New office, yay!
I got a desk next to a window through which you actually can see what the weather’s like. That’s nice even though its been kind of cloudy today compared to the past week. But for the moment, I feel a slightly tingling sensation of temporary happiness in my chest.

Penalty of Heroes - HUD

Enough chitchat, WORK has been executed this day, right here, in front of my gargantually, enormously, penisenlarging screen. I’ve made another iteration of the HUD and I can’t recall that I’ve written about the previous ones so here we go. I begun with a dark vector shape created earlier, just like in a cooking show. I added a new layer and started to play with details and colors, trying to find something that works with the art style I had in mind. I have to add that making interface is really not my thing, I knew this before I started and now I’ve learned that it’s also quite boring.

Anyway, here’s the result of today’s work, the resolution is far too high compared to what it’s gonna be ingame but I’ll deal with that later. Forget I said that.

We had some requests about two week ago that people wanted to have a look at us working at our office. So here’s a video, though from our old office (we just moved), of us at work. This is how it looks like when things are running smoothly and everyone is in.

At first you’ll see Nixi working on some concept art, then a quick look at Jona texturing, over to Jakob coding, to Dwarf making level art, to Andreas play testing, back to Jakob, and then to Jona and Nixi again. The man with the camera is King Klepot aka Håkan.

After a couple of days in Prague, I’m back at the office in Sweden. The writing is put on ice this week as I’m currently working on feedback from the story and the level’s built. This week I will work with our sound effects guy (Josef) and I’m eager to see what sound he will put on the characters’ animations.

I’m also working on the upcoming trailer. Nothing is really determined for the moment, but as usual it’s going to kick ass. I have tons of ideas and the hard part will be to decide which one will fit our game the most. The obvious choice of curse would be something like THIS

But that wouldn’t really fit our game now would it!?

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)

How do you get your messy co-worker to clean his desk? Well after asking him a couple of times without any results I decided to play a little prank on him. I knew beforehand that he really believes in ghost and often watches shows like Ghost Hunters and that he often stays late alone at the office.

This gave me an idea. I found an audio sample with children singing a song about cleaning up and added it as a sound event every time visual studio hits a break point while debugging. Later that night he was sitting alone at the office writing some code and heard the strange sound of children singing. He later told me he got really startled because he couldn’t figure out where the sound was coming from. He checked all the Windows processes for something that played the sound and even went so far as to check the hallway outside the our office.

Another funny thing is that he wrote to people on msn that night about his ordeal so they should know if anything happened to him. The best part of it all is that his desk was clean when I came to the office the next day.

9 people in the old sauna (we have two fans right know and that’s not enough) was starting to tear us apart, the new one is only two doors away from the old one so we have decide to keep it, we have not decide how to split the group yet but i wish for us to rotate because most of us have laptops. we have also unfortunately happen to find some nice office chair. I found out that it was really nice to split the group because then you have to walk over sometime and that’s relay nice for the body. We have also put up some webcam so we see each other all the time, which sometimes might be bad :p

The office have always bean to small fore nine people bout that shouldn’t  stop us to make it nice for us self , now for once when we have it rather clean.  So me and dwarf printed some images PoH and stamp on the wall.

curtain someone ?

I feel pretty, oh sooo pretty. No, wait. I feel shitty. Didn’t sleep at all and there is no one to blame but myself. I never went to bed but stayed in front of my computer screen, painting my way through the night, then the whole morning and now I have dragged myself to the office for some reason. It’s gloomy and empty and I also got a new background from Tobias. He is upset about the coat one character is wearing and by using MS paint he has expressed his feelings about this matter. That poor boy needs my attention, as always.

So you might be wondering what I painted this night. Well, last Friday I started sketching on a new concept for the third character and that’s what I’ve been trying to finish during the whole day.

I think I’m going in the right direction and I feel quite confident with the design. I had a little different approach than I usually have. On my previous concepts I feel that I move too quickly from making line art to the coloring process. This time I really tried to be more accurate by starting with a rough sketch of the pose then moving on to the anatomy by adding layers and painting over the previous one until I got a nice and clean line art. Sure it takes time but I really felt that it helped me. I added a layer, made some rough sketches and when I was happy with the design, I refined the lineart just like I did with the anatomy.

So now I have a much clearer picture which makes it a lot easier to define the shadows, midtones and highlights. I create a new layer that I stack behind the line art and then I just fill in the values, without any shadows or highlights. When I’m done with that I copy the layer, change the brightness to a darker value and add a layer mask. By using a layer mask I can use black or white to hide or reveal the layer which the mask is covering, in this case the shadows. This is a good way to keep the consistency of the values.

When I feel done with that I simply add a color layer on top and start coloring. I will continue that tomorrow.

Mostly it’s more like 12.00 to 00.00 here at Databox and it’s rarely you see anyone on-line on MSN before 11.00. Two month ago we agreed at a meeting that everyone had to be at the office at least between 14-16 (pm 2-4). This so that things can be discussed and decided in the group at a daily basis. Well I guess we work more or less like everyone else does in the game development business. It’s Saturday today and I haven’t seen any sign of live yet (12.30). I guess everyone’s is in bed having a nice hangover since yesterdays partying.

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..

Since we’re not millionaires, we just have a very tiny office were we sit basically on top of each other. Behold our fancy office! From the left: Baba, Stoffer and Nixi.

Databox office