Todays meeting was mostly focused on things related to the deadlines for SGA (Sweden Game Awards) and GGA (Gotland Game Awards). We mostly discussed different versions of the the new video trailer and what things to priorities the next weeks. We have so much to do the next three weeks that we really can’t afford to sleep, then in the middle of it some of us are going to Nordic Games. Well on top of that there’s about 2-3 major things to do also.

Anyway why sleep when you can work?

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.

We just got a Wikipedia page up about Penalty of Heroes. So be sure to check it out! There you can get facts and story about the game.

Penalty of Heroes takes place in the world of Nimo, in a time when machinery has become mans helper, convinience spoils men and the restlessness it brings leads to an abundance of greed and ill will in this fantasy and steam punk influenced world. The land is ruled by the great King Salo, but opposing forces has started to threaten his leadership. At this point in time King Salo sends out the four friends Llaknel, Kimo, Zedwig and Darwin to stop the upcoming war and to win back the trust of his people.

Today I installed a monstrous coffee machine at our office. By my calculation it will increase the work flow by 12% and make the team members afford to buy six more beer each week (because the coffee cost 1 euro at the machine outside our office). Thought it will also increase the time used for toilet visits by 5% :p

EDIT good news everyone our WC have finale bean completely restore and are ready to use.

The model to the right is from the game “Hellgate London”.

So it’s was time for the weekly big meeting. As usual we stared the meeting about 20-30 minutes late. Today it was due to the heavy discussion that went on for about 30 minutes. The discussion was which girl is the best looking, not gonna name any names but there were actresses , porn stars and artists in the discussion. Today we mostly discussed the contract for Databox Games and future of Databox Games for the next 2 years. We also discussed:

• Discussing the enemies
• Dangers/threats for PoH being released
• New things on the “wish list”

This meeting was extra long (nearly 4 hours), but it was mainly to solve everything with the company.

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)

We discovered a funny/nice thing today, when one of us did a search on the all mighty Google today.

When we put in the word “penalty” in Google the name “penalty of heroes” came in fourth place in the “drop down suggestion menu”. We did the same with the word “databox” and “databox games” was the first choice on the “drop down menu”. We tried it on different computers and all with the same result so we think that it’s real.

We first thought that Google might recognize that we use those words and then put them high up on our computer, but it didn’t seam like that. So keep on talking about our game : )

Just me trying/playing around a little with the level editor.

We got tons of videos from prior games that we’ve done or that people been involved in at Databox Games. So we decided to put them on YOU TUBE and not just on our company web page. We put up some video clips from older stuff we’ve done such as Headbanger, Drinks, Physitive and so on. So head over there and have a look : )

9 people in the old sauna (we have two fans right know and that’s not enough) was starting to tear us apart, the new one is only two doors away from the old one so we have decide to keep it, we have not decide how to split the group yet but i wish for us to rotate because most of us have laptops. we have also unfortunately happen to find some nice office chair. I found out that it was really nice to split the group because then you have to walk over sometime and that’s relay nice for the body. We have also put up some webcam so we see each other all the time, which sometimes might be bad :p

Today we had a really really (je a kinda like hats) nice locking man at our office, the man with the hat and pair of braces Ernest W Adams, Ernest are HGO guest professor in game design that just have finished a workshop for the first and second grade game design students. I ask Ernest afterwards if he had time to look at our game Exhaust that five people from Databox Games had recently been released to Xbox live community games and he happily agreed.

At our office (for some reason real clean right now, I wonder why) Don and Ernest had the chance to see the pro play the games last level before giving the chance to try out the tutorial level for themselves. I always found it quiet funny that Ernest didn’t handle the gamepad well since he have write 3 books about game design. I believe like all professors he enjoys to observe more than participate and thats total fine. Afterwards the Exhaust team seams really happy and they totally earn it for all their hard work.

It’s not every day you get the chance to let a gamasutra writer review your game

Exhaust finally got approved by Microsoft and are now available to buy from Xbox Live Marketplace in Canada, France, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom and The United States. It´s a big relief to finally know that I don´t have to work any more on the game and I am very happy with the result. I finally made a game I can be proud of : )

You’ll find Exhaust on Xbox Live Marketplace HERE

We ‘ve got our companys web page up and running, so head over to www.databoxgames.com and have a look at it and other games we have made.

according to Dwarf, one of our artists who made this one. Much Mirror’s Edge feeling in it, but very nice.

Databox Games - We plan for the future