As you might have noticed we haven’t been updating the PoH blog since this summer. So is PoH dead you might ask yourself? No it’s alive and well : )

So why haven’t we updated our progress here then. Well …. the summer came and most people went home so there weren’t to much work on PoH to write about, then autum came and some people had new game projects to take care about so work on PoH went down about 50 %.

So before and during the x-mas holiday we have been 100% focusing on PoH and it starts to shape up. The main focus now is getting game conents into the game. The game has been up and running with all the game features since the beginning of the summer. We showed and demoed  the first level of PoH at both GGA and GDC Europe 2009 this year, so we have got tons of feedback what kick ass and what things that sucks ass :p

So when will PoH be out? Well all I can say is “When It’s Done” :p and that is in 2010 : )

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

It’s been a while since my last contribution to this blog and I know that Jens is very mad with me. I can hear it in his voice and now my fear of facing that anger is forcing me to write. Luckily he works from a distance so there still might be time left before he unleashes his great anger upon me. Better get started.

Last week I worked with several things; enemies, the gem system and the start menu. Today I’ll show you the final concept of the very first two enemies the player will encounter, the forest troll and a mount animal. You might recognize the troll from some of my earlier sketches. I’ve polished it and thought about its behavior.

The troll can come as one or riding on the pigs back. When mounted you can hit him so that he dies and falls off, this will change the way the pig acts and it will go berserk and start charging wildly across the screen. The player will unfortunately not be able to use the pig as a mount. That would look funny though.

* Jens comment *
I never get mad at you Trixi ; ) I only frustrated :p You have to ask/tell the people around 10 times before they start to blog. Then when they do, you get 10-20 posts to sort out. The “blog rule” here at DataBox is that each person should post 0.5-1 post/week. This so the people reading our blog knows what we’re up to.

Would be cool if you could eat that nice little piggy and gain heath from it after you killed it (guess I put that on the “wish/reject” list :p)

Time runs fast when you’re having fun, people say. If someone would have said before we started this blog–“it must have at least 100 posts, before PoH was released”, I would have said –“we won’t be able to make that”. Well only four and a half month into development we’re posted over 100 posts in our blog. It’s about 5 posts a week and since the beginning of 2009 we try to post at least one post a day. Hope you enjoy our effort to keep this up : )

Thanks again for reading about us and our game!

If marketing is so bad, why do you even talk about it? Well in my opinion marketing is bad when you try to enforce or convey people into believing something. When we do marketing we just want people to have a look at our game and see if they like what they’re seeing.

Today everything that’s released can be seen as some kind of marketing (interview, game play video, blog, screen shot). This blog is a way of “marketing” our game to. So it’s nearly impossible to hear about a game/product without marking, because when you hear about it has got to you because of some kind of marketing (post of a web site, an url from a friend “word-by-mouth”, read an interview and so on).

So our marketing will only be on the Internet. It will be things like previews, game play videos, this blog (+ www.penaltyofheroes.com & www.databoxgames.com), screenshots and things like that. We hope that this will do, but as everything else on the Internet it’s mostly up the users if it gets any circulation. So it’s up to you who reads this to tell your friends about our 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

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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 : )

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 …. “

As you might notice we’re right now updating our blog. So that’s why it’s a bit “messy” in here.

It will be back to normal in a few days.

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!”

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Since we’re not millionaires, we just have a very tiny office were we sit basically on top of each other. Behold our fancy office! From the left: Baba, Stoffer and Nixi.

As you might have understood or not, everyone on our team is bloging. So just look under the title of the blog post and you’ll see who of us is “responsible” for that particular post. That’s the reason why the “tone” and they way we talk/write change from post to post. So that was just a little information about that small thing : )

We haven’t brought it up here since we didn’t have this blog back then, but I’ll fill in the blanks. The story goes something like this ….

It was a cold and windy September night (19th) and four vicious game wolves from different packs (companies) were out hunting for some tender game student meat. The students were hunted down just after sun set near the town of Marratech and they were forced to present a game idea so great that the wolves had to let them go and make it. So with great power (point) and Intel power the students presented the game Penalty of Heroes. The wolves were satisfied and agreed to let them go and make the game.

…. but keep in mind that several heroic and great games weren’t as lucky and died that same night.

We have this blog so that people like you can read what we’re up so. So is there something that you think that we should talk more about or not talk about, just let us know : ) Remember that we write here for you : )

Some of the gaming blogs out there of games that got big, often got “made up” after the game got famous. Nothing wrong with that since it’s always nice to read about a good game and its development. Anyway we’re writing all the way through our development and our game might not sell a single copy. So if you want to read things straight away during the whole making of a video game then you should read our blog : )