Since GGA we have had a bit of a vacation from PoH. Tomorrow we’ll have a big meeting about all the feedback we got from all the people at GGA. We will compare notes and then decide what things we should change or redo.

It was really good that we got a nice playable version of PoH (with most of the features in) to GGA. This so people could give us feedback on the gameplay and what things worked and what didn’t. The good thing is that we can make most of the changes now, if we got that feedback later (2-3 month) we probably wouldn’t/couldn’t make the changes. I think about 250-300 people tried PoH at GGA and I think most of us have the same idea what worked and what didn’t.

Just tried the particle engine out for the first time, decided to make some firey things, an explosion for some type of thrown bomb as well as the flames from some kind of dragons breath or a flamethrower, my vote and love goes to realtime, can’t wait for realtime voxel fires to really catch on and “true” realtime ray-tracing!

Sorry about the framerate… gotta get a better screen capturing application. The particle effects looks way better in the game engine. We’ll probably release some in-game footage in the next weeks

At the Gotland Game Awards we met possible our biggest fan. This kid jumped up and down and screamed as he played our game. He came back and played the game several times : )

Penalty of Heroes and Exhaust got one awards each at Wednesdays Gotland Game Awards. Penalty of Heroes won for best “Exhibition Booth” and Exhaust won for “Best game from graduating class”.

Exhaust won over Penalty of Heroes which I still can’t really believe and I don’t think no one else did. Anyway most games at the GGA got an award each, so it might have something to do with that. If that’s not the case we really should stop working on PoH if we only can win “Best Exhibition Booth” with this game :p

Well I’m being sarcastic because we’re happy with GGA. Both days we had 8 player all the time playing PoH, also having a 99% of all the people “finishing the game before leaving” is really great. Anyway it’s time to rise and show that we can do a lot more that just nice Exhibition Booth :p

for a couple of days that is. After the award ceremony (Wednesday) we partied until 7 in the morning, first at Wisby Strand (had a couple of bottles of champagne), then at the club Gute källan. After that we continued party in an old basement/catacomb club until 7 o’clock. So yesterday we got up at about 3 pm in the afternoon and then we had a BBQ with everyone at Databox. So today and probably this weekend we won’t work on PoH. I think it’s nice to have a break from it a couple of days and then start with discussing all the feedback we got at Gotland Game Awards.

Day two went as good as the first day. About 100-150 people tested PoH and just 1-2 of them left the game without finishing the first level. Here’s some random video from day 1 (I know it’s a “day 2″), in the first video clip people from Starbreeze and Massive Entertainment are playing the game.

If you watched “Kulturnyheterna” (Culture/Entertainment News) on SVT (Swedish national TV station) you probably had a look at Penalty of Heroes in-game. Yes, it’s true and sweet. So now we can “brag” about being showed at national TV : o You can watch it HERE, 7.34 seconds into the TV segment (don’t know how long this will be on-line).

So here’s a sum up of the first day at GGA:

We started at about 6 am, me and Håkan went to Swedish Radio P1 (Swedens national radio channel) and promoted GGA (about 7.45). After that we went to the exhibition area at Wisby Strand Conference Center  to build up our “Game Booth”. It took about 3 hours. Then the jury came and played all of the 25-30 games in about 2 hours then the public was let in.

We wasn’t sure how the public was going to react to our game, so at first we put up our game on just one of our 46 inch screens and we showed a trailer of the game on the other screen. But after 30 min we had to stop because there was so many people wanting to play. So we had 8 players constantly hacking and slashing, that was so fucking awesome to see, because we didn’t expect this at all really.

After everyone played we asked what was good and what didn’t work in the game, so we got tons of feedback now so we can make the game better. The first day there was only one person that stoped playing the game without finishing the first level and it took about 10 minutes to finish the first level (I thing about 150-200 people played it the first day).

There were alot of newspapers and TV present during the first day at GGA.

At about 4pm we had a presentation about Penalty of Heroes infront of the jury.

… That is the question. And the answer is no. We won’t have booth babes on GGA, but we will have a nice looking booth though. We’re currently working with what to have and what not to have inside our booth on Tuesday. Calling all sorts of companies to get the right look, we’ve settled with A0 cardboard paper with images of the exteriors of the game to decorate our foreground. From the blueprint of our booth it looks good and I bet it’ll look even better in place.

* Comment by Jens *

Well, Stoff thougth that he was talking the truth when he wrote this post and I had no idea of a booth babe. Anyway one of our friends turned up at GGA dressed up as Kimo. First I saw a person holding a “wand” and I thought -”hmm, that looks just like Kimos wand”. Then I saw the pattern on her leg and I thougth -”shit that’s Kimo”. So that’s really sweet to actually have a person dressed up like someone we “invented” for our game.

This evening Dwarf, Stoffer and me (Jens) went out to Visby harbor to paint our exhibition booth for Gotland Game Awards. The paint for the sky drained out so we’ll probably finish it tomorrow. In the front we’ll also have paper cut-outs of buildings shown here. There will also be a 46 inch TV in the middle and two 42 inch at the sides.

-”Once upon a decade, the great Pig gods bless the strongest Pig in the forest with immense strenght and size, at this time the grey trolls send out their bravest hunter gatherer to bring home a great feast for the village.

It’s eat or be eaten in this grand tale based upon the true story of David vs Goliath.”

This is a 3d rendered movie that I (with little help of Stoffer) made yesterday just for fun. So it’s not a official release movie for PoH or anything that will be appearing in the game. The 3d models though are the once we use in the game.

Yesterday we got our printed stuff for our game booth at Gotland Game Awards next week. We have an idea of layering the booth with cut out silhouettes of houses in a similar way like Penalty of Heroes is done. We’ll also try to paint a sky behind the  silhouettes and in the middle there will be a nice 46 inch TV showing PoH (we’ll probably have two 42 inch TV:s at each sides also). The picture is taken at our office where we tried how it would work.

We also got a nice poster that Nixi has done as promotion for PoH. We’ll have two of these to the left and right. That’s our plan right now anyway : )

Yesterday we worked until 5 am in the morning and I think I fell asleep at 6, then the phone range at 9 so I got about 3 hours of sleep. Anyway nothing important to know our working hours :p
Anyway I took two pictures yesterday night and some pictures about 10 minutes ago.

Here’s our nice view from our office one picture taken at 4 am and at 3 pm

Us working at 4pm and our back alley (not from our game though it might look like it:)

Today we have 4 things in one blog post, so enjoy : ) Here are a couple of WIP (Work In Progress) images from our engine.

Image 1. Says it all. It’s an overview of what our codes look like.

As seen in image 2 we maximized the engine’s capacity, using enemies to see whether it would crash or not… It didn’t. It’s vital hence the amount of enemies we’ll use in the game. Not that many enemies as shown but still. Maybe the new Serious Sam on arcade :p

We also wanted to give you a glimpse of our AI pattern as shown in image 3. It’s a simplified view of the enemies’ movement in the game. Depending on your action and location, the AI will try to find different approaches to get you and hopefully the enemy won’t get stuck behind a tree.

Last but not least the 4th image shows you hit boxes. Blue circles show where the character/enemy can be hit, as the red circles show what parts that will deal damage… Poor piggy died by the hands of Kimo.

In just three weeks we have had 3 major deadlines . First we had a deadline to Nordic Games, then it was a deadline to Sweden Game awards and now we’re working on the deadline for Gotland Game Awards that will be done the 2nd of June. Though it’s hard we show some real progress. One month ago we could just move one character back and forward in the game, now we can play a whole level with most things working.

The things we’ll focus on for the GGA deadline is to work out all the bugs we have found and tweak the gameplay. This weak we’ll also do the game booth for GGA and a ingame trailer for the game. After GGA we’ll probably take some days of working on PoH.

So we made it, we just send in a early “build” and a trailer of “Penalty of Heroes” to SGA (Sweden Game Awards). So all we can do now is just hope that the jury likes it : )

There’s a couple of hundred games at SGA  so the competition is quiet hard and also we send in a early “build” so we shouldn’t really expect anything. But who knows : )

Stoffer our Narrativ guy put it like this:
Oh My God! If panic had a face it would surely have looked all of ours on May 24th. Deadline for Swedish Game Awards 09 (SGA) and we made it=). Everything was going according to plan, kind of. We had to make some last minute changes, and of course by then it was almost time’s up. Anyways, everything worked out and we believe that the demo is gonna kick ass.

Of course a demo wasn’t enough. We had to send them a teaser too. Or two as a matter of fact. One PoH teaser not longer than 30 sec and one 30 sec Exhaust teaser. Both which I had to edit with some great effects made by the one and only Dopefish. The PoH teaser is also edited after our latest song made by Pontus. Overall I can say that I’m satisfied with the teasers even though some of the ingame footage wasn’t final.

I’ll be back with more blogging once things have settled down.
Thank you for reading.

Whaaaaat! Already 200 blog posts!?! Well it looks that way in the “post count”. Our goal in the beginning was to post once a week, but then it grow to 2-3 posts a week and when we got into production after new year we felt that one post a day wasn’t hard to do. So we decided to post daily : )

We really hope that you enjoy reading our blog because we do this for you : ) So if you want to know more about certain things just send a mail about it : )

Here’s a selection of some nice blog posts “down the memory lane”:
All the characters of Penalty of Heroes
Cramp in the jaw
Ernest W Adams visit Databox office and tried Exhaust
Starbreeze QA test Exhaust
Working is super nice
The evolvement of a character
Exhaust: the most popular community game on XBL!
Databox Games was ahead of Guitar Heroes!
First concept art
First blog post

Dear readers. As you might know, Penalty of Heroes is a hack ’n slash co-op title. A 4 player co-op title nonetheless. Hopefully our game will find its way to every categorized gamer out there and hopefully it will find its way to other than them. Because the game provides so much more than an arcade hack ‘n slash, I think future gamers would enjoy it too. It has story, critic, strategy, blood, explosions, action AND which I love the most: teamwork.

With all of this in one game I think that we can reach out to all of you and make you very pleased. Wow players (myself included) who are used with working together, calculating strategies and kicking a** should have a great time playing PoH, just like the casual gamers will enjoy, well everything which this game provides them.
Thank You for reading.

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