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.

Let’s throw out the old saying and replace it with a new one. -”Word-by-mouth” has been and still is one, if not, the best way to get attention. When it comes to Internet  then it’s even more important. So let us change the popular expression”Word-by-Mouth” to the new invented “Word-by-Mouse”. The “Mouse” is the new refined form of the “Word”. On Internet the “click” on a page/url means exposure and when you sen urls to friends through MSN, forums, You Tube, Facebook etc you’re spreading the word like never before. To get the “ball” rolling is now the key to get major exposure.

Attention = Exposure = Money (yes I know the ugly “M-word”)

We at Databox had a little “taste” of it in March when Gotland University gave out a press release about one of the educations (IGPS - International Game Production Studies)  that some of us in the team are studding. The news was on some major gaming sites and we more than doubled the visitors to our blog in a day. Some of you reading this might got the news about our blog through that press release : )

So I would say “Word by Mouce” is the most important thing in marketing anything on-line today. So:
-”send our blog to 10 of you friends within 10 minutes and you’ll be the happiest person today. If not you’ll be cursed and you’ll start to dislike playing games” :p

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 : )

Is there anyone out there who doesn’t enjoy blood and gore in movies, games or comics? Yeah okey there might be a few but they don’t ever have fun and many of them also hate when you have fun. But today, they stand powerless as I play with our particle editor, creating fountains of blood and gore that would make even the toughest character in mortal combat cry. Here’s a sample.

Llaknel creating blood out of thin air

Yes, that’s right, we have put up a new web page on the official “Penalty of Heroes” web page at www.penaltyofheroes.com : ) It’s not the final one and it’s better than the last one. Also there are some content such as concept art, teaser trailer and SCREENSHOTS! This is our first officially released screenshots of Penalty of Heroes, so we hope you like them : )

The screenshots are work in progress and will be adding more features before the release this fall. So the final game will look better than the screenshots that we just released, though we hope you digg them : ) We’re grateful for feedback on them, if we don’t’ get any feedback (good or bad) we don’t know what we should focus on : )

Well you didn’t expect that now did you? Our first preview of Penalty of Heroes we gave to our friends over at the great gaming site Evil Avatar. So head over there and get the first sneak peek of the game.

Read the preview here (you have to scroll down a bit)

Now, Penalty of Heroes, your new game is a quite traditional in its concepts. What titles have been particularly influential in the game design?
One of the reasons why we wanted to make a game like Penalty of Heroes in the first place was to take the elements that we loved in old school games and combine them into a new one. Games that we love and have influenced us for Penalty of Heroes are Golden Axe, Turtles in Time, Secrets of Mana and Diablo. The game design philosophy for Penalty of Heroes was to take the best features of old school arcade and console games and then mix it with next generation graphics and physics.

Describe the gameplay for us.
Penalty of Heroes have four unique playable characters (tank, healer, dps, range) which have different weapon, fighting style and magic. All of the characters are in play all the time, so in single player mode you can swap between the characters as you want. If you need a character with a range weapon you swap to the range character, if you feel you need more muscles you change to the tank character. So in a way you’re controlling all of the characters.

Yesterday we had the presentation about the marketing of PoH that we were supposed to have like 3 weeks ago, but then it was canceled due to the fact that some people got sick. Overall the presentation went really well and it lasted for about 20 minutes and then we talked and discussed for about one hour. We got a advice to start to use Twitter so we probably start to twitter in a few weeks.

This was the last “game presentation” we have before the final one at GGA in the beginning of June. Though we have a game play panel presentation in a few week, but that presentation is just us getting feedback from the “game panel” playing the game, so no real presentation is needed.

Before I post what we discussed on todays weekly meeting, I just want to post a picture of the “Databox team” (we who makes “Penalty of Heroes”).  Some people are missing though, from left to right, Dwarf, Jakob, Baba, Jona Nixi, Stoffer, Håkan (in the tree).

We had a short meeting today since we have a lot of things to do. Things we discussed were the use of shadows in game (we have done some research of it), when we should release screenshots (more “tech” is now in and it starts to look more like the final game). We also discussed how we should divide the programing tasks (we are 4 programmers now) and the sound fx and the music in the game.

Today and tomorrw we will have some nice visitors at our office, so we planed a bit of that and we also cleaned the office : ) We probably post a post in here about the visitors in a few days.

* It’s great spring weather right now in Sweden around 20+ Celsius (68+ Fahrenheit), blue sky and it’s been like this for about 2-3 week now (I’m outside right now, really nice to have wireless broadband)

Today we had one of the shortest weekly meetings in the history of Databox. It was about 45 minutes including the “ordinary” 15 minute delay.

Today we discussed next week “game panel” presentation and who is gonna make it and if we needed any new layout (or use the last one). We haven’t heard which people or from which game companies that will be present, so it might be the people from last presentation (better ask mr T).

Since we stated “major sprint 4″ this Tuesday we went though what went right and wrong in sprint 3. The coding is still a bit behind, but that’s mainly because Baba and Jakob have had programming classes the last 2 weeks. The 3d modeling is also speeding up and we’re on track there.

Sprint 4 is a pure production period, no more testing or concepting. The game is up and running, the level editor is stable and it’s just about putting content together and make a game.

It’s time for another game presentation (2nd of April). We haven’t had one in a while which is both good and bad. The bad thing is that a presentations takes away approx 1 week of 2-3 people in the team, the good thing is that we get great feedback. Here’s some slides from the templete that we got:

This presentation will be about marketing and how we’ll get people to know about Penalty of Heroes. For each presentation we get tons of questions that we have to answer and then put together in a Power Point presentation that we present to a game panel of different people in the gaming industry.

After this presentation we have 2 more, one that’s about the gameplay/test of the game and the last one is the final presentation about the whole game (it’s will be at this year GGA).

I’ve been putting a lot of time into the start screen lately, trying to give a more impressive feel to it, something that reflects the awesomeness of what to come when starting up the game. I want to spend even more time to it but this will do for now. Its fairly close to what you will see in the actual game except that it will be much more vivid when all the shaders puts into use, such as moving leaves, clouds and flags and more. Without saying too much you might get a glimpse of that quite soon..

The second iteration of the start screen

From the start of Penalty of Heroes I have seen the release of the game Darkfall as a major risk in our project. Jona, Zaffe, Tobbe and Johan have now got Darkfall and will probably forget to sleep, party and even work on PoH (I think I have to bring out the whip).

This is truly a dark day for PoH and the only thing I will hear about at the office for several weeks/months now are how great Darkfall is.

Watch how happy Baba gets when he receives the message “service is not available” when he starts up Darkfall. At the beginning Baba says -”I pee my pants of happiness” (in Swedish). At the end of the video you can see Jona making animations for Llaknel.

Time runs fast when you’re having fun, people say. If someone would have said before we started this blog–“it must have at least 100 posts, before PoH was released”, I would have said –“we won’t be able to make that”. Well only four and a half month into development we’re posted over 100 posts in our blog. It’s about 5 posts a week and since the beginning of 2009 we try to post at least one post a day. Hope you enjoy our effort to keep this up : )

Thanks again for reading about us and our game!

As always on Thursdays we had our big weekly meeting today. Today it was the first time we discussed all the things that had been written down on the “wish list”. There were around 15 ideas and I think it was only 3 suggestions that were put away directly, 4 were considered to be implemented and the rest was considered “ok” (Ok = will be implemented if we have time).

We discussed the progress of sprint 2 and the beginning of sprint 3 (starts next week). We also discussed that we might divide the “major sprints” into smaller “weekly sprints”, this so that it becomes more of weekly goals instead on “monthly goals”. The risk of having a “monthly goal” is that you might focus and work 3 weeks with one thing and when the last week of the sprint comes you suddenly realize that you haven’t done all the other stuff you were supposed to do during the whole sprint.

We talked about motion capture (which we should try tonight : ) and what type of script function we would like to have in the game.

There were also some other smaller stuff that we discussed today.

Well, the most annoying part of him is at the very least, gotta skin him as well but that won’t take long also I’ve been busy dealing with “undisclosed as of now”.

Now I’m gonna get back to the latest secret that has been added into the game… It’s gonna be really great.

As I learned about the narrative structures in films at the University while studying to become a screen writer, I mainly worked with linear narrated structures, much like any film. For some reason it felt like linear structures were the only stories I could or would write. Computer games showed me another way around a story. The non linear structure like many computer games worked. As you are in control of your avatar anything can happen. He or she as its own protagonist can fill lots of gaps, without breaking any narrative “rules”.

It’s fun and it’s different writing for a computer game, than writing a script. It feels like I’m working backwards. Normally I would start with figuring out the plot etc. Now I have to build the plot into our game and not the other way around. And I have to say “I like it”. It’s weird but it’s fun.

As I’m writing the different challenges on the level plus story I just fill in info on my template. It’s simple and efficient. E.g. challenge 1, 2, 3 etc. followed by, info on mobs, environmental aspects and what is the main challenge. It reminds me of a call cheat, or a treatment.

Hi, Stoffer the narrative guy in the PoH team. I’ve bee trying to make a video in a non functional editing tool has been a pain in the ass ever since I started working with this game. However, I now finally have one that works. A new test video with speech bubbles is on it’s way. We use “test videos” to see how things will/can look without putting the time and effort to implant it into the game engine. This way we can see if things will or will not work.

The earlier projects involved frapped videos from my best friend You tube, where I used TMNT (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) In Time as a substitute. It was an in game video with four players from the arcade version of the game. I experimented with different types of texts. From toned bars at the upper part of the screen to colored speech bubbles. Speech bubbles seem to be the best choice for adding dialog to the game. However it didn’t look good enough and the crappy quality of the frapped video made it even worse.

My guess is that my new video will resemble our expectations of the dialog part of the game better than the TMNT one. Hence I now use our own design of the first level as our own characters.

Some jobs such as firefighters and police men have scheduled that they have to work out at work. Well we have just decided to do the same thing, but instead of workout we have to play lan game each day at 20.00 (8 pm) each day at the office for at least one hour. The reason we do this, besides that we love to play game, is to get a break from work, but also get inspiration and have fun : )

I arrived at our office somewhere around four a clock in the afternoon today. When opening the door the “air” hit me in the face like a wall, thick and heavy, filled with mixed scents of cheap fast food, old coffee and garbage from an overgrown trashcan. I sure as hell won’t take it out and I’m just as sure no one else will. Not to mention the bag stuffed with empty beer cans and cola bottles. If our game doesn’t bring us any money we might at least earn a small fortune by recycling. Yay..