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.

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.

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.

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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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.

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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During the last week I’ve done extensive testing on how to implement 3D animation. There are two ways to go about this: Write everything from scratch, which is hard to do because of the limited time we have for this project, or use an existing library. I have found three libraries that work on both PC and Xbox.

KiloWatt is by far the best library. Fast and versitile, but with the drawback of beeing complicated to use and it having no documentation what so ever. Is took me about a day to write a wrapper for KiloWatt. The wrapper makes it really easy to load and play animations.

Many people using KiloWatt have had problems with playback of short animations. If the animation contains to few frames, the last frame is padded to get the correct length. This makes the animation ”freeze” once every loop cycle.

The problem is actually caused by the XNA .X importer and not KiloWatt. There are two ways to fix this. One is to filter out and remove duplicate frames in the content proccessor and the second ,easy but uggly way, is to change the NumFrames field in the KiloWatt animation class when loading the models. The padded frames will still be there, but they will not be played.

The days seems to fly by and we have a lot in school and much work to be done so I am not restless. Yesterday I sat down and fixed what I hope to be a bug-free threading system for C++. The good thing is that I can probably translate the System into C# and XNA so we can use something similar to Penalty of Heroes. I think it became a big problem we didn’t use all the processors in the Xbox for Exhaust and this will be different in Penalty of Heroes.

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 : )