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

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.

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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.

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.

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We have put together a short “promotion video” for our blog. We feel that many people would be interested in our blog, but right now they might not know of it. So now go and send this video/url to all of your friends : )

In the video are some video that you probably not yet have seen. Hope you enjoy it!

Today I’d like to share a new recording. Like the previous one I posted, this video demonstrates the process of drawing and coloring an enemy concept in photoshop. All I knew when starting was that it should be a quite heavily armored average male warrior controlled by Maag, the leader of Jedna. His equipment will vary but in this case I felt that it would be cool if he wielded a large shield, making him suitable for a little more dynamic and interesting AI. I didn’t use any reference whatsoever, I’m painting directly from my head and experimenting with different shapes to create an interesting armor.
It took about three hours to finish but the video is at high speed as usual.

Part 1

Part 2

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!

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.

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.

Today we had a really really (je a kinda like hats) nice locking man at our office, the man with the hat and pair of braces Ernest W Adams, Ernest are HGO guest professor in game design that just have finished a workshop for the first and second grade game design students. I ask Ernest afterwards if he had time to look at our game Exhaust that five people from Databox Games had recently been released to Xbox live community games and he happily agreed.

At our office (for some reason real clean right now, I wonder why) Don and Ernest had the chance to see the pro play the games last level before giving the chance to try out the tutorial level for themselves. I always found it quiet funny that Ernest didn’t handle the gamepad well since he have write 3 books about game design. I believe like all professors he enjoys to observe more than participate and thats total fine. Afterwards the Exhaust team seams really happy and they totally earn it for all their hard work.

It’s not every day you get the chance to let a gamasutra writer review your game

Well you read it right folks. I’m on the way down to Gran Canarias, one of the Canary Islands will “all” of Databox money they made from Exhaust :p No I’m just joking : )
My sister works there as a musician at a hotel, so I promised her to visit her before Christmas, but there were no time. So when I saw a very cheap fly ticket yesterday I couldn’t resist, so long rainy, snowy, cold, dark Sweden :p

Since the hotel got wireless broadband I don’t think this trip will affect the work on the game in any way : ) The only thing is that I’ll probably only be working 8 hours days instead of the 12-16 hours day I have done the last month. Might even share some pictures : )

At the weekly meeting yesterday I asked everyone to each give me some material for the blog. I just got this video from Nixi and he told me to put it on the blog. He said that the video shows how he and Tekie are testing to import a 3d model into the game engine. Well I’m not sure if he’s doing that or if he’s just telling me that I was annoying to give him that assignment or both*lol. Check out the video and you’ll probably figure it out. This won’t end up in PoH, unless Playboy buys Databox Games :p

Well not Penalty of Heroes, but Exhaust! What’s Exhaust!?! It’s  the first gravity based 2.5D monster truck racing game for Xbox Live Arcade and it’s made by three persons from Databox Games (Jakob, Baba & Jona). We have send in Exhaust to Microsoft for evaluation/certification/bug testing and it will be out when it’s got the big OK from Microsoft. We’ll keep you updated when the game’s available for download on XBLA.

Be sure to check out the trailer for the game here!

Everyone have left the island of Gotland for the holiday and gone back to their families. I got some videos from Håkan and Jona of what they were up to. Håkan has been out with his love Lisa (his scooter) and Jona been singing a bit.

When me (Jens), Nixi and Håkan had a meeting yesterday, Håkan suddenly got some serious cramp in his jaw *lol. The thing that made it even funnier was that we got in on camera since we had the meeting on Marratech. Håkan is yawning and then the cramp comes and stays for about 30 sec. Me and Nixi first thought that it was a joke so we’re joking about calling 112 (Swedish 911) or putting the movie clip on You Tube or our blog (which we now do).

I just took my digital camera and shot the video at my computer screen so the quality isn’t the best, but the fun is ; )

So if you want to learn some useful Swedish:
-“sendrag i käften!” is something like -“cramp in the jaw!”

Here’s a video of some shader testing. The game being showed/tested is Exhaust. What’s Exhaust you might ask!?!

-”Exhaust is the first gravity based 2.5D monster truck racing game to ever hit the market. Even though it is called a racing game, the use of dynamic objects and physics in a world controlled by gravity has given us the option of adding loads of interesting artifacts to the racing tracks which turns this monster truck racer into an incredible platform game.”

The game is made for Xbox Live Arcade by three persons from Databox Games (Jakob, Baba & Jona). The game will be out in the beginning of 2009. We’ll keep you updated on how things are going.