Today me Jona och Nixi went true the final sprint list in the presence for Dreambuild 2009, we discuss our last long meeting about feedback from Nordic game and Gotland Game Awards and how we should organization our work to get  ass much ass possible done in time. We know that we cannot have all the futures to Dreambuild, so we have to focus some of our features.

We stay up all night (only 22+ Celsius on the night that make it possible to breathe in Visby) playing Penalty of heroes ; ) and some  old hack -n slash game. We found a new game that are very slimier to use except its imposable to complete with only 10 lifes. It’s called dungeons and dragons shadow over mystara and is a  must play for all hack n slash lovers

Tomorrow I’m going to start working on all the nasty bugs.

My girlfriend Zenobia ( queenzenobia.deviantart.com ) got inspired when she saw some of the artwork for our booth at GGA and played around with some pixel art.

I thought it looked really nice, I’m sure she’ll get hired once PoH is to be made for the NDS.

She kept telling me it’s not done etc buuut, here it is!

As I said a few days ago, the first weeks of June it’s moslty bad and rainy weather  here in Sweden and it mostly rains on “midsummer eve”. But after that the summer usually comes : ) No exception this year, today it’s about 25 degress Celsius (77+ Faherneheit) and this next week will be the same … all sunny : )

Yesterday a nice/strange thing happened when I drove out to the coast to fish (in Ängelholm). Suddenly all cars started to use their horns and I though -”well it’s probably some students that have taken their degree”. Then the next moment a Koenigsegg drow up at the side of my car. First I thought of trying to race, but I guessed that would just seam pathetic :p so I didn’t. Koenigsegg makes the car in the area (in the town of Ängelholm) so I guessed it was out on a test run.

Koenigsegg just bought Saab from GM so it will be interesting how that will turn out.

I know, no updates regarding PoH (it will probably slow down this sunny week : )

We posted some pictures before of Llaknels evolvement in concept art.

So I thought we post some pictures now of Llaknels evolvement now in 3d.

As some of you people might remember John Romero did a “great hype ad” for his game Daikatana in 1997 (3 years before release). Personally I think that the game wasn’t that bad as many claimed it to be, but it was rated this way because John had hyped Daikatana to be the best game ever, … and it wasn’t. So it was a “text-book” case of  “do not hype your game unless it’s great”. Although it must be one of the most sold - “lowest scored” games of all time since it sold well over 200 000 copies the first year.

So while “over hyping” isn’t good, it seamed to work here. Though today many of the games have to “hype” their” game becasue if they don’t, no one will hear about the game at all. That’s why it’s really important for games today to have a USP (Unique Selling Points). It means that the game has to have a unique feature that no other game has. USP can be Max Paynes “bullit time” (one of my favourit USP), it’s a feature that you “push” in the marketing and that you hope that all the gamers will love.

I made this “art” (Llaknel about to make you his b****) some month ago and thought that I post it as a joke/tribute to John.

As I mentioned before it’s holiday time for some of the people at Databox and this weekend it’s also “Midsummer eve”, a holiday/weekend where you celebrate summer with eating and drinking and dancing around a giant XXXX.

It usual rains on Midsummer eve and this year looks like no exeption. Anyway I assume that there will be not so much work done on PoH the next 3-5 days.

Many of our friends at the University of Gotland and also some of the Databox people are leaving the island (Gotland) for the summer. Therefor things will probably not move as fast as they have done before summer but we’ll try do the best we can anyway : ) Things will probably speed up in a few month again.

Today there’s nothing really more to post.

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 : )

Here’s some of Nixis concept art of the main characters for Penalty of Heroes. This and some other collages were Nixis contributions for “Best effort in art” at the Gotland Game Awards, last week. The larger versions of the characters on the sides are the newest versions of the main characters. There’s also some smaller sketches at the bottom of different moves of the characters

Some people on the team is in Stockholm today and SGA (Swedish Game Awards). We didn’t win anything sadly but that’s life : ) The games that won were really great and more done and polished than PoH. Great to see that Sweden has so many great new game maker : )

The next comeptions now is Microsofts “Dream Build” where the competition will be even more harder, though PoH will be alot more done then.

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.

It sounds really good, but the fact is that during June it’s mostly shitty weather. Normal is that in April and May we have really great weather with about 15-25+ degrees (Celsius) and then when summer should start in June we have a month of kind of bad weather with rain and about 15-20+ degrees.

So why do I write this? Well, it’s because it’s been typical “Swedish summer weather” now for about 2 weeks now and it’s so boring : ( Well I guess the summer will start here late in June so in a couple of weeks it will be all nice I think : )

Later today/tonight we’ll have the first big meeting since GGA and will discuss all the feedback we got. Everyone has written down all the feedback they got/heard from the people playing PoH. At the meeting we’ll decide what things we’ll have to redo and tweek.

Since GGA we have had a bit of a vacation from PoH. Tomorrow we’ll have a big meeting about all the feedback we got from all the people at GGA. We will compare notes and then decide what things we should change or redo.

It was really good that we got a nice playable version of PoH (with most of the features in) to GGA. This so people could give us feedback on the gameplay and what things worked and what didn’t. The good thing is that we can make most of the changes now, if we got that feedback later (2-3 month) we probably wouldn’t/couldn’t make the changes. I think about 250-300 people tried PoH at GGA and I think most of us have the same idea what worked and what didn’t.

At the Gotland Game Awards we met possible our biggest fan. This kid jumped up and down and screamed as he played our game. He came back and played the game several times : )

Penalty of Heroes and Exhaust got one awards each at Wednesdays Gotland Game Awards. Penalty of Heroes won for best “Exhibition Booth” and Exhaust won for “Best game from graduating class”.

Exhaust won over Penalty of Heroes which I still can’t really believe and I don’t think no one else did. Anyway most games at the GGA got an award each, so it might have something to do with that. If that’s not the case we really should stop working on PoH if we only can win “Best Exhibition Booth” with this game :p

Well I’m being sarcastic because we’re happy with GGA. Both days we had 8 player all the time playing PoH, also having a 99% of all the people “finishing the game before leaving” is really great. Anyway it’s time to rise and show that we can do a lot more that just nice Exhibition Booth :p

Day two went as good as the first day. About 100-150 people tested PoH and just 1-2 of them left the game without finishing the first level. Here’s some random video from day 1 (I know it’s a “day 2″), in the first video clip people from Starbreeze and Massive Entertainment are playing the game.

If you watched “Kulturnyheterna” (Culture/Entertainment News) on SVT (Swedish national TV station) you probably had a look at Penalty of Heroes in-game. Yes, it’s true and sweet. So now we can “brag” about being showed at national TV : o You can watch it HERE, 7.34 seconds into the TV segment (don’t know how long this will be on-line).

… That is the question. And the answer is no. We won’t have booth babes on GGA, but we will have a nice looking booth though. We’re currently working with what to have and what not to have inside our booth on Tuesday. Calling all sorts of companies to get the right look, we’ve settled with A0 cardboard paper with images of the exteriors of the game to decorate our foreground. From the blueprint of our booth it looks good and I bet it’ll look even better in place.

* Comment by Jens *

Well, Stoff thougth that he was talking the truth when he wrote this post and I had no idea of a booth babe. Anyway one of our friends turned up at GGA dressed up as Kimo. First I saw a person holding a “wand” and I thought -”hmm, that looks just like Kimos wand”. Then I saw the pattern on her leg and I thougth -”shit that’s Kimo”. So that’s really sweet to actually have a person dressed up like someone we “invented” for our game.

-”Once upon a decade, the great Pig gods bless the strongest Pig in the forest with immense strenght and size, at this time the grey trolls send out their bravest hunter gatherer to bring home a great feast for the village.

It’s eat or be eaten in this grand tale based upon the true story of David vs Goliath.”

This is a 3d rendered movie that I (with little help of Stoffer) made yesterday just for fun. So it’s not a official release movie for PoH or anything that will be appearing in the game. The 3d models though are the once we use in the game.

Yesterday we got our printed stuff for our game booth at Gotland Game Awards next week. We have an idea of layering the booth with cut out silhouettes of houses in a similar way like Penalty of Heroes is done. We’ll also try to paint a sky behind the  silhouettes and in the middle there will be a nice 46 inch TV showing PoH (we’ll probably have two 42 inch TV:s at each sides also). The picture is taken at our office where we tried how it would work.

We also got a nice poster that Nixi has done as promotion for PoH. We’ll have two of these to the left and right. That’s our plan right now anyway : )