Wohoooo. We just got back from the Nordic Game party at the club Debaser in Malmö and it was great.

The first day at Nordic Games went good. We started to show Exhaust, but we changed to a “work in progress” beta of Penalty of Heroes. Many features is missing but the “core gameplay” is in so we tried it on a lot of people. The response was over all good, there were of cause some things that were pointed out, but now we can change or design them in another way. So all the worlds game developer were our beta testers today :p

I also went to a couple of lectures. The best one that I went to was Ryan Schneider seminar about communities. Ryan is the community manager at Insomniac Games (Resistance, Ratchet & Clank etc).

There were also “some” people that took a chance to play PoH. The video is shot from a distance and PoH is shown on the TV to the right.

Also today two games from Gotland University was nominated at the awards, Vertigo (best new game studio) & Penumbra (best game of the year). Though none of them won : (

* There were also some people coming up to us and saying hi and thanking us for keeping this blog up working. It’ feels really great to get that response from people you never met : ) This makes us want to do this blog even better : )

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.

Be prepared Sweden, Malmoe and all you game developers because Databox Games is going to Nordic Games this weekend. We’ll be showing Exhaust and maybe also a little “Penalty of Heroes”, but we’ll probably only be showing that for selected people or if someone asks for it : )

At this years event there will be a lot of great speakers at the event so I hope I can catch some of them. One of the bad things is that some of the speakers have their  seminars at the same time, so you can only catch on of them. But as we’re four people we might go to different seminars : )

On my “want to see” list is:
Keijl Inafune (Capcom) - “The Capcom Philosophy”
Ian Bowden (Rockstar Leeds) - “It’s a small Word”
Calle Lejdfors (IO Interactive) - “Designing a flexible content pipeline”
Ilari Kulittinen (Housemarque) - “PSN rock crushing & casual golfing on XBLA”
Ryan Schneider (Insomniac Games) - “Does community even matter?”
Lars Gustavsson (DICE) - “Innovation - Making a leap of faith”
Suda 51 (Grasshopper) - “The birth of No More Heroes”
Jussi Laakkonen (Everyplay) - “How to start your own game company”
Harald Rieger (Sproing) - “Managing multiple development teams”

We will be posting updates about Nordic Games every day, so check out our blog this week for the latest!

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

Todays meeting was mostly focused on things related to the deadlines for SGA (Sweden Game Awards) and GGA (Gotland Game Awards). We mostly discussed different versions of the the new video trailer and what things to priorities the next weeks. We have so much to do the next three weeks that we really can’t afford to sleep, then in the middle of it some of us are going to Nordic Games. Well on top of that there’s about 2-3 major things to do also.

Anyway why sleep when you can work?

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.