Yesterday we worked until 5 am in the morning and I think I fell asleep at 6, then the phone range at 9 so I got about 3 hours of sleep. Anyway nothing important to know our working hours :p
Anyway I took two pictures yesterday night and some pictures about 10 minutes ago.

Here’s our nice view from our office one picture taken at 4 am and at 3 pm

Us working at 4pm and our back alley (not from our game though it might look like it:)

Today we have 4 things in one blog post, so enjoy : ) Here are a couple of WIP (Work In Progress) images from our engine.

Image 1. Says it all. It’s an overview of what our codes look like.

As seen in image 2 we maximized the engine’s capacity, using enemies to see whether it would crash or not… It didn’t. It’s vital hence the amount of enemies we’ll use in the game. Not that many enemies as shown but still. Maybe the new Serious Sam on arcade :p

We also wanted to give you a glimpse of our AI pattern as shown in image 3. It’s a simplified view of the enemies’ movement in the game. Depending on your action and location, the AI will try to find different approaches to get you and hopefully the enemy won’t get stuck behind a tree.

Last but not least the 4th image shows you hit boxes. Blue circles show where the character/enemy can be hit, as the red circles show what parts that will deal damage… Poor piggy died by the hands of Kimo.

In just three weeks we have had 3 major deadlines . First we had a deadline to Nordic Games, then it was a deadline to Sweden Game awards and now we’re working on the deadline for Gotland Game Awards that will be done the 2nd of June. Though it’s hard we show some real progress. One month ago we could just move one character back and forward in the game, now we can play a whole level with most things working.

The things we’ll focus on for the GGA deadline is to work out all the bugs we have found and tweak the gameplay. This weak we’ll also do the game booth for GGA and a ingame trailer for the game. After GGA we’ll probably take some days of working on PoH.

So we made it, we just send in a early “build” and a trailer of “Penalty of Heroes” to SGA (Sweden Game Awards). So all we can do now is just hope that the jury likes it : )

There’s a couple of hundred games at SGA  so the competition is quiet hard and also we send in a early “build” so we shouldn’t really expect anything. But who knows : )

Stoffer our Narrativ guy put it like this:
Oh My God! If panic had a face it would surely have looked all of ours on May 24th. Deadline for Swedish Game Awards 09 (SGA) and we made it=). Everything was going according to plan, kind of. We had to make some last minute changes, and of course by then it was almost time’s up. Anyways, everything worked out and we believe that the demo is gonna kick ass.

Of course a demo wasn’t enough. We had to send them a teaser too. Or two as a matter of fact. One PoH teaser not longer than 30 sec and one 30 sec Exhaust teaser. Both which I had to edit with some great effects made by the one and only Dopefish. The PoH teaser is also edited after our latest song made by Pontus. Overall I can say that I’m satisfied with the teasers even though some of the ingame footage wasn’t final.

I’ll be back with more blogging once things have settled down.
Thank you for reading.

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

While coding the game play you always end up with unbelievable bugs, or is it a bug?

I have sometime built mini game upon bug I found, so all aren’t that evil. On behalf of that I now know decided to start a blog series with all off our bugs and feature there. You have to guess what it is, …. so now vote, is it a bug or a feature?

In this video we test the AI and collision system.

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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 : )

We had some requests about two week ago that people wanted to have a look at us working at our office. So here’s a video, though from our old office (we just moved), of us at work. This is how it looks like when things are running smoothly and everyone is in.

At first you’ll see Nixi working on some concept art, then a quick look at Jona texturing, over to Jakob coding, to Dwarf making level art, to Andreas play testing, back to Jakob, and then to Jona and Nixi again. The man with the camera is King Klepot aka Håkan.

So, time is starting to run out and the things to do starts to really pile up and in the middle of is half of the team is going to Nordic Games next week.

Code
- Sound & Music (Jakob)
- Change diffuse light (Baba)
- Calibrate particle effects (Baba)
- Optimize code (Jakob & Baba)
- Vertex shader (Baba)
- Game over screen (Jakob)
- Movement & camera (Nixi & Baba)

Animation
- Collision boxes (Tobbe & Jona)
- Frame on character that will detect damage (Tobbe & Jona & Nixi)

Level optimization
-Level 1 (Dwarf)
-Level 2 (Dwarf)

Trailer
- Content (Stoff)

Exhibition booth
- Get all measures & printing details (Stoff)

Other thing
- Gameplay test on Friday, demo done on Thursday

While coding the game play you always end up with unbelievable bugs, or is it a bug?

I have sometime built mini game upon bug I found, so all aren’t that evil. On behalf of that I now know decided to start a blog series with all off our bugs and feature there. You have to guess what it is, …. so now vote, is it a bug or a feature?

In this first video we tested the camera.

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Today when we come the office, our beloved mascot Godan was laing dead before one of the coders computer.

We have no idea what have happen but we we strongly suspect the cleaner,  this is our penalty for  leaving food behind.

Grodans struggle will not be in wain. He will always someway appear in our game and so live on.

RIP Grodan

I was bored and needed something red colored for external screen backgrounds so made a new bk,,, wrong colors on the logo perhaps, but it do the job for the mode I want on the desktop, maybe someone else would find use of it also:p

Anyhow, I have also some old desktops that are more official, they are not being released on the DataBox site yet though, but I bring them up here to so you can check them out.

Mostly it’s more like 12.00 to 00.00 here at Databox and it’s rarely you see anyone on-line on MSN before 11.00. Two month ago we agreed at a meeting that everyone had to be at the office at least between 14-16 (pm 2-4). This so that things can be discussed and decided in the group at a daily basis. Well I guess we work more or less like everyone else does in the game development business. It’s Saturday today and I haven’t seen any sign of live yet (12.30). I guess everyone’s is in bed having a nice hangover since yesterdays partying.

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.

Databox office