark Sweden, just sun, heat, sea, cheep beer and girls in bikinis every day.

* I would guess all happy sweet games are made in places where it’s like this and all dark games are made in countries like Sweden, Finland and so on. But who wants to make sweet and happy games anyway :p ?

At yesterdays meeting we decided that we had to do something about people dropping in late for meetings. Two persons showed up in time and then people dropped in over 1 hour late. We had brought up this problem before and it was mostly generated by the fact that people stayed up until 06.00 in the morning working.
Anyway we decided that a Penalty will be in place for being late to a meeting:

The fees:
20 skr (≈$2.5) being late for a weekly meeting
10 skr (≈$1.3) being late for a Scrum meeting

All money will be collected in a “party pot” and will support the companies parties :p

Well we couldn’t believe our eyes when we woke up this morning and found that Exhaust was the most popular community game on Xbox Live. It fells really great and surreal that people have started to play our game. Just let us know what you think about it. I’ll post some screen shots so you don’t think that we’re making it up : )

We (Databox Games) got three games into the Swedish Game Awards this year. The games nominated are Exhaust, Dead Dictators Society and Penalty of Heroes.

Don’t forget to vote for us!

Exhaust finally got approved by Microsoft and are now available to buy from Xbox Live Marketplace in Canada, France, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom and The United States. It´s a big relief to finally know that I don´t have to work any more on the game and I am very happy with the result. I finally made a game I can be proud of : )

You’ll find Exhaust on Xbox Live Marketplace HERE

Things move fast in here. We had as a small goal to keep this blog updated once a week, but at this pace we have been posting around 3-4 posts/week, which is a bit : ) We´ll hopefully keep this up so that you can follow what we’re doing.

So cheers to the 50 post old blog :p

-“foooor, he’s a jolly good fellow …. “

Now a little about PoH, … so me and Tobias finally sat down and fixed a basic bone animation for our project. It worked nicely and I feel that animation wont be a problem in the project. I also wrote a kind of basic particle system that used the gpu for animating the particle system.

You could say mixing pleasure with pleasure (working and partying). The time is 00.15 and the day just turn from Saturday to Sunday. Right now we’re working on finishing the Databox Games web site and drinking a bit. Drinking and working isn’t good if you’re a bus driver, but if you’re making games it can sometimes help to get really great ideas, … well until you sober up :p

Yepp, everyone’s back from the holidays. We started it right away with a meeting about what and when we’ll be doing stuff for the next 6-8 month. Håkan was especially happy since both his computer and scooter (snow mobile) had broken down.

The modeling phase of XXXX (one of the main characters not to reviled just jet) is drawing to an end, and I must say it feels good. As with any game model I will probably have to redo a few things when we’ve had the opportunity to test the engine more, but the idea and shape is there. It all ended at about 10k tris.
Now I’ve got his weapon and quiver left to work on before I get to the UV-Unwrapping, and once that’s finished I’ll start working on the high-poly version that’ll be used as a base for the normal map. I’m looking forward to it!

That’s all for now, I hope you enjoyed it. You’ll get an update on the high-poly when it’s time to present the other characters of PoH : )

Now it’s a new year and with new year comes new routines. Before Christmas has been more of a research face where everyone has been in preproduction. The programmers have been coding the engine, narrative has been written and the artists have been sketching.
So now when all the preproduction have been done we’ll be starting to use the project management tool/system Scrum to get everyone working tight together. With Scrum we’ll have daily meetings and work towards common milestones.

We’ll keep you updated how things work out with Scrum : )

We ‘ve got our companys web page up and running, so head over to www.databoxgames.com and have a look at it and other games we have made.

Hope everyone will have a great new years eve and a great 2009!
Be sure to check out Penalty of Hero later this year!