The level two was decided to be a swamp kinda level, mainly composed by swamp elements, but also with a cross fade from the forest in the beginning, the swamp would even stretch a bit into the level 3. Actually most levels will have similar planning like that to ease the transition between the environmental graphics.

The feeling of the swamp environment was changed after time, from the beginning a muddy section of the open forest area to the up-to-date widespread evil and dark much more strange looking area it has become at this point.

The references for the latest sketches are mostly made up, the trees thou have partly influences from actual far east swamp vegetation but they are much more exaggerated and mutated of course. Well things still are to be added (mostly minor items thou), anyhow not grouse enough for the moment:P but overall a glimpse of that to become can be found in the sketches.

It’s been a while since my last contribution to this blog and I know that Jens is very mad with me. I can hear it in his voice and now my fear of facing that anger is forcing me to write. Luckily he works from a distance so there still might be time left before he unleashes his great anger upon me. Better get started.

Last week I worked with several things; enemies, the gem system and the start menu. Today I’ll show you the final concept of the very first two enemies the player will encounter, the forest troll and a mount animal. You might recognize the troll from some of my earlier sketches. I’ve polished it and thought about its behavior.

The troll can come as one or riding on the pigs back. When mounted you can hit him so that he dies and falls off, this will change the way the pig acts and it will go berserk and start charging wildly across the screen. The player will unfortunately not be able to use the pig as a mount. That would look funny though.

* Jens comment *
I never get mad at you Trixi ; ) I only frustrated :p You have to ask/tell the people around 10 times before they start to blog. Then when they do, you get 10-20 posts to sort out. The “blog rule” here at DataBox is that each person should post 0.5-1 post/week. This so the people reading our blog knows what we’re up to.

Would be cool if you could eat that nice little piggy and gain heath from it after you killed it (guess I put that on the “wish/reject” list :p)

Because of lectures and misjudgments of our animations, we didn’t make last week sprint goals. We’ll make it up this week instead, which means working 10+ hours/day

This week sprint looks like this:

Code:
Physics and collision system
AI system

Graphic 3d
Animate all characters with textures
Model enemies for level 1-2Artists
Make list of all the enemies

Level
Sketch on level 5
Continue building levels
Make level shares list

Narrative
Continue as usual
Trailer
Suggestions for the next trailer

Level editor
Implement scripting according to schedule
2d menus

By the way, the spring seams to have arrived : )

I know that we haven’t showed you so much from the actual game. But I promise you that in the next month we’ll be showing of some in game shots and maybe even some videos.

So I thought it was time to show you how the drafts and sketches of the first level in the game looked like.

Stoffer (narrative) and Håkan (producer) told me that the start of the game would be in a grand city (the heroes hometown) and it would later transcend into a nearby forest.

As reference material to the city I used pictures from Minas Tirith, the ruins in Oblivion, the Roman Empire, and inspiration from modern cities. So it’s a mixture of all of that : )

The inspiration material for the forest I used different pictures of forests. The main object for me is to make the forest more interesting and alive that in normal “forest levels” in side scrollers.

Today I finished the rough outlines for level 1. Some questions still remain though. Is there lack of information about the main story? Is there too much information? And is it good enough? Of course it’s good enough=) I just hope my combination of story and humor will fit. Dwarf and I are working together now on level one with the design as well. Exchanging texts and sketches with each other let both of us have lots of material for building a level. Mainly I write a shortened script with narrative and playable checkpoints which I present to Dwarf. Then he makes sketches of what I’ve written, which we finally present to Håkan who decides if it fits with our game.