Here’s a little video from all of us to all of you, hope you have a happy Christmas : )

The video is a trailer we made for GGA before the summer, so the things shown in it is about 7 month old : )

It’s still nice to watch

My girlfriend Zenobia ( queenzenobia.deviantart.com ) got inspired when she saw some of the artwork for our booth at GGA and played around with some pixel art.

I thought it looked really nice, I’m sure she’ll get hired once PoH is to be made for the NDS.

She kept telling me it’s not done etc buuut, here it is!

Here’s some of Nixis concept art of the main characters for Penalty of Heroes. This and some other collages were Nixis contributions for “Best effort in art” at the Gotland Game Awards, last week. The larger versions of the characters on the sides are the newest versions of the main characters. There’s also some smaller sketches at the bottom of different moves of the characters

It sounds really good, but the fact is that during June it’s mostly shitty weather. Normal is that in April and May we have really great weather with about 15-25+ degrees (Celsius) and then when summer should start in June we have a month of kind of bad weather with rain and about 15-20+ degrees.

So why do I write this? Well, it’s because it’s been typical “Swedish summer weather” now for about 2 weeks now and it’s so boring : ( Well I guess the summer will start here late in June so in a couple of weeks it will be all nice I think : )

Later today/tonight we’ll have the first big meeting since GGA and will discuss all the feedback we got. Everyone has written down all the feedback they got/heard from the people playing PoH. At the meeting we’ll decide what things we’ll have to redo and tweek.

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.

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

for a couple of days that is. After the award ceremony (Wednesday) we partied until 7 in the morning, first at Wisby Strand (had a couple of bottles of champagne), then at the club Gute källan. After that we continued party in an old basement/catacomb club until 7 o’clock. So yesterday we got up at about 3 pm in the afternoon and then we had a BBQ with everyone at Databox. So today and probably this weekend we won’t work on PoH. I think it’s nice to have a break from it a couple of days and then start with discussing all the feedback we got at Gotland Game Awards.

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.

Some of us didn’t sleep from the 1-2 of June just to get a nice “build” of PoH for Gotland Game Awards. Here’s everyone at Databox eating a healthy dinner together the day before GGA.

* MaX is a Swedish hamburg company that makes way better burgers than both McDonalds and Burger King.

Here’s a picture of us testing the “GGA build”

… That is the question. And the answer is no. We won’t have booth babes on GGA, but we will have a nice looking booth though. We’re currently working with what to have and what not to have inside our booth on Tuesday. Calling all sorts of companies to get the right look, we’ve settled with A0 cardboard paper with images of the exteriors of the game to decorate our foreground. From the blueprint of our booth it looks good and I bet it’ll look even better in place.

* Comment by Jens *

Well, Stoff thougth that he was talking the truth when he wrote this post and I had no idea of a booth babe. Anyway one of our friends turned up at GGA dressed up as Kimo. First I saw a person holding a “wand” and I thought -”hmm, that looks just like Kimos wand”. Then I saw the pattern on her leg and I thougth -”shit that’s Kimo”. So that’s really sweet to actually have a person dressed up like someone we “invented” for our game.

Yesterday we got our printed stuff for our game booth at Gotland Game Awards next week. We have an idea of layering the booth with cut out silhouettes of houses in a similar way like Penalty of Heroes is done. We’ll also try to paint a sky behind the  silhouettes and in the middle there will be a nice 46 inch TV showing PoH (we’ll probably have two 42 inch TV:s at each sides also). The picture is taken at our office where we tried how it would work.

We also got a nice poster that Nixi has done as promotion for PoH. We’ll have two of these to the left and right. That’s our plan right now anyway : )

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 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

SGA (Sweden Game Awards) and GGA (Gotland Game Awards) starting to close up, so we have to focus on getting all system running and working together. So this next month we will be focusing on tuning things and not to implement new features.

Code
Make more AI patterns
Adjust player control
Get particle and light effects onto the characters
Get gem system to work
Enemy generator

Concept (2d)
Menu & GUI

Levels 2d
Continue working on levels

3D
Make more animations and get the to work smoothly

Narrative
List of sound effects
Start to work on presentation
Sketch for trailer for GGA
Test the story on regular people

Other things
Take screenshots
Move to new office
Start on the last sprint

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.

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).

On the meeting tomorrow we’ll have a lot of different things to discuss such as how big the characters will be on the screen, coming events (such as SGA, GGA, Nordic Games), the music (new music guy on the team), the narrative and different things regarding the level editor.

On Friday we’re going to have a very interesting on-line lecture/seminar mainly about Scrum with Kjartan Vidarsson that has been a producer at Deadline Games (Chili con Carnage, Faith and a .45, Total Overdose) and he also worked at IO (Hitman, Kane & Lynch, Freedom Fighters). He’ll have a look how we use Scrum when we work on PoH and he’ll come with suggestions how to improve things (there’s always room for improvements).
It’s going to be really interesting.