So, time is starting to run out and the things to do starts to really pile up and in the middle of is half of the team is going to Nordic Games next week.

Code
- Sound & Music (Jakob)
- Change diffuse light (Baba)
- Calibrate particle effects (Baba)
- Optimize code (Jakob & Baba)
- Vertex shader (Baba)
- Game over screen (Jakob)
- Movement & camera (Nixi & Baba)

Animation
- Collision boxes (Tobbe & Jona)
- Frame on character that will detect damage (Tobbe & Jona & Nixi)

Level optimization
-Level 1 (Dwarf)
-Level 2 (Dwarf)

Trailer
- Content (Stoff)

Exhibition booth
- Get all measures & printing details (Stoff)

Other thing
- Gameplay test on Friday, demo done on Thursday

We haven’t talked so much about the new people on the PoH and what they will do. So I think feel it’s time to present them now : )

Programming
We haven’t really been on track with the programming for about 2 month and we have been about 2-3 weeks behind scheduel constantly. So we had to do something about it. That “something” was Andreas. Andreas will join the programmer team (Jakob and Baba) but he will focus solely on AI programming, this so Jakob and Baba can focus on all the other stuff such as engine optimizing, shaders, gameplay code and so on. Our producer Håkan has also step in as a programmer and he will program about 50% of his time (about 1h/day :p).

Music & Sound
We have the “know how” in the team but not the time to focus on music and sound, since it takes quiet some time to make. So we invited two new persons to do this.

Pontus Rufelt will make all the music for PoH and you have already heard a bit of it in the “teaser trailer” (yes it’s his music, it’s not music taken from Hans Zimmerman). Pontus is the first “external resource” that we use, but when we heard his creations we all said that he was the guy to make the music.
Josef will make all the sound effects for the game. We know and have worked with Josef on other games such as “In Other Words”.

So welcome Andreas, Pontus and Josef!

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)

Last Thursday I met and old friend of mind at the old game student floor. He asked for some advice about a poster that tells that he is a graphic artist searching for jobs. We talk and I helped as much as I could. On my way back to the Databox office I realized that Johan was great with music. He had made the ingame music for headbanger and the sound to the drinks trailer and remix of some enoying sounds. This was kind of frustrating because I had been searching for music person for a long time and started to get desperate so I directly took contact with him and a hour later we had agreed that he had the weekend to make a demo for us to see if he could create the kind of music we wanted for PoH. Later the same day a friend of mine hade find one music person that had time to help us to. One moment you have nobody and a second later you have to say no because you have too many.

On Monday he presented two songs made in 2 hours each on his laptop and I was over whelmed about the result.

(Jens continuous)
I agreed with Håkan. When I heard the songs Johan had made during the weekend I was very pleased, it was exactly what I had in mind for the music in PoH. I was so nervous when I pressed “play” to hear the music, -“what if this sucks or sounds like “Euro disco” (I do not trust Håkan when it comes to music :p). I’m a musician (worked as music producer), so I have told Håkan to talk to me before he said “ok” to the person doing the music for PoH.

At a meeting in late November or early December we had a meeting just about what kind of music that would be suited for PoH. We had so many different suggestions of music styles for PoH that we had to get together and decide what style to go with. At that meeting we all agreed on going in one direction on the music. That music direction has been the same since that meeting, but we haven’t got the right person to do the job before Johan came along.

* The music style in PoH will probably be shown in the first trailer/movie/teaser that we release in 1-2 month. So stay tune ; )

So what kind of music are we going to have in Penalty of heroes? Well to be honest with you, we’re right now in the process of discussing and throwing ideas around. We have tons of suggestions of what kind of music to have in PoH, this mainly because everyone in the team loves music and plays some sort of instrument (many guitarists). Before we set the music direction “in stone”, we have some things to work out first such as decide the final art direction and story (levels). I think that we will have done this in the next month.