In just three weeks we have had 3 major deadlines . First we had a deadline to Nordic Games, then it was a deadline to Sweden Game awards and now we’re working on the deadline for Gotland Game Awards that will be done the 2nd of June. Though it’s hard we show some real progress. One month ago we could just move one character back and forward in the game, now we can play a whole level with most things working.

The things we’ll focus on for the GGA deadline is to work out all the bugs we have found and tweak the gameplay. This weak we’ll also do the game booth for GGA and a ingame trailer for the game. After GGA we’ll probably take some days of working on PoH.

Tags: Databox, GGA, Gogland Game Awards, Nordic Game, Penalty of Heroes, Sweden game awards

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Tags: bug, Databox, feature, Penalty of Heroes

So we made it, we just send in a early “build” and a trailer of “Penalty of Heroes” to SGA (Sweden Game Awards). So all we can do now is just hope that the jury likes it : )

There’s a couple of hundred games at SGA  so the competition is quiet hard and also we send in a early “build” so we shouldn’t really expect anything. But who knows : )

Stoffer our Narrativ guy put it like this:
Oh My God! If panic had a face it would surely have looked all of ours on May 24th. Deadline for Swedish Game Awards 09 (SGA) and we made it=). Everything was going according to plan, kind of. We had to make some last minute changes, and of course by then it was almost time’s up. Anyways, everything worked out and we believe that the demo is gonna kick ass.

Of course a demo wasn’t enough. We had to send them a teaser too. Or two as a matter of fact. One PoH teaser not longer than 30 sec and one 30 sec Exhaust teaser. Both which I had to edit with some great effects made by the one and only Dopefish. The PoH teaser is also edited after our latest song made by Pontus. Overall I can say that I’m satisfied with the teasers even though some of the ingame footage wasn’t final.

I’ll be back with more blogging once things have settled down.
Thank you for reading.

Tags: Databox, jury, Penalty of Heroes, SGA, Sweden game awards

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

Tags: 200, blog, Databox, Ernest w Adams, Exhaust, grow, mail, Penalty of Heroes, post, post count, QA, Starbreese, week

Dear readers. As you might know, Penalty of Heroes is a hack ’n slash co-op title. A 4 player co-op title nonetheless. Hopefully our game will find its way to every categorized gamer out there and hopefully it will find its way to other than them. Because the game provides so much more than an arcade hack ‘n slash, I think future gamers would enjoy it too. It has story, critic, strategy, blood, explosions, action AND which I love the most: teamwork.

With all of this in one game I think that we can reach out to all of you and make you very pleased. Wow players (myself included) who are used with working together, calculating strategies and kicking a** should have a great time playing PoH, just like the casual gamers will enjoy, well everything which this game provides them.
Thank You for reading.

Tags: blood, co-op, explotions, hack n slash, Penalty of Heroes, team work, World of Warcraft, WoW, XNA

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

Tags: Facebook, forum, game, marketing, mord by mouse, MSN, Penalty of Heroes, word by mouth

After parties, seminars and hundreds of people tried our game, it’s all over. We got new friends, new knowledge and tons of feedback, so were getting back ready to take all feedback and implement new things.

I was at four different seminars today:
Alex Evans from Media Molecule (Little Big Planet)
Really great seminar and he had a new way to do a presentation.

Financial Panel with Fred Hansson, Siggi Keogle (Attraction), Nick Parker (Parker Consulting Ldt), Valerie Bourgoin (CNC)
Good seminar, where different people gave different advice how to finance a game project.

Suda 51, Grasshopper (No More Heroes)
I had really big exportations for this one (since I really enjoyed NMH), but I think that it was one of least interesting seminars that I went to.

Ian Bowden, Rockstar Leeds (GTA Chinatown wars, GTA Liberty City Stories)
Great seminar, seams to be a really nice guy. Though he talked more about ESC (Eurovidion song contest) then other stuff :p (he thought Turkey had the best song this year)

Tags: Alex Evans, DICE, feedback, Grasshopper, LBP, Little Big Planet, Media Molecule, No More Heroes, Nordic Game, Penalty of Heroes, Suda 51

Wohoooo. We just got back from the Nordic Game party at the club Debaser in Malmö and it was great.

The first day at Nordic Games went good. We started to show Exhaust, but we changed to a “work in progress” beta of Penalty of Heroes. Many features is missing but the “core gameplay” is in so we tried it on a lot of people. The response was over all good, there were of cause some things that were pointed out, but now we can change or design them in another way. So all the worlds game developer were our beta testers today :p

I also went to a couple of lectures. The best one that I went to was Ryan Schneider seminar about communities. Ryan is the community manager at Insomniac Games (Resistance, Ratchet & Clank etc).

There were also “some” people that took a chance to play PoH. The video is shot from a distance and PoH is shown on the TV to the right.

Also today two games from Gotland University was nominated at the awards, Vertigo (best new game studio) & Penumbra (best game of the year). Though none of them won : (

* There were also some people coming up to us and saying hi and thanking us for keeping this blog up working. It’ feels really great to get that response from people you never met : ) This makes us want to do this blog even better : )

Tags: 2009, Insomniac games, Nordic Games, party, Penalty of Heroes, Penumbra, Ratchet & Clank, Resistance, Ryan Schneider

So today it’s time for Nordic Games. Håkan, Jona, Baba, Jakob & me (Jens) just had breakfast and soon we will go Nordic Games. Yesterday we set up our booth and we have booth close to both CryTech and Starbreeze so there will be some competition :p We will both show Exhaust and Penalty of Heroes on our brand new Samsung 46 inch LCD screens. PoH looked really good on it (though there’s some “eyecandy” that are not in yet), we only tried it on our laptops before, so now we could see all the details in it : )

* The picture is from yesterdays lunch.

Tags: CryTech, Exhaust, Nordic Games, Penalty of Heroes, Starbreeze

Be prepared Sweden, Malmoe and all you game developers because Databox Games is going to Nordic Games this weekend. We’ll be showing Exhaust and maybe also a little “Penalty of Heroes”, but we’ll probably only be showing that for selected people or if someone asks for it : )

At this years event there will be a lot of great speakers at the event so I hope I can catch some of them. One of the bad things is that some of the speakers have their  seminars at the same time, so you can only catch on of them. But as we’re four people we might go to different seminars : )

On my “want to see” list is:
Keijl Inafune (Capcom) - “The Capcom Philosophy”
Ian Bowden (Rockstar Leeds) - “It’s a small Word”
Calle Lejdfors (IO Interactive) - “Designing a flexible content pipeline”
Ilari Kulittinen (Housemarque) - “PSN rock crushing & casual golfing on XBLA”
Ryan Schneider (Insomniac Games) - “Does community even matter?”
Lars Gustavsson (DICE) - “Innovation - Making a leap of faith”
Suda 51 (Grasshopper) - “The birth of No More Heroes”
Jussi Laakkonen (Everyplay) - “How to start your own game company”
Harald Rieger (Sproing) - “Managing multiple development teams”

We will be posting updates about Nordic Games every day, so check out our blog this week for the latest!

Tags: Calle Lejdfors, Capcom, DICE, Ian Bowden, IO Interactive, Keijl Infune, Lars Gustavsson, Malmö, Nordic Games, Penalty of Heroes, Rockstar

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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Tags: AI, bug, camera, collision, Databox, feature, game, Penalty of Heroes, XNA

As Håkan just wrote we were supposed to had our final “game panel” presentation yesterday. This time around we shouldn’t really present anything … we would just let them be the first one to try “Penalty of Heroes”! So piece of cake? Well not really.

It turned out that none of them got the “beta build” to start so the game panel testing were canceled : (

My girlfriend (worked as test manager at a big Swedish telecom manufacture) though solved the problem. To bad she found the bug 2 hours later. The “bug” was that the game didn’t start if you had a controller, mouse, keyboard or any other external things plugged into the computer.

Anyhow my girlfriend then got the be the first “victim”. I showed her the jump, hit and change character buttons, then I she played the game none stop for about one hour until it crashed. She really enjoyed it.

The “fact” here is:
- The game is in early beta
- She never play games (well just “Wii fit” & Wii sports)
- We thought that the game is more for the hard core audience

I know that should never ever say that your game is fun or anything like that. The fact is that she have heard me talking about PoH for about 5 month daily and she was pretty tired of hearing more about it. So she was prepared that it would pretty much suck ass. Maybe that’s why she enjoyed it : ) If you think something will suck and then it’s “ok”, then it becomes great.

Hmmm, here’s our new “marketing strategy”:
-”Penalty of Heroes is shit and will suck, we are amateurs and Swedish! Don’t expect anything great from us!

In a way that’s true, our game won’t be the new Gears of War 3, Mafia 2 or Diablo 3. We just make a game that we hope will some people will enjoy : )

Tags: bug, character, Databox, demo, Diabla 3, game, Gears of War 3, mafia 2, panel, Penalty of Heroes, presentation

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

Tags: deadline, demo, party, Penalty of Heroes, pub

New office, yay!
I got a desk next to a window through which you actually can see what the weather’s like. That’s nice even though its been kind of cloudy today compared to the past week. But for the moment, I feel a slightly tingling sensation of temporary happiness in my chest.

Penalty of Heroes - HUD

Enough chitchat, WORK has been executed this day, right here, in front of my gargantually, enormously, penisenlarging screen. I’ve made another iteration of the HUD and I can’t recall that I’ve written about the previous ones so here we go. I begun with a dark vector shape created earlier, just like in a cooking show. I added a new layer and started to play with details and colors, trying to find something that works with the art style I had in mind. I have to add that making interface is really not my thing, I knew this before I started and now I’ve learned that it’s also quite boring.

Anyway, here’s the result of today’s work, the resolution is far too high compared to what it’s gonna be ingame but I’ll deal with that later. Forget I said that.

Tags: candybar, color, Headbanger, HUD, office, Penalty of Heroes, play

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.

Tags: art, AXBL, camera, code, coding, concept art, Databox, level, office, Penalty of Heroes, play testing, testing, texture, Video, xbox 360, XNA

Is there anyone out there who doesn’t enjoy blood and gore in movies, games or comics? Yeah okey there might be a few but they don’t ever have fun and many of them also hate when you have fun. But today, they stand powerless as I play with our particle editor, creating fountains of blood and gore that would make even the toughest character in mortal combat cry. Here’s a sample.

Llaknel creating blood out of thin air

Tags: blood, character, combat, game, gore, Llaknel, movie, Penalty of Heroes, play, Xbox 360 XNA

So, time is starting to run out and the things to do starts to really pile up and in the middle of is half of the team is going to Nordic Games next week.

Code
- Sound & Music (Jakob)
- Change diffuse light (Baba)
- Calibrate particle effects (Baba)
- Optimize code (Jakob & Baba)
- Vertex shader (Baba)
- Game over screen (Jakob)
- Movement & camera (Nixi & Baba)

Animation
- Collision boxes (Tobbe & Jona)
- Frame on character that will detect damage (Tobbe & Jona & Nixi)

Level optimization
-Level 1 (Dwarf)
-Level 2 (Dwarf)

Trailer
- Content (Stoff)

Exhibition booth
- Get all measures & printing details (Stoff)

Other thing
- Gameplay test on Friday, demo done on Thursday

Tags: 2d, 3d, animation, code, collision, Databox, level, music, Nordic Games, Penalty of Heroes, Sound, vertex shader

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 : )

Tags: concept art, enjoy, feedback, game, Penalty of Heroes, released, screenshots, trailer

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)

Tags: deadline, interview, Penalty of Heroes, preview, screenshots, SGA, Sweden game awards

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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Tags: bug, camera, code, Databox, feature, Penalty of Heroes, test, XNA