A TOUR AT FRICTIONAL GAMES Welcome! To celebrate that the first episode of Penumbra: Overture have been release we would like to give you a brief tour of our "office". Some of you might already know that we are an indie company and hence do not have a fancy office. Instead we do all our work from from home and keep in contact over internet or phone. This can be a hassle at times but so far it is working pretty good, hey we finsihed the first episode, didn't we? The Core Team The core fulltime working team have consisted of three people. So who are we? We are gonna let some quotes companioned by a photo of our workspace give you a rough idea: ANTON ADAMSE - ARTIST (meaning creation of 3d-models, textures, levels, gui, etc) Anton: "Here is a photo from my hideout where the dark art of Penumbra comes to life. This is from my student apartment on Gotland (a swedish island) where I spent most of the fall creating art for Penumbra overture. The laptop doesnt look like much, but believe me... it has the power of a jet engine (at least it sounds like one). Other great investments include: a wacom tablet, lots of coke and a pair of well isolated headphones." Thomas:"Poor Anton couldn't play Penumbra too long since it heated his CPU too much. To solve this he had to put it by the window to cool down every now and then." THOMAS GRIP - PROGRAMMER (+ a few art pieces, most notably the mouse pointer) Thomas: "Welcome to my living room, ehm, I mean studio! This is where have spent many hard days and night coding, debugging and other fun stuff. Most oftenly while my poor girlfriend have been watching TV (as you can spot to the left). Favorite tools include my gamepad (that I have like two games to play with) and my Simpsons mug that is oftenly filled with some sort of tea." JENS NILSSON - SOUND ENGINEER (and level-scripter, webmaster,etc) Jens: "Yes, the room really is pink. It helps me feel in the right mood to create aweful horrific sounds. Pink + Horror Games = Emo, haha. Anyway, this is my workspace where I have done all the work for the first episode. Except at times when I record sounds as that can be in the bathroom, under the bed or any of those other places where you usually find a monster or two." Thomas: "If you squint your eyes and look to the left, a pink wall might be spotted. In case you where wondering what Jens was talking about." Contributers However, we are not the only ones that have been part of creating Penumbra: Overture. Below is a list contributers without whose help Penumbra: Overture would never have been possible: Luis Rodero Morales Struggled with the not-so-friendly OpenAL to create the lowlevel sound stuff. Also helped out with some extras to the particle systems. Edward Rudd Done all Mac and Linux porting and has helped out cleaning up alot of code and finding various nasty bugs. Emil Meiton Responisble for creating a lot of additional art including base graphics for entire levels. TJ Jubert If you read something in the game TJ has probably written it. He also helped out with fixing the story so it got a hell lot better. Mikko Tarmia Without his music Penumbra: Overture would loose most of its atmosphere. Mikko is responisble for all songs in the game. Mike Hillard Lends his voice to one of the main characters in the game called Red. Fun and stuff So you want some more details on the inner workings of Frictional Games? Okay then, below we have collected a bunch of fun facts and various anomolies having to do with the creation of Penumbra: Overture - Episode One. - Anton usually uses photo references as base for making textures etc. Here he can be seen for on a photo used for recent promo art. However, the problem with this shot was that he only had a camera on his cell phone and it had only a 4 second timer. So to take the shot he had to try and steady the cell on some already unstable stacked boxes, run like hell and get into the correct postion. Needless to say, it took a few tries before he got it right. - Jens likes sounds. Actually he likes sounds so much that when there is a fierce thunderstorm going on he does not refer from using electronic equipment like normal people. Instead he runs around with a mic and head phones trying to get good sounds, making him kind of a humnan lightning rod. - Thomas is quite known for being absent-minded as he usually thinks about how to solve some nasty programming problem. Problem is that life is not only programming problems. One day his girlfriend started complaining about a strange smell in the kitchen, Thomas he said could smell nothing but his girlfriend insisted on there was something strange. Days went by and finally one day when cleaning the kitchen Thomas's girlfriend found a once frozen and now 2 weeks old chicken amoung the pots and frying pans. Appperently Thomas had been thinking about something else while unpacking some groceries and thought a chicken would fit perfectly among pots and stuff. Until this days Thomas is not let to unpack any groceries with out supervision. In Closing We really hope that you will consider picking up Penumbra: Overture - Episode One now that it is out. And if you do, please visit our forum and tell us what you think in our Feedback Section. We take all opinions into consideration and will try to make the next episode even better. Last but not least hope you will enjoy the game and have as much fun as we had (most of the time) while making it! Best wishes from Anton, Jens and Thomas Frictional Games