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.

So here’s a sum up of the first day at GGA:

We started at about 6 am, me and Håkan went to Swedish Radio P1 (Swedens national radio channel) and promoted GGA (about 7.45). After that we went to the exhibition area at Wisby Strand Conference Center  to build up our “Game Booth”. It took about 3 hours. Then the jury came and played all of the 25-30 games in about 2 hours then the public was let in.

We wasn’t sure how the public was going to react to our game, so at first we put up our game on just one of our 46 inch screens and we showed a trailer of the game on the other screen. But after 30 min we had to stop because there was so many people wanting to play. So we had 8 players constantly hacking and slashing, that was so fucking awesome to see, because we didn’t expect this at all really.

After everyone played we asked what was good and what didn’t work in the game, so we got tons of feedback now so we can make the game better. The first day there was only one person that stoped playing the game without finishing the first level and it took about 10 minutes to finish the first level (I thing about 150-200 people played it the first day).

There were alot of newspapers and TV present during the first day at GGA.

At about 4pm we had a presentation about Penalty of Heroes infront of the jury.

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 : )

Yesterday was a hard day, I had to abandon my own child, “the ninjas” and the student unions regular ninja party. I had looked forward to this party that I and dwarf once started and still lives on.

The reason I made the sacrifice for free beer and free absinthe as the younger member of Databox now attended to (BASTERDS!!!) are because of our deadline. Yesterday we have to have our first  demo version ready for game testing, how much I love my child I have to let it go. I have a new target in sight that still demands a lots of works and I’m not gonna allow it to fail.

After six beer and code crank, me, Ninja, Dwarf, Nixi, Andreas, Jens and Jakob successfully build a satisfying demo, 15 min after the closing time of the pub, crap

Last Thursday I met and old friend of mind at the old game student floor. He asked for some advice about a poster that tells that he is a graphic artist searching for jobs. We talk and I helped as much as I could. On my way back to the Databox office I realized that Johan was great with music. He had made the ingame music for headbanger and the sound to the drinks trailer and remix of some enoying sounds. This was kind of frustrating because I had been searching for music person for a long time and started to get desperate so I directly took contact with him and a hour later we had agreed that he had the weekend to make a demo for us to see if he could create the kind of music we wanted for PoH. Later the same day a friend of mine hade find one music person that had time to help us to. One moment you have nobody and a second later you have to say no because you have too many.

On Monday he presented two songs made in 2 hours each on his laptop and I was over whelmed about the result.

(Jens continuous)
I agreed with Håkan. When I heard the songs Johan had made during the weekend I was very pleased, it was exactly what I had in mind for the music in PoH. I was so nervous when I pressed “play” to hear the music, -“what if this sucks or sounds like “Euro disco” (I do not trust Håkan when it comes to music :p). I’m a musician (worked as music producer), so I have told Håkan to talk to me before he said “ok” to the person doing the music for PoH.

At a meeting in late November or early December we had a meeting just about what kind of music that would be suited for PoH. We had so many different suggestions of music styles for PoH that we had to get together and decide what style to go with. At that meeting we all agreed on going in one direction on the music. That music direction has been the same since that meeting, but we haven’t got the right person to do the job before Johan came along.

* The music style in PoH will probably be shown in the first trailer/movie/teaser that we release in 1-2 month. So stay tune ; )