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.

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 : )

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

Every Monday now for the past four weeks we have presented each of the heroes in the game. So I thought it was appropriate to post a picture of all of the characters together.

Here’s a round-up of all the facts about the heroes:

Llaknel
Llaknel is a young and skillful fighter and fight with two Katars. He was born and raised in the city of Era in the land of Nimo. He’s the current general of King Salo’s army and the princess’ personal bodyguard. Llaknel’s father was the late general who died protecting the king years ago and therefore Llaknel does not feel comfortable following his father’s footsteps. Llaknel also finds Kimo to be naive, but stays loyal to her and the King as he hopes for a change in Nimo. He is the leader of the party and reconsiders every action very thoroughly.

Zedwig
Zedwig is a short but heavily built man who wears thick armor and fights with raw strength. He doesn’t use weapons, but wields his shields which he smashes his enemies with. Zedwig is a cocky man, but trusted amongst his friends. He was born and raised in the city of Jedna, but fled to Era when Maag enslaved his people. He seeks revenge and wants to set his people free and get rid of Maag once and for all.

Kimo
Kimo is the youngest one of the four heroes and is trained in politics, combat and healing magics. She is the heiress of King Salo’s empire and loves the people of Era. She is in love with Llaknel, but is aware of the complications with him being responsible for her as he also figures as her general. However she finds it amusing to tease him, making his position awkward. Zedwig and her share friendship and the same sense of humor.

Darwin
Darwin is a skinny old man, who always carries his crossbow with him. He fled his hometown of Giza as it was enslaved and corrupted by people that gave false promises about a better future. Darwin has lived in Era for just as long as Zedwig and knows all of them very well. Though he is old fashioned and somewhat an outsider in the party, he is still a good friend and a skilled armsman.

I know that we haven’t showed or told you so much about the four main characters of Penalty of Heroes, but starting next week we’ll change that. The first “Character of the week” that we’ll present/reveal is Llaknel, that we have showed a bit before. With every “character reveal” there will be a concept art of the character and some information about him or her.

The sprint last week was ok and we finished nearly all of our goals (two of our goals will be done in a few days). This was due to that our codes have had heavy lectures these past weeks. The good thing is that this course ended last week, so this week they will have 24h each day to code on PoH :p

This week sprint looks like this:

Code:
3D animations system
Physic and collision system
Implement basic character control

Level editor:
Continue to implement content
Write visual effects (shaders and so on)
Start to implement the trigger system for the scripting

2d graphics:
More enemies and models of them

3d graphics:
Fine tune the heroes
Skin 2 enemies and give them animations

Test:
3d characters with animation in the game engine (blending)

In the end of March we’ll be presenting a playable demo to our mentors for review, so it’s crunching time!

The shield of one of the main character has taken quite some time to create, not because the modeling is particularly difficult, but because we had trouble getting a design that we could agree upon down.

Here are some of the late versions that we sat and chose between.

Yesterday I’ve finally fixed the last parts of Llaknel’s face mesh and after that was finished I had enough time to re-model his weaponry.

Today I might have finally finished the Llaknel mesh just gotta send it in for a final revision, I’ve made the arms into separate elements from the rest of the mesh, this should help in preventing weird artifacts during animation it should also make skinning the character much faster.

The modeling phase of XXXX (one of the main characters not to reviled just jet) is drawing to an end, and I must say it feels good. As with any game model I will probably have to redo a few things when we’ve had the opportunity to test the engine more, but the idea and shape is there. It all ended at about 10k tris.
Now I’ve got his weapon and quiver left to work on before I get to the UV-Unwrapping, and once that’s finished I’ll start working on the high-poly version that’ll be used as a base for the normal map. I’m looking forward to it!

That’s all for now, I hope you enjoyed it. You’ll get an update on the high-poly when it’s time to present the other characters of PoH : )