Here’s a list of all the main programs that we use to make Penalty of Heroes.

The game engine, level editor and other stuff (scripting & collision system, shaders and so on) is done in-house and our programmers write everything in C# (The engine and the level editor both use XNA 3.0 and are developed in Visual Studio 2008).

Our concept artists use Wacom drawing boards to draw the characters in the computer in Photoshop.

Our 3d artists use 3d Studio Max for modeling and Mudbox 2009 for texturing

Here’s from an on-line meeting using Marratech

Additional programs:
For the web we code in HTML and Flash and for the blog we use Word Press (HTML).
For communication we use MSN, Skype, Marratech and related programs.
For documentation/project management we use Word, Excel and Google document.
For video & trailers we use Premier Pro & After Effects
Also our narrative guy mr Stoffer uses MS Paint to draw his ideas.

Hmm I think that’s about it : )

Just as last weeks “weekly meeting”, not everyone was there (some had lectures). We really didn’t had an agenda when we started, but after a few minutes of talk we suddenly had a lot to talk about. It was very much talk about what will happen in the next few month, about how we’re doing (compared to our scrum plan) and what will happen this summer (holidays, work and so on). We also discussed what different trailer/videos we will/should have.

This meeting also cleared a lot of things for the future so, now we know what we’re aiming for and what to expect (a bit cryptic, I know :p)

Yeah, we also got conference microphones after about 3 month after ordering one. This so that people that attending the meeting though “Skype”/Marratech

* We also have some new news about the music for the game, but we’ll tell you more about it in a few days.

To our help we have our main teacher Troels (a.k.a Trulle) that weekly gives us tons of material to read, analyze, use, and hand in. The material can be anything from narrative, game play intentions, stakeholders, risks, role responsibilities, target group, game stage definition, high concept and so on and on and on.

Every 1-2 month we have a presentation before an expert panel that consists of external people that already work in the gaming industry. Usually they come with tons of constructive criticism that many times makes us rethink some of our decisions that we’ve made. It’s really hard at first to hear criticism about a project that you’re working on day and night, especially from people in “the business”, but usually after 30-60 minutes after the presentations we can “think clearly” and see their points.

Our next presentation will on the 12th of December. We have asked Trulls to try to contact some new people that med similar games like “Penalty of Heroes” to be on the expert panel. So we hope they would like to participate. You know who you are!

We stay in touch using Msn/Skype kind of tools and for big meetings with 3-15 people we use a tool/program called Marratech. In my opinion it’s a good conference tool where you can hear, see everyone + show word, pdf, and power point files for everyone. You can also record everything which is really good.