These days in-between projects I spend most of my time doing administrative tasks, writing mails, news and such activities. It’s quite a nice break from the production tasks that are mainly gameplay scripting and audio design, but at times the administrative tasks can be quite scary, even haunting if you so wish.
A penumbra soup of mixed news
For a while we have been only two people here at Frictional Games, but since last week we are back to the norm of being three. Marc has been working with us for some time, but now he is a steady member of our company fiddling away on the graphics side. If things go as planned we might soon extend the employee list further!
Penumbra: Black Plague Demo Released!
The Penumbra: Black Plague Demo is out!
Penumbra: Black Plague Reviews
It’s only about 1 week to go before Penumbra: Black Plague is released and the first couple of reviews have started to come in.
Texture Atlas
The texture atlas was one of the first thing that I implemented in the engine. It was actually something I started working on the day work started for Energetic, which also means the code is a bit messy 😀 So I decided an update was needed.
HPL 2.0 – The beginning
This is the first post in our brand new Work Log subforum, which is going to act as a sort of blog where we show of how work progress on our upcoming projects! Hope you will enjoy it!
Penumbra: Black Plague website, game final, latest previews and more!
At the beginning of January we sent the final version of Penumbra: Black Plague to Paradox Interactive, so indeed the news about the 12th of February for a North America release is correct and the 15th of February is set to be the European date. Exactly what part of Europe this is remains to be seen, we personally have our fingers crossed for Sweden!
‘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.
Penumbra: Overture released for Mac OS X, better late than never!
Finally we at Frictional Games can proudly present the finished version of Penumbra: Overture, previously released on Windows and Linux, for Mac OS X.
‘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!
