Here’s some of Nixis concept art of the main characters for Penalty of Heroes. This and some other collages were Nixis contributions for “Best effort in art” at the Gotland Game Awards, last week. The larger versions of the characters on the sides are the newest versions of the main characters. There’s also some smaller sketches at the bottom of different moves of the characters
Tags: Best effort in art, characters, concept art, Darwin, Databox, GGA, Gotland Game Awards, Kimo, Llaknel, Penalty of Heroes, Zedwig
Some people on the team is in Stockholm today and SGA (Swedish Game Awards). We didn’t win anything sadly but that’s life : ) The games that won were really great and more done and polished than PoH. Great to see that Sweden has so many great new game maker : )
The next comeptions now is Microsofts “Dream Build” where the competition will be even more harder, though PoH will be alot more done then.
Tags: Databox, Dream Build, Microsoft, Penalty of Heroes, SGA, Sweden game awards
An old friends is back, mr “Weekly meeting”. It’s been a while but yesterday he was back. We only discussed the feedback we got from all the people playing PoH at GGA and what we should do about it. It was things from easier way to hit enemies, animation corrections, character tweaking to leveling suggestions. Some of the things will take about 1h to change/try while other things might take up to a week to change (for one person) so after we have put everything down on paper we’ll estimate how long it will take to do and what priority it has.
We also discussed how much people can work this summer and what time they will be away on vacations.
Tags: animation, character, Databox, enemies, Gotland Game Awards, meeting, Penalty of Heroes, tweaking, weekly, Xbox
It sounds really good, but the fact is that during June it’s mostly shitty weather. Normal is that in April and May we have really great weather with about 15-25+ degrees (Celsius) and then when summer should start in June we have a month of kind of bad weather with rain and about 15-20+ degrees.
So why do I write this? Well, it’s because it’s been typical “Swedish summer weather” now for about 2 weeks now and it’s so boring : ( Well I guess the summer will start here late in June so in a couple of weeks it will be all nice I think : )
Later today/tonight we’ll have the first big meeting since GGA and will discuss all the feedback we got. Everyone has written down all the feedback they got/heard from the people playing PoH. At the meeting we’ll decide what things we’ll have to redo and tweek.
Tags: boring, Databox, feedback, GGA, Gotland Game Awards, Penalty of Heroes, summer, Sweden
Since GGA we have had a bit of a vacation from PoH. Tomorrow we’ll have a big meeting about all the feedback we got from all the people at GGA. We will compare notes and then decide what things we should change or redo.
It was really good that we got a nice playable version of PoH (with most of the features in) to GGA. This so people could give us feedback on the gameplay and what things worked and what didn’t. The good thing is that we can make most of the changes now, if we got that feedback later (2-3 month) we probably wouldn’t/couldn’t make the changes. I think about 250-300 people tried PoH at GGA and I think most of us have the same idea what worked and what didn’t.
Tags: crunch, Databox, demo, feedback, GGA, Gotland Game Awards, Penalty of Heroes, playable
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
Tags: flames, flamethrower, frame rate, game engine, Penalty of Heroes, ray-tracing, realtime, voxel
At the Gotland Game Awards we met possible our biggest fan. This kid jumped up and down and screamed as he played our game. He came back and played the game several times : )
Tags: community games, Databox, Gotland Game Awards, kid, Penalty of Heroes, Starwars kid, Xbox XNA, you tube
Today it’s voting day for the Europe parliament here in Sweden (and most of the countries in Europe) so it’s our time to get our voices heard in Europe. One of the parties that’s an newcomer this year is “Piratpartiet” (the pirate party), they mainly formed because of the IPRED & FRA law here in Sweden, which is really bad law if you love integrity (which most people here does). So it will be interesting to see how many people that will vote on “Piratpartiet” today.
* Jens comment *
Piratpartiet got 7.1% of the votes which is really much for a new political party.
Tags: Europe, fra, ipred, piratpartiet, vote
Penalty of Heroes and Exhaust got one awards each at Wednesdays Gotland Game Awards. Penalty of Heroes won for best “Exhibition Booth” and Exhaust won for “Best game from graduating class”.
Exhaust won over Penalty of Heroes which I still can’t really believe and I don’t think no one else did. Anyway most games at the GGA got an award each, so it might have something to do with that. If that’s not the case we really should stop working on PoH if we only can win “Best Exhibition Booth” with this game :p
Well I’m being sarcastic because we’re happy with GGA. Both days we had 8 player all the time playing PoH, also having a 99% of all the people “finishing the game before leaving” is really great. Anyway it’s time to rise and show that we can do a lot more that just nice Exhibition Booth :p
Tags: Databox, Exhaust, exhibition booth, GGA, Gotland Game Awards, graduating class, Penalty of Heroes, xbox 360, XNA
for a couple of days that is. After the award ceremony (Wednesday) we partied until 7 in the morning, first at Wisby Strand (had a couple of bottles of champagne), then at the club Gute källan. After that we continued party in an old basement/catacomb club until 7 o’clock. So yesterday we got up at about 3 pm in the afternoon and then we had a BBQ with everyone at Databox. So today and probably this weekend we won’t work on PoH. I think it’s nice to have a break from it a couple of days and then start with discussing all the feedback we got at Gotland Game Awards.
Tags: champagne, GGA, Gotland Game Awards, Gute källan, Penalty of Heroes, Wisby Strand
Day two went as good as the first day. About 100-150 people tested PoH and just 1-2 of them left the game without finishing the first level. Here’s some random video from day 1 (I know it’s a “day 2″), in the first video clip people from Starbreeze and Massive Entertainment are playing the game.
Tags: Databox, Exhaust, GGA, Gotland Game Awards, Massive Entertainment, Penalty of Heroes, Starbreeze
If you watched “Kulturnyheterna” (Culture/Entertainment News) on SVT (Swedish national TV station) you probably had a look at Penalty of Heroes in-game. Yes, it’s true and sweet. So now we can “brag” about being showed at national TV : o You can watch it HERE, 7.34 seconds into the TV segment (don’t know how long this will be on-line).
Tags: Databox, Kultur nyheterna, Penalty of Heroes, SVT, Swedish tv
So here’s a sum up of the first day at GGA:
We started at about 6 am, me and Håkan went to Swedish Radio P1 (Swedens national radio channel) and promoted GGA (about 7.45). After that we went to the exhibition area at Wisby Strand Conference Center to build up our “Game Booth”. It took about 3 hours. Then the jury came and played all of the 25-30 games in about 2 hours then the public was let in.
We wasn’t sure how the public was going to react to our game, so at first we put up our game on just one of our 46 inch screens and we showed a trailer of the game on the other screen. But after 30 min we had to stop because there was so many people wanting to play. So we had 8 players constantly hacking and slashing, that was so fucking awesome to see, because we didn’t expect this at all really.
After everyone played we asked what was good and what didn’t work in the game, so we got tons of feedback now so we can make the game better. The first day there was only one person that stoped playing the game without finishing the first level and it took about 10 minutes to finish the first level (I thing about 150-200 people played it the first day).
There were alot of newspapers and TV present during the first day at GGA.
At about 4pm we had a presentation about Penalty of Heroes infront of the jury.
Tags: demo, GGA Sweden, Penalty of Heroes, people Wisby Strand
Some of us didn’t sleep from the 1-2 of June just to get a nice “build” of PoH for Gotland Game Awards. Here’s everyone at Databox eating a healthy dinner together the day before GGA.
* MaX is a Swedish hamburg company that makes way better burgers than both McDonalds and Burger King.
Here’s a picture of us testing the “GGA build”
Tags: crunching, deadline, GGA, Gotland Game Awards, Max, Max hamburger
… 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.
Tags: booth babe, Databox, E3, GGA, Gotland Game Awards, Penalty of Heroes
This evening Dwarf, Stoffer and me (Jens) went out to Visby harbor to paint our exhibition booth for Gotland Game Awards. The paint for the sky drained out so we’ll probably finish it tomorrow. In the front we’ll also have paper cut-outs of buildings shown
here. There will also be a 46 inch TV in the middle and two 42 inch at the sides.
Tags: 42 inch, 46 inch, Gotland Game Awards, harbor, Penalty of Heroes, TV, Visby
-”Once upon a decade, the great Pig gods bless the strongest Pig in the forest with immense strenght and size, at this time the grey trolls send out their bravest hunter gatherer to bring home a great feast for the village.
It’s eat or be eaten in this grand tale based upon the true story of David vs Goliath.”
This is a 3d rendered movie that I (with little help of Stoffer) made yesterday just for fun. So it’s not a official release movie for PoH or anything that will be appearing in the game. The 3d models though are the once we use in the game.
Tags: Databox, Penalty of Heroes, pig, troll, unofficial movie
Yesterday we got our printed stuff for our game booth at Gotland Game Awards next week. We have an idea of layering the booth with cut out silhouettes of houses in a similar way like Penalty of Heroes is done. We’ll also try to paint a sky behind the silhouettes and in the middle there will be a nice 46 inch TV showing PoH (we’ll probably have two 42 inch TV:s at each sides also). The picture is taken at our office where we tried how it would work.
We also got a nice poster that Nixi has done as promotion for PoH. We’ll have two of these to the left and right. That’s our plan right now anyway : )
Tags: 42 inch, 46 inch, Databox, GGA, Gotland Game Awards, LCD, Penalty of Heroes, Picture, silhouette, TV
Yesterday we worked until 5 am in the morning and I think I fell asleep at 6, then the phone range at 9 so I got about 3 hours of sleep. Anyway nothing important to know our working hours :p
Anyway I took two pictures yesterday night and some pictures about 10 minutes ago.
Here’s our nice view from our office one picture taken at 4 am and at 3 pm
Us working at 4pm and our back alley (not from our game though it might look like it:)
Tags: Databox, Gotland, night, Penalty of Heroes, Picture, sleep
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.
Tags: AI pattern, code, community game, Databox, enemy, engine, game, Penalty of Heroes, WIP, xbox 360, XNA
