On a sleepy Tuesday evening in March, Jens noticed that someone on our forum had found not only the location of his apartment, but also had the photos from Google street-view, and photos from the inside, as provided by real estate agents. I guess there really is no right way to deal with such delicate matters, so Jens did what anyone of us would have done; post the link in the company chat.
The Portal 2 ARG Postmortem
On Saturday morning, the 11th December, I came across a strange mail as I did my early inbox checking. The email in question was an invite from Valve, asking us to visit them on the 17th, merely 6 days away, for reasons that were quite obscure. The only thing we knew was that it had to do with Portal 2 and that it might involve other game developers. We were of course intrigued, but at the same time a bit reluctant as we had to travel, a not short journey, in only a few days. However, after a few minutes of deep introspection, we thought “what the heck” and decided to go.
Some Industry Reflections
One thing I have been thinking about recently, is the direction in which the indie game scene seems to be heading. This is something that can be seen in upcoming of games, various talks, articles and what is considered the largest recent successes. It is a direction that might have large consequences for the future of the medium.
Birth of a Monster part 4: It’s alive!
Before the model could be used in game, some other things was required. First the model needed to be rigged and skinned, a process where the mesh is connected to a skeleton. This skeleton then need to get animations and not until that was done where we able to get a it into the game. This job was made in part internally and partly by an external company. There were a lot of job put into this, but is unfortunately outside of the scope of the article. To some sum things up: we got the creature moving and it was now time to put inside the game.
Birth of Monster Part 3: Molding the Abomination
As a modeler the first thing I noted about this character was that the concept design demanded it to be completely unique in all of its parts. Usually it is possible to mirror some parts (e.g. an arm, a leg or some cloth piece) to save texture space and maybe some production time when modeling game characters. Not so this time.
Birth of a Monster Part 2: Conceptualizing the Horror
Thomas gave me almost full creative freedom. The basic guidelines were that it had to be a humanoid and nothing like standard zombies, “The Infected” in Penumbra: Black Plague or the creatures in Dead Space. It should also fit the the story of demon-like creatures taking over human bodies and be super creepy. Apart from that, I was free to do pretty much what I wanted.
Birth of a Monster Part 1: Creating Unspeakable Guidelines
The following article outlines the process of creating a creature model from scratch for our first person horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent. It will go through the basic thinking that went into the design of the enemy, how the concept images where made, how the mesh was built and finally how it was put into the game
Amnesia Retail Release, GDC & IGF
Tomorrow we will begin our journey to the GDC, during the exhibit days (March 2nd to 4th) we can be found showing Amnesia in the IGF Pavilion.
The Dragon Speech
This weekend I discovered the “Dragon Speech” by Chris Crawford and found it really great. He brings up a lot of good stuff, and touches on many subjects that I have ranted about. I am actually a bit embarrassed that I never seen this talk before.
The Dead Island Trailer and the Future of Games
By now most of you have probably seen the teaser trailer for Dead Island. This trailer has been getting tons of attention over the Internet and many seem to think that it is one of the best game trailers ever. I find that this is quite interesting, since just about everything that makes the trailer good are things that modern video games lack. I would even go as far as to say that a video game made using modern gameplay-centric design could never create something that gives the same experience.
