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

Here’s a list of all the main programs that we use to make Penalty of Heroes.

The game engine, level editor and other stuff (scripting & collision system, shaders and so on) is done in-house and our programmers write everything in C# (The engine and the level editor both use XNA 3.0 and are developed in Visual Studio 2008).

Our concept artists use Wacom drawing boards to draw the characters in the computer in Photoshop.

Our 3d artists use 3d Studio Max for modeling and Mudbox 2009 for texturing

Here’s from an on-line meeting using Marratech

Additional programs:
For the web we code in HTML and Flash and for the blog we use Word Press (HTML).
For communication we use MSN, Skype, Marratech and related programs.
For documentation/project management we use Word, Excel and Google document.
For video & trailers we use Premier Pro & After Effects
Also our narrative guy mr Stoffer uses MS Paint to draw his ideas.

Hmm I think that’s about it : )

To our help we have our main teacher Troels (a.k.a Trulle) that weekly gives us tons of material to read, analyze, use, and hand in. The material can be anything from narrative, game play intentions, stakeholders, risks, role responsibilities, target group, game stage definition, high concept and so on and on and on.

Every 1-2 month we have a presentation before an expert panel that consists of external people that already work in the gaming industry. Usually they come with tons of constructive criticism that many times makes us rethink some of our decisions that we’ve made. It’s really hard at first to hear criticism about a project that you’re working on day and night, especially from people in “the business”, but usually after 30-60 minutes after the presentations we can “think clearly” and see their points.

Our next presentation will on the 12th of December. We have asked Trulls to try to contact some new people that med similar games like “Penalty of Heroes” to be on the expert panel. So we hope they would like to participate. You know who you are!

We stay in touch using Msn/Skype kind of tools and for big meetings with 3-15 people we use a tool/program called Marratech. In my opinion it’s a good conference tool where you can hear, see everyone + show word, pdf, and power point files for everyone. You can also record everything which is really good.