Frictional Goes To MOCKBA

The 17th this month me and Jens took a plane from Copenhagen to Moscow where we met up with Fredrick and Susana from Paradox Interactive. The whole point of the journey was to meet the Russian publisher of Penumbra, “Snowball”, and to hold a talk on Frictional Games and the production of Black Plague at a Russian game conferance called КРИ (That’s KRI for all you non-cryllians).

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Multiple Views

This time I have finally implemented the single largest change in design for the new engine – the Viewport. The last engine really only had one world and one camera that could be active for the frame to be rendered and this was something I wanted to change for HPL2.

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‘Penumbra: Black Plague’ Developer Diary #3 – Screens

One of the main features in Penumbra: Black Plague is the physics. This is a feature that adds a lot of immersion and gives new opportunities for gameplay. However, it has not been without problems to implement it and that is what we will focus on in this diary entry. We will go through some of the different problems we encountered and explain how we solved them.

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‘Penumbra: Black Plague’ Developer Diary #2

The voiceovers are an area that has received more attention in Black Plague than it did in our previous Overture game. In Overture we had one character speaking to the player through a radio, in Black Plague this has been extended to around five characters speaking to him through various media. As we are working with a small budget we have not done any animated and synced characters. This is also a design choice as we believe horror is created by being lonely and isolated in an unknown territory, so don’t expect any friendly chats over a cup of tea!

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