Also for another 57 hours the PC version of Unmechanical is up on a pay-what-you-want basis on Indiegamestand.com. Pay above the average (1.23USD) and you will also receive two old prototype builds as well as the soundtrack in three different formats.

As for the rest I am currently still working on my secret new expansion project for this website, some level design work for clients, along with handling all kinds of things at FutureGames, our education. I’ve been busy following up on our internships for one. Over the past two months I’ve visited places like Yager, Guerrilla Games, DICE, Starbreeze, Paradox, etc. I have recently also been by the mobile games giant King to give a short lecture about Unreal Engine development to some of their devs, and over at FutureGames I am currently running the students their third and final game project. This time in collaboration with the Swedish developer Fatshark, who are acting as publisher for our students.

The KFS Oilrig took me 2 hours 45 minutes to go from what I received from the art team to polishing it up, and the Prison level took 20 hours about + another 8 hours of unrecorded work to set up the entire level from start to end, including the creation of placeholder art. I did not prepare anything for either of these two levels/videos so what you see is just improvisation. The only thing I had when I began work on the Prison was a rough idea of the general shape and idea of the level, but no sketches or anything on paper, nor any concepts.
The Oilrig was mostly made already, but lacked effects and styling when I received it. It was particularly easy to do because it was a cutscene level, so you can get away with a lot. There were only a couple of angles to take care of and I did not had to think much/anything about performance.

There are some things that I could have done better, or put more time into if I would have had that, for example the outside of the Prison is rather flat whereas the inside has the tendency to be cramped plus too disconnected from the outside, and the inside also has a bit too flat lighting and detailing going on, but those smaller problems aside, as an illustration of my drive for efficiency and my usual no-nonsense-just-do-it approach to everything I create it gets the point across. I want to give my clients fast but quality results because my time is their money.

If you have epilepsy/photosensitivity you should probably not watch these, the screen jumps around aggressively and it goes really fast.

I have finally gotten around to updating my portfolio. I updated some info, added a 5th level page for the era 2011-Today, and added all the work that I have done in the past 1.5 years about that was missing, and I also made the website more compatible with iOS devices.

Rekoil

Still working on Rekoil. We are moving forward at a solid pace, though like usual things end up taking a bit longer than expected. We are still very much so in need of your support on Steam Greenlight.

Here are the levels I have worked on. Many of these were team efforts. Details on who did what are on my portfolio’s fifth level page. In general I did little gameplay design on these, and was mostly responsible for the level art side of things. I did a lot of the detailing, some of the major architecture, and I set up the lighting, texture and light color pallets, effects, etc. Overall look and feel basically, visual polish and styling, along

Levels like Sawmill I am particularly proud off. I made those entirely myself, and I did it super fast. You are looking at just ~18 hours of work from start to end. I got more on that tomorrow in the form of two videos.

Kung Fu Superstar

I did some quick work on their new environment a while ago, video of that coming up tomorrow. The team tried to get funding secured via Kickstarter, as one of the first UK teams to go onto Kickstarter + with testimonials from people like Peter Molyneux but none of that seemed to have helped. It never met its goals so the project was canned unfortunately.

Here are some screenshots of the newest environment I worked on plus some new shots of the previous stuff I helped out on. I mostly did visual polish and special fx/materials/lighting work. Credits to the whole KFS team for all the rest.

Unmechanical was awarded Best Game & Best Sound at BIG, the Brazilian International Games Festival.

We also received some boxed copies of the game, of our German retail distribution partner CrimsonCow

iOS wise we are quite a bit behind on our schedule. We had planned to release the iOS version of the game in September, but that obviously didn’t happen. We discussed the game with some external people and came to the conclusion that in order to for the game to have a reasonable chance of success, we had to support more iOS devices. The original plan was to go for iPad2 minimum, but over the past 4 months we’ve been hard at work at further optimizing the game, and we can now proudly say that we got the game working on pretty much every single iOS device out there.

We are now supporting iOS4.3/iPhone3GS/iPod 4th Gen/iPad1, and everything newer than that. We did tons of heavy modifications to all of our content and to the engine itself. I’ve learned a huge amount of deep technical stuff by doing this kind of work the past year, so it has been very valuable on a technical level.

The game is scheduled for release some time later this month, or in February. Most likely. No promises there.

Some new iOS screenshots. These are in-game shots of the game running on iPad4.

Huge update tomorrow! Dozens of screenshots of my latest levels.

Got some new Unmechanical media and info tomorrow, with dozens of screenshots of all my recent work and some timelapse WIP videos coming up day 4 and 5.

Hourences.com

As you may have noticed Hourences.com got updated.

FutureGames Class of 2012 – Game Project 1

I am still teaching at the education FutureGames, and once more we’ve thrown our students into the deep end right away. I think the results have been particularly good this year.

Together with Tobias Lundmark I made a video of these games. All footage was captured directly from an iPad2.

For example this is currently the most popular, or one of the most popular games on Steam Greenlight. With all do respect, but I don’t see how that will make it into a finished game. On the other hand there are games out there with development budgets of hundreds of thousands if not millions that do not get much attention because they are flushed away by the sheer volume of games added all the time, many of them tiny productions or just plain ideas. A day in I already do not know where to begin looking at the games. And the more fluff there will be on Steam Greenlight, the more the average viewers will step out, and the more the system will be controlled by a small hardcore crowd with too much time on their hands I believe.

This game for example was posted on about the same time as the aforementioned game, looks like a much more complete and functional game, yet has almost no votes whatsoever. And how about this game. Been posted fairly recently, but has much higher budget and production values.

There are also plenty of trolling attempts coming by. I saw Battlefield 3 floating by in Russian earlier today, and a game with pictures of Anders Breivik.

All too often with things like these it are not the good products that make it, it are the “dreams” that get popular. Sell an idea that makes people dream, say for example Building a Colony on Mars or Oyua and you will get yourself plenty of attention. Dreams aren’t playable though. Games are. It should always be about products, not about dreams. It does not matter how awesome an idea is, if it does not make it into a finished and sustainable product it is utterly irrelevant.

I would love to see the entire system more business focused and not gamer focused. I would try to keep the average viewer returning to Steam Greenlight as much as possible to reduce the risk of getting the entire system run by a small group of users, and I would do that through:

The irony of the whole indie revolution is that so many people got into it, that in order for the whole thing to continue to work it will fall back into almost exactly the situation we came from about five years ago. In order to stand out, get attention, and make it through all the gatekeepers like Steam or the console developers, you will soon need (and often already need this kind) a publisher who can open the doors for you that you need opened. I know plenty of developers who approach traditional publishers just for the sake of getting a spot on Steam or XBLA, because they cannot manage on their own. I don’t immediately have a solution for that either. There are just way too many games out there.

A first trailer has just gone up.

The game has also gone up on Steam Greenlight – Please give us your support! Takes just a second to push the Like button :)

This has been, and still is, a very fun game to work on. It kind of goes back to what I started out with. Classic FPS gameplay, competitive, and a wide variety of multiplayer level that gives a lot of creative freedom and possibilities to me as a developer. Jason Brice, the guy behind the game and CEO is also one of the nicest guys and bosses I have worked with in my decade in the games industry. He has poured tons of dedication and money into getting his game off the ground and could really use your support.

I have worked on most of the levels of the game. Some from scratch and all on my own, though most of them in collaboration with the other developers in the team. I spent a lot of time on optimization and polish passes, and getting an art style going in the levels. I will be showing all the things I have done for the game so far over the coming weeks/months.

Unmechanical

Last Wednesday was the release part of Unmechanical in Stockholm. Here is a photo of almost the entire team.

As you may know, Unmechanical was released for PC about three weeks ago and is on sale for 9.99 USD. The iOS version is going a bit slower than expected but still very much underway.

Get the game now on Steam, GOG, GamersGate, and Onlive for less than 10$

As part of our Unmechanical launch campaign, we’ve also began selling a DRM free copy of The Ball on GOG.com and introduced a permanent price drop. The Ball is now only 9.99 USD.

Here are some screenshots of areas that I have done a lot of work on/major impact on visuals:

And a couple more shots of areas that I did something on, though to a lesser extend than the screenshots above.

Next up, the iOS version! Hoping to get that done by the end of the month!