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.

So it’s time once again to let you know what we will be up to this week, by posting our “sprint of the week”, “project plane of the week”, “to-do list of the week” or just simple our focus area (work) this week. As last week this week will focus much on programming. On Wednesday we have a “game presentation” and we will show some gameplay of the game to some people in the industry. So there’s a lot of things that should be done before that.

Code
Make more AI patterns
Adjust player control (revive)
Enemy generator true triggers
Camera kontroll Concept (2d)
Menu & GUI (animation)
Particles

Level (2d)
Finalize level 1

3d
Make animations for foes

Narrative
Fraps animations for sound effects

Other things
Start to work on presentation
Sketch for trailer for GGA
GGA boot
Game play presentation

Been modeling another enemy today, total time from Nixi’s finished concept to all but finished 3D model 2hours and 40minutes, it’s incredible how much faster you can get when you model a lot.

This little guy will serve as a tough opponent, charging into the ranks of our heroes in hope of gouge their inards out… time will only tell if it’ll succeed or if you’ll turn this unstopable force into an immovable object.

It currently consits of 2700triss, which hopefully means that when game testing starts for real, we won’t be able to see Llakel for all of the pigs! Llaknel has around 10 000 triss.

Here’s Nixis concept art of the piggy.

Here’s the third part of the Velocirator series, where you get to follow an enemy all the way from first concept to a finished and animated 3d mesh.
Once again I have in co-operation with Håkan compiled this little video, it shows my workflow as I rig, skin and textur the Velocirator (Ratociraptor?) in 3ds max, at 12 times the original speed.

I will make sure to keep my camera rolling when I animate it as well, look forward to it! Please!

I’ve been working on a new enemy which Nixi has drawn, I want it to be called a Velocirator, mainly because it’s a rat with a Velociraptor’s body, but also because it rolls nicely off of one’s tongue.

Now for the real reason of this rant, this is the second in the four part series about the enemy, which started out as nothing more than the “tiny foe”, the less than dreadful, Velocirator!

Using Håkan, I’ve compiled this video where I model the Velocirator from start to finish.

Enjoy it!

Nixi and me work quite closely, once Nixi has finished a concept he hands it to me so that I will be able to start modeling it, during the time I work on the model I often take Nixi away from new concepts and make him give me some critique on my model.

Then when Nixi and I agree upon the model being finished I UVW map, rig and skin the model after that I usually put a really basic texture onto the
model and start to animate.

Being more of a technical artist I do find general anatomy to be my main issue while modeling things, especially human anatomy, which luckily is something that Nixi is quite good at.

This week, stating today, we’ll publish a little series of connection posts that will show you how we make a character/enemy from start to finish.

Finally, I’m back at the island after a couple of smooth days back home. It was nice to eat three meals a day and do nothing at all, just dragging the feet behind me and enjoying friends, family and the wonderful weather. Thank you easter bunny and Jesus Christ.

The video below shows how I work when making a concept: in this case an enemy rat mixed with a kangaroo and a velociraptor. I knew that it had to be small sized, come in hordes and perform some sort of jumping attack, making it more vulnerable and easier to hit if you get the timing right.

I started off making a couple of quick sketches to find something that could work. As reference I found some hideous pictures of the African nude mole rat. It’s probably the ugliest animal on the planet and when you see it, you instantly want to kill it. This creature looks like as if someone copy pasted a human penis, gave it eyes, legs and a nose. It didn’t quite feel right to keep that body type so instead I decided to move towards, as mentioned, the kangaroo/raptor direction.

It took about 2-3 hours to complete but luckily the video is like 8x speed. I hope you enjoy watching it.

Next week, starting on Tuesday, we’ll be posting a series of posts that are connected to eachother and showing how we work . We will do this using one of our enemies. First of is Nixi, our concept artist, that first shows how he draws two versions of the enemy. In the Next post Jona, one of our 3d artists show how he makes a 3d model using Nixis concept art. In the third video Jona is skinning and texturing the 3d model. In the last video you’ll see the enemy move.

Here’s a little “pre taste” video of Llaknel being textured in Mudbox.

I wanted to share some of the work I’ve been doing in the Story document. This is where everything is explained and later put into each level. It is a guide, me and the other guys in the team, can use while working on the game. But it is also a minor Lore of Penalty of Heroes. I tend to find lore from games I like to be very interesting and somewhat addictive. Therefore I want the Lore of PoH to be well written and intriguing for the people who will enjoy our game and want to find out more after playing it.

This is an early example of one of the creatures/enemies of the game that I would like to share with you:

“The people/creatures living on the mountainside of Jedna were the aboriginals, who later became the founders and the citizens of Jedna. They have a xxx like appearance and have grown fur over centuries from experiencing rough weather and tough climates. Compared to the previous people/creatures of the xxxx and the xxxxx, the men in this mountain are fairly neutral and will not attack outsiders who enter their territory. However if someone would disturb their peace and threaten them, they will be attacked. The mountain men are collectors and are not afraid of the changes happening in xxxxx; such as the xxxxxx. They collect the spare parts thrown off Jedna, which they use to build huts and weapons.”

Ps: X=Secret.

Well it seemed to me that it was time to show off something completely new.
You’ve seen the concept and here is the finished model doing what he does best.

http://blog.penaltyofheroes.com/wp-content/uploads/mediumfoe_spearstab.flv

I’ll be posting some modeling, rigging, skinning and texturing videos later when I’ve finished rendering them out.
We are also toying around with different kinds of weapons for this enemy, so we’ll see if he ends up wielding  a spear, a sword or maybe even an ostrich hammer (google Red Faction april 1st).

However, no matter what kind of armament he ends up with, it’s highly likely that he’ll not just have one type of weapon or shield, but quite a few interchangable parts in order to make him more interesting.

This weekly meeting started just 15 minutes late :p The work hours was discussed … again (mostly so everyone work at the same time).

Today we mainly discussed the enemies of Penalty of Heroes and if we can make different versions of them to get more types of enemies.

On Tuesday it’s stop for “major sprint 3″ (each “major sprint” is divided into 3-4 weekly sprints), so we discussed which tasks are done or behind schedule.

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.