Sometime everything is against you, like today I had to do a  lots of paper work for our company and bank so we  finally can  get pay for our other game Exhaust. It’s god dame boring but have to be done, it’s 30+ Celsius (86+ Fahrenheit) and all the girls are running around in there new summer clothes outside dozenth increase my concentration either,  maybe i well grade myself i swim in the ocean after this.

Oh I forgot, the politician weekend this week and then your not allowed to go through the  town naked :/ to bad

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.

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

So today it’s time for Nordic Games. Håkan, Jona, Baba, Jakob & me (Jens) just had breakfast and soon we will go Nordic Games. Yesterday we set up our booth and we have booth close to both CryTech and Starbreeze so there will be some competition :p We will both show Exhaust and Penalty of Heroes on our brand new Samsung 46 inch LCD screens. PoH looked really good on it (though there’s some “eyecandy” that are not in yet), we only tried it on our laptops before, so now we could see all the details in it : )

* The picture is from yesterdays lunch.

Some weeks ago my dear friend Dopefish came back to his home island Gotland to pay me a visit … and his parents (mostly me). Baba, Jakob, Jona and Zaffe had bean working really hard to finish their game Exhaust, so they could be able to release it on the Xbox live community game in the beginning of 2009.

So what more could I do as a good friend than handing over the control to a man that breakes games (find bugs errors and so on) for a living. Dopefish works at the excellent Swedish game studio Starbreeze, makers of games such as The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and The Darkness. They’re busy working right now on The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena (360, PS3) and Project RedLime (Win, 360, PS3).

Tip don’t forget to read Dopefish blog it’s one of my favorite!

And so it’s Friday again. Some people look forward to this day. I, on the other hand, feel a bit concerned. I’m not a workaholic or anything, it’s just that the release party for Exhaust is coming up tonight and it probably will involve consuming alcohol with insane people, such as my colleges. I hope no one dies.
Anyway, this week I devoted most of my time to design enemies. Mainly some enemies that’s in the forest.

Kristofer and I discussed what could work and we agreed on some sort of small trolls equipped with wooden clubs. Said and done, I drew a couple of sketches which you can see below.

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

Well you read it right folks. I’m on the way down to Gran Canarias, one of the Canary Islands will “all” of Databox money they made from Exhaust :p No I’m just joking : )
My sister works there as a musician at a hotel, so I promised her to visit her before Christmas, but there were no time. So when I saw a very cheap fly ticket yesterday I couldn’t resist, so long rainy, snowy, cold, dark Sweden :p

Since the hotel got wireless broadband I don’t think this trip will affect the work on the game in any way : ) The only thing is that I’ll probably only be working 8 hours days instead of the 12-16 hours day I have done the last month. Might even share some pictures : )

Well we couldn’t believe our eyes when we woke up this morning and found that Exhaust was the most popular community game on Xbox Live. It fells really great and surreal that people have started to play our game. Just let us know what you think about it. I’ll post some screen shots so you don’t think that we’re making it up : )

We (Databox Games) got three games into the Swedish Game Awards this year. The games nominated are Exhaust, Dead Dictators Society and Penalty of Heroes.

Don’t forget to vote for us!

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

Well not Penalty of Heroes, but Exhaust! What’s Exhaust!?! It’s  the first gravity based 2.5D monster truck racing game for Xbox Live Arcade and it’s made by three persons from Databox Games (Jakob, Baba & Jona). We have send in Exhaust to Microsoft for evaluation/certification/bug testing and it will be out when it’s got the big OK from Microsoft. We’ll keep you updated when the game’s available for download on XBLA.

Be sure to check out the trailer for the game here!

Here’s a video of some shader testing. The game being showed/tested is Exhaust. What’s Exhaust you might ask!?!

-”Exhaust is the first gravity based 2.5D monster truck racing game to ever hit the market. Even though it is called a racing game, the use of dynamic objects and physics in a world controlled by gravity has given us the option of adding loads of interesting artifacts to the racing tracks which turns this monster truck racer into an incredible platform game.”

The game is made for Xbox Live Arcade by three persons from Databox Games (Jakob, Baba & Jona). The game will be out in the beginning of 2009. We’ll keep you updated on how things are going.