While the last year has been quite stressful with people having to get new jobs to support development and/or writing their final thesis to graduate from Uni, some enemies have been created.

While I am unable to show off all of these new enemies I still wanted to at least show off  a variation on an already shown enemy that have not only been re-textured but also remodeled for later levels in the game!

WIP Magma Rat

It is a work in progress and rendered in realtime in the viewport of 3Ds Max, Diffuse, Normal, Specular and finally a Glow map, has been used to create this effect of glowing lava, when in its natural dark environment (it’s a cave! But don’t tell anyone I leaked that.) in-game, the lava looks pretty frickin ‘ sweet!

Happy new year to everyone!

Hope you’ll have a great year

As you might have noticed we haven’t been updating the PoH blog since this summer. So is PoH dead you might ask yourself? No it’s alive and well : )

So why haven’t we updated our progress here then. Well …. the summer came and most people went home so there weren’t to much work on PoH to write about, then autum came and some people had new game projects to take care about so work on PoH went down about 50 %.

So before and during the x-mas holiday we have been 100% focusing on PoH and it starts to shape up. The main focus now is getting game conents into the game. The game has been up and running with all the game features since the beginning of the summer. We showed and demoed  the first level of PoH at both GGA and GDC Europe 2009 this year, so we have got tons of feedback what kick ass and what things that sucks ass :p

So when will PoH be out? Well all I can say is “When It’s Done” :p and that is in 2010 : )

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

Some in our team is in Germany right now at GDC (Game Developer Conference) Europe showing Penalty of Heroes. So we’ll probably post some pictures and stuff of it in a few days : )

Sorry for no updates.It’s holiday for most of us : ) We’ll start to update here again in late August, beginning of September : )

Today me Jona och Nixi went true the final sprint list in the presence for Dreambuild 2009, we discuss our last long meeting about feedback from Nordic game and Gotland Game Awards and how we should organization our work to get  ass much ass possible done in time. We know that we cannot have all the futures to Dreambuild, so we have to focus some of our features.

We stay up all night (only 22+ Celsius on the night that make it possible to breathe in Visby) playing Penalty of heroes ; ) and some  old hack -n slash game. We found a new game that are very slimier to use except its imposable to complete with only 10 lifes. It’s called dungeons and dragons shadow over mystara and is a  must play for all hack n slash lovers

Tomorrow I’m going to start working on all the nasty bugs.

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!

Sometime everything is against you, like today I had to do a  lots of paper work for our company and bank so we  finally can  get pay for our other game Exhaust. It’s god dame boring but have to be done, it’s 30+ Celsius (86+ Fahrenheit) and all the girls are running around in there new summer clothes outside dozenth increase my concentration either,  maybe i well grade myself i swim in the ocean after this.

Oh I forgot, the politician weekend this week and then your not allowed to go through the  town naked :/ to bad

It’s been around +30 degrees Celsius today and no wind. I went out to fish around 7 pm and I stoped around 9pm when it was still to hot (about 23-25+). It’s great that the summer has arrived : ) It looks like it will be the same tomorrow, so I’ll be a the beach (work morning, get a tan, work at night). To bad that not every job can’t have this work schedule.

As I said a few days ago, the first weeks of June it’s moslty bad and rainy weather  here in Sweden and it mostly rains on “midsummer eve”. But after that the summer usually comes : ) No exception this year, today it’s about 25 degress Celsius (77+ Faherneheit) and this next week will be the same … all sunny : )

Yesterday a nice/strange thing happened when I drove out to the coast to fish (in Ängelholm). Suddenly all cars started to use their horns and I though -”well it’s probably some students that have taken their degree”. Then the next moment a Koenigsegg drow up at the side of my car. First I thought of trying to race, but I guessed that would just seam pathetic :p so I didn’t. Koenigsegg makes the car in the area (in the town of Ängelholm) so I guessed it was out on a test run.

Koenigsegg just bought Saab from GM so it will be interesting how that will turn out.

I know, no updates regarding PoH (it will probably slow down this sunny week : )

We posted some pictures before of Llaknels evolvement in concept art.

So I thought we post some pictures now of Llaknels evolvement now in 3d.

As some of you people might remember John Romero did a “great hype ad” for his game Daikatana in 1997 (3 years before release). Personally I think that the game wasn’t that bad as many claimed it to be, but it was rated this way because John had hyped Daikatana to be the best game ever, … and it wasn’t. So it was a “text-book” case of  “do not hype your game unless it’s great”. Although it must be one of the most sold - “lowest scored” games of all time since it sold well over 200 000 copies the first year.

So while “over hyping” isn’t good, it seamed to work here. Though today many of the games have to “hype” their” game becasue if they don’t, no one will hear about the game at all. That’s why it’s really important for games today to have a USP (Unique Selling Points). It means that the game has to have a unique feature that no other game has. USP can be Max Paynes “bullit time” (one of my favourit USP), it’s a feature that you “push” in the marketing and that you hope that all the gamers will love.

I made this “art” (Llaknel about to make you his b****) some month ago and thought that I post it as a joke/tribute to John.

As I mentioned before it’s holiday time for some of the people at Databox and this weekend it’s also “Midsummer eve”, a holiday/weekend where you celebrate summer with eating and drinking and dancing around a giant XXXX.

It usual rains on Midsummer eve and this year looks like no exeption. Anyway I assume that there will be not so much work done on PoH the next 3-5 days.

Many of our friends at the University of Gotland and also some of the Databox people are leaving the island (Gotland) for the summer. Therefor things will probably not move as fast as they have done before summer but we’ll try do the best we can anyway : ) Things will probably speed up in a few month again.

Today there’s nothing really more to post.

Before you start to make a 3d model out of a concept art you should have made some different versions so you can chose the best one. Here are 5 versions of the troll that Nixi made before we chose to go with troll number 5 (bottom right). We might include some of the other versions later in the game, but that’s mostly up to if we get the time to do it : )

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

Some people on the team is in Stockholm today and SGA (Swedish Game Awards). We didn’t win anything sadly but that’s life : ) The games that won were really great and more done and polished than PoH. Great to see that Sweden has so many great new game maker : )

The next comeptions now is Microsofts “Dream Build” where the competition will be even more harder, though PoH will be alot more done then.

An old friends is back, mr “Weekly meeting”. It’s been a while but yesterday he was back. We only discussed the feedback we got from all the people playing PoH at GGA and what we should do about it. It was things from easier way to hit enemies, animation corrections, character tweaking to leveling suggestions. Some of the things will take about 1h to change/try while other things might take up to a week to change (for one person) so after we have put everything down on paper we’ll estimate how long it will take to do and what priority it has.

We also discussed how much people can work this summer and what time they will be away on vacations.

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.