After parties, seminars and hundreds of people tried our game, it’s all over. We got new friends, new knowledge and tons of feedback, so were getting back ready to take all feedback and implement new things.

I was at four different seminars today:
Alex Evans from Media Molecule (Little Big Planet)
Really great seminar and he had a new way to do a presentation.

Financial Panel with Fred Hansson, Siggi Keogle (Attraction), Nick Parker (Parker Consulting Ldt), Valerie Bourgoin (CNC)
Good seminar, where different people gave different advice how to finance a game project.

Suda 51, Grasshopper (No More Heroes)
I had really big exportations for this one (since I really enjoyed NMH), but I think that it was one of least interesting seminars that I went to.

Ian Bowden, Rockstar Leeds (GTA Chinatown wars, GTA Liberty City Stories)
Great seminar, seams to be a really nice guy. Though he talked more about ESC (Eurovidion song contest) then other stuff :p (he thought Turkey had the best song this year)

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!

While coding the game play you always end up with unbelievable bugs, or is it a bug?

I have sometime built mini game upon bug I found, so all aren’t that evil. On behalf of that I now know decided to start a blog series with all off our bugs and feature there. You have to guess what it is, …. so now vote, is it a bug or a feature?

In this video we test the AI and collision system.

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As Håkan just wrote we were supposed to had our final “game panel” presentation yesterday. This time around we shouldn’t really present anything … we would just let them be the first one to try “Penalty of Heroes”! So piece of cake? Well not really.

It turned out that none of them got the “beta build” to start so the game panel testing were canceled : (

My girlfriend (worked as test manager at a big Swedish telecom manufacture) though solved the problem. To bad she found the bug 2 hours later. The “bug” was that the game didn’t start if you had a controller, mouse, keyboard or any other external things plugged into the computer.

Anyhow my girlfriend then got the be the first “victim”. I showed her the jump, hit and change character buttons, then I she played the game none stop for about one hour until it crashed. She really enjoyed it.

The “fact” here is:
- The game is in early beta
- She never play games (well just “Wii fit” & Wii sports)
- We thought that the game is more for the hard core audience

I know that should never ever say that your game is fun or anything like that. The fact is that she have heard me talking about PoH for about 5 month daily and she was pretty tired of hearing more about it. So she was prepared that it would pretty much suck ass. Maybe that’s why she enjoyed it : ) If you think something will suck and then it’s “ok”, then it becomes great.

Hmmm, here’s our new “marketing strategy”:
-”Penalty of Heroes is shit and will suck, we are amateurs and Swedish! Don’t expect anything great from us!

In a way that’s true, our game won’t be the new Gears of War 3, Mafia 2 or Diablo 3. We just make a game that we hope will some people will enjoy : )

Yesterday was a hard day, I had to abandon my own child, “the ninjas” and the student unions regular ninja party. I had looked forward to this party that I and dwarf once started and still lives on.

The reason I made the sacrifice for free beer and free absinthe as the younger member of Databox now attended to (BASTERDS!!!) are because of our deadline. Yesterday we have to have our first  demo version ready for game testing, how much I love my child I have to let it go. I have a new target in sight that still demands a lots of works and I’m not gonna allow it to fail.

After six beer and code crank, me, Ninja, Dwarf, Nixi, Andreas, Jens and Jakob successfully build a satisfying demo, 15 min after the closing time of the pub, crap

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.

Is there anyone out there who doesn’t enjoy blood and gore in movies, games or comics? Yeah okey there might be a few but they don’t ever have fun and many of them also hate when you have fun. But today, they stand powerless as I play with our particle editor, creating fountains of blood and gore that would make even the toughest character in mortal combat cry. Here’s a sample.

Llaknel creating blood out of thin air

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

Yes, that’s right, we have put up a new web page on the official “Penalty of Heroes” web page at www.penaltyofheroes.com : ) It’s not the final one and it’s better than the last one. Also there are some content such as concept art, teaser trailer and SCREENSHOTS! This is our first officially released screenshots of Penalty of Heroes, so we hope you like them : )

The screenshots are work in progress and will be adding more features before the release this fall. So the final game will look better than the screenshots that we just released, though we hope you digg them : ) We’re grateful for feedback on them, if we don’t’ get any feedback (good or bad) we don’t know what we should focus on : )

We have entered Sweden Game Awards with “Penalty of Heroes” and they have done a preview/interview with us where we talk about PoH development and related stuff. So if you’re interested in knowing more about PoH just head over HERE to read all about it.

The deadline for SGA is the 24th of May, so we’re working hard to have the game ready for them : )

* They have the earlier screenshots of the game (not the new one)

While coding the game play you always end up with unbelievable bugs, or is it a bug?

I have sometime built mini game upon bug I found, so all aren’t that evil. On behalf of that I now know decided to start a blog series with all off our bugs and feature there. You have to guess what it is, …. so now vote, is it a bug or a feature?

In this first video we tested the camera.

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Well you didn’t expect that now did you? Our first preview of Penalty of Heroes we gave to our friends over at the great gaming site Evil Avatar. So head over there and get the first sneak peek of the game.

Read the preview here (you have to scroll down a bit)

Now, Penalty of Heroes, your new game is a quite traditional in its concepts. What titles have been particularly influential in the game design?
One of the reasons why we wanted to make a game like Penalty of Heroes in the first place was to take the elements that we loved in old school games and combine them into a new one. Games that we love and have influenced us for Penalty of Heroes are Golden Axe, Turtles in Time, Secrets of Mana and Diablo. The game design philosophy for Penalty of Heroes was to take the best features of old school arcade and console games and then mix it with next generation graphics and physics.

Describe the gameplay for us.
Penalty of Heroes have four unique playable characters (tank, healer, dps, range) which have different weapon, fighting style and magic. All of the characters are in play all the time, so in single player mode you can swap between the characters as you want. If you need a character with a range weapon you swap to the range character, if you feel you need more muscles you change to the tank character. So in a way you’re controlling all of the characters.

So it’s time once again to let you know what we will be up to this week, by posting our “sprint of the week”, “project plane of the week”, “to-do list of the week” or just simple our focus area (work) this week. As last week this week will focus much on programming. On Wednesday we have a “game presentation” and we will show some gameplay of the game to some people in the industry. So there’s a lot of things that should be done before that.

Code
Make more AI patterns
Adjust player control (revive)
Enemy generator true triggers
Camera kontroll Concept (2d)
Menu & GUI (animation)
Particles

Level (2d)
Finalize level 1

3d
Make animations for foes

Narrative
Fraps animations for sound effects

Other things
Start to work on presentation
Sketch for trailer for GGA
GGA boot
Game play presentation

Today I’d like to share a new recording. Like the previous one I posted, this video demonstrates the process of drawing and coloring an enemy concept in photoshop. All I knew when starting was that it should be a quite heavily armored average male warrior controlled by Maag, the leader of Jedna. His equipment will vary but in this case I felt that it would be cool if he wielded a large shield, making him suitable for a little more dynamic and interesting AI. I didn’t use any reference whatsoever, I’m painting directly from my head and experimenting with different shapes to create an interesting armor.
It took about three hours to finish but the video is at high speed as usual.

Part 1

Part 2

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!?

SGA (Sweden Game Awards) and GGA (Gotland Game Awards) starting to close up, so we have to focus on getting all system running and working together. So this next month we will be focusing on tuning things and not to implement new features.

Code
Make more AI patterns
Adjust player control
Get particle and light effects onto the characters
Get gem system to work
Enemy generator

Concept (2d)
Menu & GUI

Levels 2d
Continue working on levels

3D
Make more animations and get the to work smoothly

Narrative
List of sound effects
Start to work on presentation
Sketch for trailer for GGA
Test the story on regular people

Other things
Take screenshots
Move to new office
Start on the last sprint

The references for level 3 are mainly mountain and rocky ground, the path to the city of Jedna that is located on a high mountain. Then you travel further in the level also more and more of the outbound city industry mechanics are to be seen, also a path/transition to the industry area are going to be implemented near the end of the level.

Inspiration for this is mainly regular rocky terrain and real life steampunk looking engine and structure. Well, some of the level design visuals are not finished (mostly the graphical style of architectural environment, that I’m actually going to research later today) but here how it looks at the moment at one point of the course. (Have in mind its a draft and not the end visuals)

* Jens comment *
Dwarf wrote this post some month ago, but it wasn’t posted back then because we didn’t want to show so much of the different environments in the game back then.