Long time no see, eh? Yeah, school projects, life getting in the way, yadda-yadda.

Who cares? Let’s get to what’s new instead!

So, me and my pal Mike made a little trap-filled dungeon level in UDK for our project for the course we just finished. It’s short, but we’re both pretty satisfied with what we managed to make in the less than two weeks we had to work on it. We’re just gonna fiddle with it and polish a few things, then you’ll probably, hopefully see it up and available for download here before the end of the year (no promises though, but fingers crossed!)

That’s about all I had to say for now. Work on My Burden to Keep has unfortunately been stalled a bit due to the recent courses in school, but rest assured, it’s still alive and well!

That’ll be all, safe travels through the snowy lands, lads and gals! (What I really mean: play Skyrim!)

Marcus out.

A little while no see, been working at my father’s store this summer. Not to worry though, I’ve still had time to work on my game projects. I thought I’d let you all in on a quick update on the revised version of My Burden to Keep, it’s coming along quite nicely!

I’m about 65% done with the new background art for the game, which I’ve decided to render fully in Maya instead of using the process that I used for the first version I made. Here’s a comparison shot of the interrogation room;

Left - original version, right - new version (duh!) Click the picture for bigger version.

The original process involved rendering the scene in Maya with just ambient occlusion, then colouring it in Photoshop and finally reducing the amount of colours to give it that grainy, old-school look. It worked allright, the results were fine, but I felt I could improve it a lot.
For the revised backgrounds, I decided to go with a fully rendered approach. Some scenes were re-modelled, all of them touched up and all elements were given appropriate materials. Then they were lit and then rendered in mental ray.

As you can see, the characters have also been given proper sitting sprites (detective Francis even has standing frames in all four directions now! Progress!) and  there’s an added question to Francis’ dialogue choices.

I hope you found this quick post interesting, as I like to share not only the stuff I create, but also the thought and process behind it. It’s more personal that way, we wouldn’t want it to be all stale and secretive like the big companies do it, right?

That’ll be all for now, rock on, folks!
Marcus out.

PS. If you have any thoughts you’d like to share regarding the posts content, then the comments field is the perfect place to do so. Go on, it won’t bite!

Good afternoon, fellow humans (and/or worm babies!)

As you can see at the very top of the page, the new logo for this site is live! I’d very much appreciate any input you readers might have about it, so get to commenting! Pretty please?

Other than that, there’s not much to report. Been playing a lot of L.A. Noire lately, and I’m loving it! The gameplay style is a bit less free than I expected it to be, but what’s there is really well polished and the acting is superb. Lots of big names fill the list of actors, but it doesn’t end there, they all do a terrific job as well. Very well directed, the new facial expression scanning they’re using really shows and works well.
I’ll probably have a review of it up on the Caffeine Gamer-blog sometime soon, when I’ve finished the game, that is.

That’ll be all for now. Hopefully, I’ll have some things to report/pictures to post of my ongoing projects soon.

Until then!

Marcus out.

Good day, world wide web!

I’d like to start this post by apologizing for the decreased frequency of blog posts lately. Been wrapping up the last course for school for this term (a project which you’ll see popping up here pretty soon, hopefully.) My first year at BTH (Blekinge Institute of Technology, the abbreviation is for its Swedish name, though) has been a lot of fun, very educational and sometimes stressful, though in tolerable amounts. I’ve learned a lot, not only about game design but about my own weaknesses and strengths, how to better split up my work and the magic power of deadlines (actually getting projects done has been swell!)

I’m looking forward to another two years at the school, during which I hope to learn even more and become even better at what I do. For now though, summer’s here and I’ll try to relax a bit, get some work done on other projects and, hopefully, make some money too. Nothing like the comfort of having a few extra bucks in the bank (there are a lot of awesome looking games coming out this year, after all.)

I’ll make sure to get our final project from school up on the site soon. It’s a short underwater exploration game, in which you explore the remains of a downed military ship from the cold war era, searching for the personal belongings of the crew members.
I’m also working on putting together the character art and animations for My Burden to Keep, so that’ll hopefully be out and ready to be played before the end of the summer.

That’ll be all for now. Look out for some hopefully more frequent updates on this blog!

Cheers!
Marcus out.

Hey all!

So, activity’s been a bit low lately, mostly due to being busy with the last school project for this term. It’s a group project, a short ‘interactive experience’ made in UDK. You’re a diver searching through the shipwreck of a military ship from the Cold War days.
It’s turning out great, I’ll let you guys have a peek very soon, promise!

Other than that, life’s pushing forward as usual, and I can’t complain. It’ll be nice to have a couple of months free after this project, but I’m afraid I might become bored after a few weeks of catching up with lost sleeping hours…
I shouldn’t worry though, I have stuff left to do for My Burden to Keep. Namely all character animations, and integrating some music. Then, it’ll be ready for public release, so look out for that.
Also, me and a friend’ve got a few things cooking behind the scenes. More on that as we start to make good progress..!

That’ll be all for now. Peace!

Marcus out.

Hey people!

The weekend is here and with it comes… work! Not to worry though, I won’t work myself exhausted through the entire weekend. I’ll let myself have some free time as well.

I thought I’d post another little teaser screenshot, since I’m pretty satisfied with how the background art turned out.

Ta-dah! Interactive scene, holy shit! As you can see, the sprites are still placeholders. The game is shaping up now though, and it’s looking pretty good.

That’ll be all for this short post. Have a good weekend, remember to chew on tasty stuff.

Marcus out.

Hey everyone!

It’s been a while since my last post. I haven’t had much to report lately, other than the fact that the Captain Condom flash game has been uploaded to the site (see the projects tab.)
Yeah, I’m a bit late with announcing that it’s finished, since it’s been finished for a good while now. Oh well, better late than never!

Life flows on as usual. The current course we’re undertaking at school is one I’ve been looking forward to; story design. For the first two weeks that’ve passed, we’ve been assigned to come up with a story, re-iterate it as needed after first feedback, work out a game manuscript and synopsis fit for a two weeks project and prototype the idea.
All has gone well so far and I’ve teamed up with a classmate from the game graphics course for this final, two week project iteration of the storyline I came up with. I won’t reveal too much about it yet, as it hasn’t officially kicked off yet (not until tomorrow) and there might be heavy and/or light changes in the storyline, whatever we see fit.

The game is going to be an adventure game, traditional point and click style much alike the 90′s games of LucasArts and Sierra. The key element of the storyline as it currently is is a murder mystery, which will be solved through the eyes of two protagonists.
But, as I mentioned before, much of the story might come to change. I’ll try to update regularly as we progress.

Until then..!

Marcus out.

Hey everyone.

As you can probably guess, this will be a post about junk comments/spam comments. Since I launched the site, I’ve received a lot of those. In fact, I’ve only received spam comments so far (just saying, if you’re reading on here regularly, let me know in the comments! *wink, nudge*)

It’s amazing how these spammers have generated comments that would seem relevant, had I been running a boring business and/or everyday blog on here. But I don’t, so the relevance of the comments fall no short of being utterly retarded.

Unfortunately, I can’t quote any examples right now, as I just cleaned out the spam comments. Usually though, they fall within the category of ‘trying real hard to seem legit, but failing mortally in the grammar/relevance factor.’ Most of these comments claim such things as posts being ‘very interesting’ and that they’ve ‘studied the subject at matter, and have found a new way of thinking from reading the article’. The given, loosely quoted example comes from a spam comment that ended up in the Artwork – 2D Textures section. If you’ve been there, you’ll notice there are just a few paragraphs of text explaining the textures shortly (ie the gallery at the bottom that fills up way more space than the text describing them.) Which essentially means that spambots are retarded. No news there, though.

Got our project criteria today at school for the Flash course. Hopefully, in a few weeks, you’ll be seeing a cool little Flash game on the site or perhaps even on another site (I’m thinking either Newgrounds or Kongregate, should the project turn out good enough to be posted at such large sites.)
I won’t reveal much just yet, as most decisions are preliminary still, but there will be condoms in the game.

Interested?  Well, they won’t be used in the traditional fashion, that I can say.

Check back later for more info (when there’s something to actually show, that is.) Until then..!

Marcus out.

Howdy! This’ll just be a quick lil’ update on the RPG.

After recoding what little battle logic I had so far for the third time, I finally got something working! Now, the hardest part seems to have been overcome, and what remains now is just a whole lot of coding different attacks and actions, and some attack logic for the enemies too, of course. Perhaps a working battle system by the end of the week isn’t such an impossible idea after all? Of course not, there’s always a solution!

Work it harder, make it better, do it faster, makes us stronger. That’s how the Daft Punk song goes. I think I’m gonna loop it for motivational purposes tomorrow.

For now though, I’m gonna play either some Dead Space 2, or either Final Fantasy VI or VII. We’ll see what I come to choose. Perhaps I’ll even decide to play Amnesia! I really should play through it, I should’ve played through it long ago, really.

Anyhow, that’ll have to do for today. Look out for more updates tomorrow, perhaps even a little something on Breakthru: Extended! *Excitement ensues*

Marcus out.

Hello all!

Just stopping by to inform you all that the 3D Art Mix-page under the Artwork-section has been updated with some new (old) stuff, go check it out!

Also, today I’ve been working on a prototype for a school project. It’s going to be a retro-styled, 2D top-down RPG, heavily influenced by Dungeons & Dragons and Final Fantasy (hence the mish-mash name; Dungeon Fantasy). There’s not much to it just yet, mainly just a test of the character customization system. Things are happening fast though and I’ve still got plentiful of inspiration for it, even after a full day’s worth of coding! I’ve got a good feeling about the project, hopefully you’ll all find it appealing as well. It should be interesting for anyone that likes D&D or Final Fantasy. Or both!

That’ll be it for today. To make things a bit more interesting though, here’s a screenshot of what I’ve got so far. It doesn’t look like much, but there’s a lot of code behind the scenes!

From within the character customization screen. Note that the ability values are from simulated diceroll tests. (Also, noble Sir Bob seems to be without genitalia! Mysterious!)

Keep on gaming!

Marcus out.