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.

Since Nixi and other members at Databox won’t read this blog for a few days, I will do a sneaky thing : p

Some month ago I found a nice looking sketch of an enemy when I scrabbled around Nixis sketches. It was a rejected sketch of an enemy for PoH. I loved it, but it was turned down or forgotten about. Soooooo I thought I post it here so you can have a look at it and say what you think about it : ) Is it just me that likes it?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Well it seems like that it’s true : ( and it feel stupid not to mention it (though we nearly never post game news here) because  Duke 3d was one of the games that made me want to start to make games. I have tons of Duke 3d maps that I made with their level editor Build on some old computer.

Anyway I first thought it was a “George PR joke”, but it seams not to be it. I just hope that Take 2 puts another team on it and finish it (we would like to finish it :p)

Ironically I was making a sketch video two day ago where I compared Duke 4 ever (3dRealms) with Penalty of Heroes (Databox). I might release that sketch video today or tomorrow, but I don’t know yet. Don’t want it to be like a “bad-joke” about 3dRealms and Duke. If we release it it will say that it was made prior to 3dRealms closing its doors.

* If I was Bill Gates I would put in about 10 million into 3dRealms and finish it and put it out exclusively on Xbox 360.

We have put together a short “promotion video” for our blog. We feel that many people would be interested in our blog, but right now they might not know of it. So now go and send this video/url to all of your friends : )

In the video are some video that you probably not yet have seen. Hope you enjoy it!

As briefly mentioned in another post, there were some other ideas for this game project. Mostly Nintendo DS games, mainly because we love it and some people have done games to it before (Drinks, Saving Santa and so on). But most of us wanted to do Penalty of Heroes and make it for the Xbox 360 (there was an idea to make PoH for the NDS). This because it felt like it was the right place/console to release it on and also:

- The strength/power in the Xbox 360
- Quiet easy to develop for XNA
- Very similar to make a game for the PC
- Distribution was easy through XBLA
- PC games disappear easy and is easily a victim for piracy
- The control (the Xbox 360 control felt right for this kind of game)
- The right target group (we think many of the people on XBL will enjoy a game like PoH)
- Might be easier to get some attention because it’s released for the Xbox 360
- We wanted to make a game for the Xbox 360 : )

There you have it : )

Hurray! Today we got our tech up and running on the Xbox 360. Nothing fancy, but our first milestone is reached.
So now that we know that it’s working, all we have to do now is to make “some” more tech and a great game. By the way, the strange grumbling sound you hear are our two programmers (Baba & Jakob) speaking Swedish.

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