Today I’d like to share a new recording. Like the previous one I posted, this video demonstrates the process of drawing and coloring an enemy concept in photoshop. All I knew when starting was that it should be a quite heavily armored average male warrior controlled by Maag, the leader of Jedna. His equipment will vary but in this case I felt that it would be cool if he wielded a large shield, making him suitable for a little more dynamic and interesting AI. I didn’t use any reference whatsoever, I’m painting directly from my head and experimenting with different shapes to create an interesting armor.
It took about three hours to finish but the video is at high speed as usual.

Part 1

Part 2

Hello there dear readers, this is Tobias dropping in for an update.

Lately Ive been doing a lot of texturing and animation work which generally isn’t a very fun process to watch since it involves alot of smaller tweaking and jumping back and forth between different applications.

Part 1

Now on the other hand, I have the honor of showing you a short video of when I’m modeling the base mesh of one of the grunt enemies in PoH.

Generally, modeling a base mesh isn’t very troublesome since Ive made a habit of studying concept images and discussing any question marks with our lead artist before I start. The problems with creating a character start later on when more of the technical matters come into picture.

Part 2

I guess the biggest issue I had with this character was to get the right proportions. Getting the right chest-leg and chest-arm ratios and so on. Other than that, hands are always a pain in the *** to model.

Enjoy!

Today we had one of the shortest weekly meetings in the history of Databox. It was about 45 minutes including the “ordinary” 15 minute delay.

Today we discussed next week “game panel” presentation and who is gonna make it and if we needed any new layout (or use the last one). We haven’t heard which people or from which game companies that will be present, so it might be the people from last presentation (better ask mr T).

Since we stated “major sprint 4″ this Tuesday we went though what went right and wrong in sprint 3. The coding is still a bit behind, but that’s mainly because Baba and Jakob have had programming classes the last 2 weeks. The 3d modeling is also speeding up and we’re on track there.

Sprint 4 is a pure production period, no more testing or concepting. The game is up and running, the level editor is stable and it’s just about putting content together and make a game.

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)

Approximately two a clock (2 pm), I arrived at our office. I was happy to see that the garbage had been carried out and that my colleges weren’t there. It was calm and quiet, no one making bad jokes or laughing out loud, showing video clips of dancing bears or fat chicks eating cat food. No one demanding anything or telling me how “emo” I am. Ah, good times. Of course this didn’t last very long and things went back to “normal”.

I thought that a concept for Llaknels knives would a good thing to start off with. Llaknel supposed to look and fight like an assassin or rouge if you like. At first I made two quite short knives with regular handles but later I changed them into something that you hold more like iron knucklers. I also got some feedback from Tobias and Kristoffer and they suggested that I added some sort of stabilizer. Sometimes, on very rare occasions, they actually have something useful to say.

… or rather, I’m running out of concepts from Nixi. I finished modeling the quiver today and if I don’t get a new concept by the time I finish the UV-mapping of the quiver (which should be about 30 mins of work) I guess I’ll start working on some high poly sculpting.

Ah well, I guess I might as well enjoy some MMO gaming while I can, a luxury I won’t have time for when crunch mode hits!

The first thing I had to do today was to remove our producer Håkan from my workstation. I wasn’t surprised to see that he, once again, had changed the background on my desktop. His argument was that it was his screen, and therefore he had the right to do this. What can I say?

I finally got to sit down and start working on the quiver for the crossbow. I grabbed my pen, opened a new document and started sketching on some designs. Thirty seconds later Tobias called me over and showed me that he had finished the crossbow model which I made yesterday. Goddammit, I thought I could lean back at least for today but no. The model looked good and there was nothing I could say really so I knew what he was about to say:

“I need a concept of the quiver.”

A couple of hours later I finished the concept. I know it won’t keep him busy for long so now I have to figure out what to do next. I think I’ll finish the concept of another of our four main characters and give him a color palette for the texturing. That’ll show him.

The quiver