Before you start to make a 3d model out of a concept art you should have made some different versions so you can chose the best one. Here are 5 versions of the troll that Nixi made before we chose to go with troll number 5 (bottom right). We might include some of the other versions later in the game, but that’s mostly up to if we get the time to do it : )

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

After a lot of nagging from one of the 3D-artists I decided to make a concept of Darwins weapon, a crossbow. Darwin comes from a place a place that lies ahead in the development of machinery and therefor he has a technically more advanced weapon than the other main characters. The crossbow is equipped with a small magazine of bolts and a scope, mainly to make it look more interesting but also so that it makes sense that he doesn’t have to reload after every single shot.

SGA (Sweden Game Awards) and GGA (Gotland Game Awards) starting to close up, so we have to focus on getting all system running and working together. So this next month we will be focusing on tuning things and not to implement new features.

Code
Make more AI patterns
Adjust player control
Get particle and light effects onto the characters
Get gem system to work
Enemy generator

Concept (2d)
Menu & GUI

Levels 2d
Continue working on levels

3D
Make more animations and get the to work smoothly

Narrative
List of sound effects
Start to work on presentation
Sketch for trailer for GGA
Test the story on regular people

Other things
Take screenshots
Move to new office
Start on the last sprint

The last weeks we haven’t had weekly sprint due to Easter and also because we had to finish up things we haven’t completed. Now it seams that we’re starting to get back on track and in the near weeks you’ll be able to see that : ) Our team is also growing a bit, but we’ll tell you more about it in the next few days.

Code:
AI programming
Get shadows to work
Sync normal maps in the engine
Vertex shaders
Basic collision

2d:
Help to fine tune 3d models

3d:
Fine tune animations

Level editor:
Fine tune bloom
Make levels more complete

Narrative:
Research

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!

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.

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.

Everyone has more than their hand full and on top of it Easter is coming this week. Which probably means that we’re losing some work days since some of us are going to visit our families. Also we might have to present last weeks canceled presentation. Well that’s life : )

This week sprint looks something like this:

Code:
Continue work on shaders
Implement other features

2d:
Concept art for bosses
Concept art for alternative enemies

3d:
Continue making enemies
Put textures on 3d models

Levels:
Continue making level

Narrative:
Explanations for all people and enemies in the game

Marketing:
Sleep and fishing : p

It’s been a busy week and honestly I’m fucking tired. The sun is shining outside and the sky is as blue as me. A window would be nice.

But, there is always work that must be done and even though I want to go out I must remind myself that this is what I want to do and it’s all worth it, I don’t need the sun, dammit! I stayed up late last night, modeling a face and sculpting in zbrush, but that’s not what I’m going to write about today. No, no, no. I’m gonna give you a sample of what I’ve done earlier this week and maybe get something in return.

I got a couple of designs of this war machine and I can’t decide which one to use. I was hoping that maybe one of all the millions of daily readers out there could help me with this issue. I feel that something in one of the designs just doesn’t fit with Penalty of Heroes. Can you help me?

** Jens comment **
It’s going to be a great spring day today here in Sweden 15 to 20+ and blue sky, so get out mr Emo and get a some nice tan ; ) I will have a “PoH free day” (maybe just 2-3h work) and I will be fishing some nice salmon and trout. Later I will have some friends over for a BBQ.

Now we’re in production phase (major sprint 4), most of the concepting is done, the major tools are done, the game is up and running on the white box and so on. No it’s mostly putting everything together and making a game.

This week sprint looks like this:

Code:
Collision and basic physics
Player control and basic game play
Also continue work on Shaders, GUI, interface, particle effects

2d:
New versions of some of the enemies
Level 1 done

3d:
Continue making enemies

Narrative:
Should be done by the end of the week
Story and patterns for every enemy

Other things:
Test normal maps
New ingame pictures
Game presentation for the “game panel”

On Tuesday it’s the end of (major) sprint 3. So this week will be testing all of the thing we’ve implemented and done the last weeks.

On Wednesday (major) sprint 4 begins. This major sprint (divided into 4 weekly sprints) will focus on coding, implementing of shaders & particles, level design, 3d enemies and play testing the games all new features that were added last major sprint.

Before the level editor is finished 3ds Max are the place to be if you want to test the levels for basic movement with the parallaxes.

Mainly the environment is supposed to be compiled of a range of 2d plane, in different length from the camera. The ground the characters move on besides are supposed to be 3d mesh with variating height levels (depending on the structure of actual level design) well, and also 3d mesh object on the ground, but mostly for the reason that the perspective gets wrong otherwise.

After all it’s supposed to look mostly like a hi-tech 2dscroller and the all of it fit together with minimal graphical glitch between the 2d and 3d.