Portfolio

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.

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.

Day three of my 5 days of updates!

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.

I’ve been interview and featured in The Games Machine, one of Italy’s biggest gaming magazines. Thanks to Carola Cudemo from indies4indies.com for setting it up!

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.

I am going to post one update a day for rest of this week, to give you an idea of everything I have been up to in 2012.

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.

Second post of the day, while we are at it I want to voice my thoughts on Steam Greenlight. I think the basic idea is good, but it is far from where it should be right now.

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.

Rekoil
Since February this year I have been working as freelance level designer/artist/environment art director on the competitive FPS Unreal Engine game Rekoil

A first trailer has just gone up.

The game has also gone up on Steam Greenlight... [Content cut off]

And here is game number two that I’ve been working on!

Press release:

Today, indie developers Talawa Games and Teotl Studios are thrilled to announce the puzzle adventure game Unmechanical, to be released August 8 2012 for PC and a couple of weeks later for iOS.

Unmechanical is an award-winning 2.5D side-scroller which combines tricky puzzle solving, alluring exploration, and an engrossing atmosphere. The game had humble beginnings as a student project and since then both game and team has grown.

“Unmechanical has been about taking on something for real and working our fingers to the bone to get it done. It’s our hopes and ambitions combined into this very personal, unique, and awesome adventure that’s crafted with lots of love.” Said Marko Permanto, project lead for the Unmechanical team.

Unmechanical begins with a twist of fate as you’re spirited away by a network of coiled pipes into a mysterious underworld. You find yourself in a strange environment that pulsates from mechanic and organic machinery alike, and your journey to freedom begins. Flying freely through the odd and fantastic surroundings, a powerful tractor beam lets you pick up objects and interact with the world.

Your quest for freedom requires you to solve a great variety of puzzling challenges, and while it’s easy to pick up and play, later challenges may prove very difficult indeed. On your adventure you might also begin to understand what it all means–The underworld may be more than it seems, the fateful descent more than just chance, and you might not be entirely alone after all…

For more information about the game, visit Unmechanical at http://unmechanical.net/

The game started out as one of the game projects at the education Future Games where I teach. Originally put together in just 4 weeks, the little demo was received so well by everyone that the team decided to carry on with development. And that eventually led to the cooperation between Talawa Games, a new studio started up by part of the original team, and my own company Teotl Studios.
I joined the team about 8 months ago to get the game through its final stages of development. I have been responsible for optimizing all the art and levels, as well visually polishing up all the areas and ensuring the looks and style are consistent throughout the entire game. I also took care of the large majority of the PC to iOS conversion work. Tech/Level artist would sum up my work quite well. My own development work aside, as a company we are helping them with Steam and other business and distribution things.

The iOS version in particular is something that, from a tech perspective, I am particular proud of. We will be revealing iOS shots in the next couple of weeks but I managed to pretty much translate the PC looks to iOS near 1:1, including normal maps and so on at near no performance loss. I’d really like to produce one or two training videos to go over these iOS Unreal Engine tips and tricks I’ve learned later this year, though I am so very out of time all the time so we will see!

Other than this game I’ve also been busy handling the internships at Future Games the past half year. Following up and assisting our students throughout their six month internships, and visiting them at the various places where they went. That got me to visit a wide range of studios over the past few months, ranging from the biggest like Guerrilla Games and Dice to small two man indie teams like Oxeye Studios, the guys behind the indie 2D shooter Cobalt. The contacts aside, one of the big things I got out of the whole experience was probably the industry wide (for within this region at least) perspective and overview on how the industry is moving along.

As promised a while ago, the first of several projects I am currently involved in!

Kung Fu Superstar is an Unreal Engine martial arts game, and we’ve just released the anouncement trailer, along with an interview over at Eurogamer

I’ve helped them out by polishing and beautifying all the environments in the video. Lighting, particles and other effects, post process and color correction settings, skies, advanced materials, and so on. Also did some work on character materials and lighting setups.

Was great fun to do! I like the polishing stage the most of all steps, to really take an environment to the next level and make it shine, so I’d definitely be up for something like this again if anyone else similar projects going :)

More new stuff in a month, or two at most!

I am really busy with a hundred different things these days. Working on three different games, alternating daily between each of the games. Can’t show anything just yet, but by summer it should all be ready, if not released even! Last year was a bit of a slow year, but this year I am getting back up to full speed!
I am getting really good at mobile Unreal stuff also lately. I just managed to get large open high poly landscapes going on Ipad at 60 FPS, a mobile foliage system, smooth gradients with absolutely no sign of compression, normal mapping and pseudo specular without dynamic lights and with almost no performance impact, some cool usage of flares, and so on. One on the games I work on is also running on both PC and iOS using the exact same files and levels, I managed to get it to scale in both ways without compromising on both performance for mobile, or looks for PC. I plan to write tutorials on these, or make video tutorials, once I got some more time.

Also, Syndicate got released a few weeks ago. It is the game I worked as level designer/artist for the first 1.5 year of pre-production/production, until I left to work The Ball fulltime.

Otherwise I am still occupied with teaching and education. I am handling the internships for last years students and some day to day business at my school Future Games, and tomorrow I am starting a 4 day UDK course at a University in South Stockholm.

Couple of weeks ago my students over at Future Games completed their second Game Project of the year, again running on UDK.

Like previous times:

People in Sweden who interested in our school can attend our presentation March 22nd. We take in just 36 people a year and all of our teachers are industry people.

Goliath

Goliath is a side-scrolling puzzle platformer with a shooting element. Play as a seek and rescue bot as it tracks a distress signal deep into the wreckage of a downed mother ship and discover where you are and how you ended up there. Overcome hazards and enemy turrets as you progress through 4 distinctive environments to reach your objective.

Memento

A man, old and dying lies jacked in to a machine designed not to save his life, but to judge it. He is being forced to relive his memories, both joyful and horrifying, in the largest public trial since those of Nuremberg. The whole world watches with horrified anticipation as the hated old man spends his final hours reliving bloodstained fragments of his dreadful life.

Rennfahrer

Rennfahrer is an high octane racing game set in the near future. Burn through a stunning city vista high above the clouds while trying to stay alive as the cities defense system tries to hinder you from reaching the goal.
With games as “Wipeout” and “Trackmania” as inspiration, buckle up and get ready for adrenaline pumping speed and insane jumps as you race against the timer and drive for your life!

The Box Project

The Box Project is an environmentally puzzling platform adventure where you control a swiss-army box. The box contains all the contraptions needed to save the over-polluted world that remains, now that the humans have left for newer worlds. Spring over the junkyard, float through jets of steam, and collect fairies on your path to cleanse the world and make it anew.

Alex the axolotl

You play as Alex, a axolotl. You and your family gets taken from your natural habitat by man.
Set in a aquarium where you will have to swim through dangerous environments to try and find out what happened to your family.

Bad Luck

Bad Luck is a game which involves two different types of gameplay, a fast paced side scrolling shoot ‘em up, and a top-down logical puzzler. Each level swaps between these two modes in a challenging and different way, always keeping the players mind and reactions alert. You control a character whose bad luck has left them stranded alone on a planet, trying desperately to make their way to the surface. Unfortunately, bad luck keeps sending you in the opposite direction. With the help of the character’s various abilities (shooting, grabbing, dashing and manipulating time) it’s up to you to reverse the players luck and make your way out of this predicament.

I’ve updated the Simple UDK Game tutorial to reflect recent changes in the engine, and I’ve written an all new tutorial for a brand new Kismet HUD/Interface system!

This new system, written by Marko Permanto, and based on James Tan’s UI Kismet system allows you to build, control, and animate menus and HUDs through nothing but Kismet!

Get it now.

I’ve never gotten into Scaleform. I’ve always thought it is ridiculous to require someone to get and learn Flash and Actionscript just to get a little image to appear on the screen. When making indie games and prototyping concepts you need to be able to get result as fast and as easy as possible, and these Kismet blocks are a major step in the right direction in my opinion. I can make stuff appear on the screen again! Hurray!

We will be using this system in the upcoming UDK game Marko and I are working on – Unmechanical – Join us on Facebook also! We are hard at work at getting the game done at the moment so for the time being we don’t want to spend too much time yet on releasing screenshots and videos and all that, but we will soon begin ramping up our media efforts :)

Last September I started my annual fall and winter lecturing at Future Games. Normally we start the school year by having the students create a couple of traditional board games, followed by a few months of regular teaching before we let them make their first full games. Contrary to previous years, we decided to throw them in the deep end right away this year and have them make their own games after just 3 days of teaching!

At Future Games we are convinced that the best way to learn game development is by doing it. Theoretical knowledge is important, but at the end of the day you learn the most by trying things out, and by experimenting. Like many other developers who’ve started out before the era of “game development educations” I got into game development by making one level after another, one mod after another, and so on. We are trying to capture that spirit of proactive practically focused entrepreneurship many game developers in the industry have, in our education. If anyone in the vicinity of Stockholm would like to visit us, we regularly organize informal evening get togethers – follow the event on Facebook for information on when.

Either way, here are the results from our 35 new students and two weeks of work:

Knugen

In the age of knights, honor and treachery, the black (and merciless) king has been ruling the green lands of Landora since he slew the white kings father, who had been a just king for decades. Now the white king is eager for justice and to reclaim what (he believes) is rightfully his! Can he succeed? Or will the black king continue to rule it with an iron fist?
Knugen is a turn based, strategic two-player game where you affect your opponent, either by griefing him or helping him, by grabbing the goodies on the way to the throne. One must also beware, the race for the throne will awake blind spirits of fallen warriors from past times to fulfill their pledge to defend the throne from intruders!
Swipe in the direction you want to move and stomp your way through your opponent and the ancient, beautiful hallway to claim the throne for yourself! A quick and fun game with unlimited replayability to play whenever you want to show your friends who the real king is!
So, which king will prevail? The fate of Landora is your hands.

Mischief

“MISCHIEF!” is a family friendly multi-player game that features classic gameplay, that fans of traditional board-games will appreciate. Control one of four mischievous goblins seeking to earn their riches, and purchase the four mystical trinkets from across the realm. If things aren’t going your way, throw down a ‘Mischief’ card that will mess things up for the other players – Steal their items, teleport them away or just make them lose their precious gold! Featuring simple intuitive controls and cure colorful graphics, “MISCHIEF!” should keep you, and maybe your own little Mischiefs, entertained for hours!

Polarity

Polarity is based on a boardgame we all remember from our childhood: The Labyrinth, more commonly known as “the one where you tilt the board around to avoid the ball from falling into holes”.
Contrary to the original game, tilting the iPad has little effect on the direction of the ball. Instead you are to travel around the board attracting and deflecting yourself from the magnetic power plants by switching their polarity.

They See Me Rolling

Experience the next generation of labyrinth games! They See Me Rolling brings new life to an old genre, using open environments, dynamic obstacles and a revolutionary advancement system. Controlling a lonely and previously immobile rock yearning for the power of flight, you must navigate unique environments on your quest to steal the sandals of Hermes and finally fulfill your dream.

Jungleprod

Jungleprod is the latest sensation to hit the iPad! Using the iPad’s touchfunctions you will get a truly breathtaking experience swiping through the jungle! Tread carefully because the jungle is as lively as ever. Beware of Crocodiles, monkeys, and other jungle critters on your way to the treasure!

I have written a new UE3 tutorial: An introduction to Performance Profiling

Also, the 3DSMax Batch Export script has been updated with a small bug fix – Thanks “Keen”!

Currently going through my yearly fall and winter teaching sessions at Future Games in Stockholm. First thing I had the new class of students do this year was to build a UDK iPad board game, after just three days of teaching. The results were impressive, I will put it up here in my news later this year!

New tutorial!

I have written a step by step walkthrough tutorial on:

nDo2 is a new tool that hooks into Photoshop, and allows you to paint and draw normal maps directly in Photoshop.

As I posted on Twitter a few days ago, the game that I worked on before I started up Teotl Studios to work on The Ball full time just got announced by EA: Syndicate.
And related to that, I thought this was quite a nice parody.

That aside, I recently read through a couple of game design books for my course at Future Games.

Spending the month in the Philippines at the moment of all places. Vacation. Great place. The climate is a bit too warm perhaps but life feels free and relaxing here. Flying back next weekend, and then I will begin teaching my regular yearly courses at Future Games until February.

My friend Teddy and his colleagues over at Quixel have released the nDo 2 beta! I can highly recommend it. It allows you to paint and modify normal maps directly in Photoshop, and as I never really got into all that Zbrush and Mudbox stuff this is really the missing piece of tech I had been looking for for a long time. Go check it out.

I came across a couple of interesting articles, books, and a program:

Dave’s Mapper – A top down map generator. Can’t really use it for anything serious, but it may give you some inspiration when you try to come up with a floorplan. It is actually remarkably UT’ish/Quake’ish what it generates :)
Modular Environments in UDK – A tutorial from my friend Thiago Klafke on creating modular meshes for use in the UDK (or other engines if you wish).
Motivating Players in Open World Games - An article on game and level design in open world games from someone from Bethesda.
Spacescape – Free star texture generator.

Also I just bought a couple of books, two most notable ones are:

Pictorial Encyclopedia of Historic Architectural Plans, Details and Elements – Reference guide with nothing more than side and top sketches of parts of historical buildings.
Architecture Form, Space, and Order - Very readable. Just enough text, and thousands of pictures. Really nice book if you want to developer a better understanding of architecture and you don’t want to read hundreds of pages of heavy academical text.

Also have two game design books to still go through, and a book on castles. I figured since games are usually about assault/defend, lets read some in-depth info on castle design.

Long time no update again, there goes my promise of updating more regularly :) It is quite hard to find the time with all the other things I am doing.

I made some changes to the site. I removed a directory with images that were normally no longer used (I hope) and I fixed a few broken images and bits of text that messed up when it got ported over to WordPress. I also moved all large images back from the secondary host to the host the website itself is on too, after someone complained he could not see the externally referenced images. They should also load faster now. Let me know if some images ported over incorrectly.

I am currently working on some mobile Unreal Engine projects. I am working on a small kismet only mobile game that will be used for a new video for Eat3D, and we are porting over The Ball. We got it running at 30-40 FPS all the way through the first 3 levels actually, so that is really promising and these mobile devices are getting really powerful lately. More on that later when things solidify a bit more. Will also be traveling a lot later this year for a long vacation, and I will be back to teaching at Future Games in fall, until late winter 2012.

Quite a few stories popping up lately about excessive crunch and other such scandals. First we had the LA Noir Credit scandal and the stories about management and excessive crunch, now horror stories about Gameloft in New Zealand surfaced. It is really disgraceful, criminal even as far as I am concerned. I read a story of a a guy who was made to work 16 hours every day for almost half a year long while having a 3 month old baby at home… That shows just how incredibly immature the industry still is. Meanwhile the IGDA which is suppose to represent and defend our interests as developers has proven yet again that it really does not care for its members and is unable to stand up for us. This is just one out of many scandals that they have failed to respond to (Tim Langdell anyone? – and check out his amusing performance in court too), making me wonder exactly what its purpose really is…
There seems to be growing awareness of the excessive crunch problem though, even among junior developers, and each and every one of these stories that surfaces will further our cause, but there is more to be done. We need an increased awareness and opposition. Excessive crunch without a solid and fair compensation package is absolutely unacceptable!

A website dedicated to the topic popped up a few days ago: I Love Crunch

I finally found time again to write a new tutorial, on Eastern of all days. The new tutorial is about Texture Optimization and talks about lowering the memory footprint of your 2D assets in the UE3/UDK. I intend to finally go over the 3 material tutorials whenever I find time again, as those are desperately in need of an update.

I also wrote up a post mortem on the things we did for the Portal 2 ARG/Potato Sack. There is quite a big section in it about the level we did.

Now that I finally have near unlimited bandwidth and diskspace on this server I was thinking if I could perhaps extend my site somehow. If anyone has ideas let me know via mail, Facebook, Twitter, IRC, whatever!

Sorry, long time since the last update. There goes my idea of updating regularly :) I also still got those interviews around I have still yet to post. Too many other things to do. I have recently held two talks on UDK at Stockholm University, and I have also held one at Nacka Highschool, south Stockholm. Two fellow Dutchmen, both from the Renegade X team, have also spent a few days at my place to get some more in-depth knowledge on Unreal. Furthermore my website has known some problems over the past two weeks but those have now all been resolved. The site has moved servers, and I now finally have unlimited bandwidth available!

I also bought a new camera, finally. My previous camera was seven years old and it started to look really prehistorical (it had a 4 cm diameter lcd screen for example…). New one is a Sony a55. Going to give my photography hobby a new impulse :)

The big news this month however, is our The Ball Portal DLC level:

Over the past month and a half or something we had been working on this Portal/The Ball crossover level. It has about an hour worth of gameplay. Huge props to Valve for letting us officially infringe on their IP! Part of the Potato Sack!

Thanks to our whole team for making this possible!

Programming
Markus Arvidsson

Art
Markus Palviainen
Lukas Arvidsson

Level Design/Environment Art
Sjoerd “Hourences” De Jong
Mario Marquardt
Kevin Cytatzky
Dan “Cardo” Shannon
Marko “Urre” Permanto
Joachim Holmér

Over the past few months I have been teaching at Future Games in central Stockholm, and after a three months of introductory classes the students got to make their first game, using the UDK.

The students had some serious limitations imposed on them:

I am really happy with the results. The students did an awesome job and the quality they accomplished surpassed my expectations!

Unmechanical – Winner according to our jury
By André Axrud, Marko Permanto, Markus Andersson, Sandra Scholz, Sofia Jakobsson

Captured by a creature unknown, you must now find your way through the weird and horrid underground to find your way back home to your family.
Solve mindbending puzzles using very easy controls to navigate your little character.
Use your environment to your advantage by manipulating objects with your powerful tractor beam.

Furious Trucker
By Emil Wikström, Jesper Engström, Jakob Pålinger, Peter Wilhelmsson, Sofie Sundqvist

The truck full of fury is now in your possession! Deliver the cargo through forests, fires and steep cliffs, while you run over hoards of debris scattered around in all chaos.

Red Edge
By Joachim Holmér, Tomas Holm, Björn Eriksson, Jenny Nordenborg, Jesper Janson, Patrik Robertsson

On a distant planet in a far off galaxy, a crashed spaceship is slowly sinking into a poisonous swamp… Fifteen years after the forced landing, a small maintenance drone has finally generated enough energy to boot up… The human crew is suspended in cryo stasis and the only one who can save them is YOU…

The Fly-Guy
By Erik Wonnevi, Fredrik Albrektson, Jessica Wiklund, Jonas Gustafsson, José González

You are Mr González, an intruder in the human world who seeks to rescue his trapped son.
As humans are not particularly fond of flies, stay out of their way while indirectly making them open the doors for you.

Lanternus – Luminent Descent
By Giuseppe Lacapra, Klara Nordin, Carlos Lundhall, Max Elmberg Sjöholm, Omar Chaouch

In the depths of the ocean lies an acient alien structure, with mysterious powers it has corrupted the surrounding environment. Take control of a submarine and dive in to the abyss!

The Not So Flying Carpet
By Bojan Piperac, Fredrik Henriksson, Leo Ringborg, Oskar Thuresson, Rasmus Bremholm

The not so flying carpet is a reaction based racing/platform-jumping game set in a dark, murky forest with an arcade style fast paced gameplay.

Mailman
By Andreas Häll-Penninger, Ivan Boström, Gustav Holmström, Jennie Persson, Malin Lindgren

Mailman is an adventure game about a man who’s on a quest to deliver a very important package. Something goes wrong and he crash lands with his airplane on a world of islands, and now he has to retrieve his lost package and get back home.

PC Gamer has awarded my game ,The Ball, Best Action/Adventure of 2010! Thanks a lot! That is cool :)

"A masterstroke of minimalism, The Ball was the best gaming vignette of the year. There’s no dialog, sweeping cinematics or tacked-on multiplayer mode to burden The Ball—just a lightweight, focused, gameplay-driven short story."

In other news, after a very calm and relaxing Christmas vacation I am now back at my regular schedule. I updated my first Material tutorial a little, but given my schedule I don't think I will be able to do any further tutorial updates for at least a month. Basically the only ones left to do are two material tutorials, and one tutorial on triggering materials (outdated – the Kismet actions it refers to were removed a few months ago).

The Ball is available for 75% off today and tonight only! And it actually is my birthday today, so if you feel like buying something for me, buy The Ball :)

Not much happening otherwise, I am taking it easy. 2011 looks like it will be a busy year. I am slowly making progress on my book about The Ball but I am not sure at all when it will be done. Progress goes slow, and it is a bit too random right now. It is covering the story behind The Ball and its art style and all, how to set up and organize an indie team, and how to practically use the UDK. That is too much. Too unfocused. So I am going to see if I can fix that, possibly split it up or remove parts. If I can’t I might just dump the idea, or recycle it into something else.

Also if you haven’t already, feel free to add me on Facebook!

I am almost there! I made a big push over the weekend, and I have now fixed up all tutorials but the three material tutorials!

InterpActors

• Rewrote it entirely.
• All new screenshots.

Lightmapping

• Extended it with a whole section.
• Rewrote parts of it.

And I fixed up the layout of all other tutorials. If only I could force myself to wrestle through the material tutorials now :)

Teaching means lots of vacation. Three weeks of nothing coming up, which I plan to spend on making the start on my new book, and reading through some game design books I borrowed from school. Also came across this blog today Making Big AAA Games: Not The Dream Job (Anymore), which pretty much sums up my feelings as well.

And I saw this Photoshop plugin float by today as well. vTools, with a bunch of useful scripts, whatever use you may find for it. People interested in Photoshop scripts should also check out my ex-colleague Teddy’s script nDO by the way, if you haven’t already. It is neat!

Goes really slow, I lost so much time the past two weeks on all kinds of other things. I have barely had the time to work on updating all my tutorials. I have made a big push today though.

Physics

• Fixed up the English.
• Replaced outdated screenshots.
• Added CanBecomeDynamic
• Added Force Actors. Wanted to add Constrain Actors but ran out of time.

Sound

• Replaced and added new screenshots.
• Rewrote a large part of it to be more accurate.
• Added AmbientSoundSimpleToggleable.

Streaming

• Rewrote part of the text. More accurate now.

Also I fixed some of the formatting of the Soft Physics and Foliage and Deco Layers tutorials.

Completely unrelated, but I just built a super tiny PC. I have been wanting to do so for a long time and now I finally got to it. Mini-ITX. The thing uses just 20W to operate, and the only moving element in the PC is the on button! In fact, my TV, which it is hooked up to, makes more noise than the PC :)

I can now reply emails from the comfort of my couch, and watch YouTube on my TV.

Also, here is something cute. MakeHuman. It is a free character generator, like found in RPGs. It generates a base character which you can then export to a 3D program to further work on. Gets you up and running much faster when modeling a character. The export function doesn’t seem to work very well yet, but still a very nice tool!

I have had very little time the past week, much less than I had hoped, and I have pretty much spent all my time on typing emails and documents, and it is set to continue for a while as it is looking now. Fun! I had three interviews about The Ball pop up, and I have been so smart to make my students write design documents, which I now have to read through. Totals about 200 pages :)

I also had to write my monthly column for Official Playstation Magazine Benelux. I have been writing a column for them for about a year I believe, so if you happen to read Dutch check them out. The one I just wrote is about how I see the retail and digital markets evolve in the future, and an insight in digital pricing.

I pressured myself to do get one new piece for my website done however, to at least somewhat keep myself on schedule. I highlighted some cool tools and programs I use for UE3 in Cool Tools. If you got any other tools that come in handy when working with UE3 feel free to tell me!

Also, two of my The Ball programmers, Markus Arvidsson and James Tan just got back home from Dubai, where they had a bunch of workshops about the UDK at Epic’s booth. Here are some pics of them two, together with Jay Wilbur from Epic.

Thanks for the opportunity Epic!

And lastly, The Ball could really use your vote over at IndieDB.com!

And going on… This is actually quite boring to do :) I can’t wait until I can get started with new things.

Light Functions

• Replaced an outdated screenshot and corrected a few things.

Fog

• Corrected a few things and added in a section on Exponential Height Fog

I also updated lots of tiny things in A Simple UDK Game, Decals, Cutscenes.

A while ago I stumbled across a magazine from 1955 on Google Books: Popular Mechanics. Awesome!

There is some seriously crazy stuff in it, and it is really interesting to read this and develop an insight in society of 50-60 years ago. They were obsessed by uranium for one, and didn’t really seem to understand the dangers of messing around with it. The magazine is full of uranium topics.

• Uranium Hunt By Jeep
• Vacation Geiger Counter

“If you are looking for a vacation in the open with adventure thrown in, why not consider prospecting for uranium? In on evening you can assemble a vacation geiger counter!”

And the best one of them all: Forestry in 2005.

“Like a giant eagle spotting supper from the air, the helicopter hovers over the densely timbered mountainside. As the pilot checks instruments, the logger members of the two man crew refers to a memorandum dated that day – August 12 2005… Watching every flick of the helicopter’s supersensitive geiger counter, the pilot begins to ‘zero in’ on a big pine. The tree is one that had been radioactively marked by a ground crew. With the helicopter over the marked pine, the pilot nods, and says ‘Hooks away!’”

They actually believed we were going to mark trees with a radioactive material in 2005, then detect such a marked tree from a heli, and then pull up the entire tree, roots included, right out of the ground with that very heli! “Not only possible, but probable”

Now that I’ve finished The Ball I finally found the time to get back to my website! An all new website and a fresh start!

So what is new?

The tutorial pages are currently WIP. Everything else should work. If there is anything that does not work please shoot me an email/tweet so I can fix it.

Hourences.com is a pretty major website. Here are some interesting numbers from the past 365 days:

For a website that I updated pretty much once in that entire time I am not unhappy with that… :) I really intend to do more with it, as time allows, and have it grow in size even more.

My UDK Game tutorial I posted on www.theballthegame.com rather than Hourences.com in itself pulled in another 152 714 visitors for that single page (that page will be moved to Hourences.com now by the way).

Thanks a lot to Ryan Watson – 1clickwebdesigns.co.uk for redesigning my site and setting it all up!