machai-umno

Introduction It has now passed a little more than two years since we launched Amnesia and one year since the last report , so time for another! One would think that there is perhaps not much to be said this long after release, especially for a single player game with no built-in social features. But the fact is that Amnesia is still going very strong and 2012 will probably be the best financial year here at Frictional Games, which we would never had expected two years ago. Sales As always, let's start with the sales and some numbers. The first thing will be to figure out how many units we have sold in total, which is actually really hard to pin down. The biggest reasons for the uncertainty is that Amnesia was part of the Humble Indie Bundle  (HIB) earlier this year and Potato Bundle last year. Both of these account for quite a lot of sales. Without counting the units bought there our total lands at 710 000 units. Adding all HIB and Potato Sack sales gets us to 1 360 ...

Introduction A year has passed since we first released Amnesia and a lot has changed for us at Frictional Games since. We have gone from being pretty much out of money, to being financially stable in a way we never thought we would be. Everybody in the company has gotten raised salaries and we have more than enough money to complete our next game. Our financial situation is far from the only change though. The success of Amnesia has led to us getting a lot more known among players and the press. Reactions to the game are still pouring in, and it feels extremely good and humbling to be able to have that kind of impact on people. With that little summary, now let's get down and dirty with some more detailed information. (And oh, see end of post for a wee surprise.) Sales Let's start with what most people probably are the most interested in: how many units have we actually sold? During the GDC EU lecture I noted that we were now above 400k units total, but as we scrutinized all o...

The lecture I gave at GDC EU 2011 is now up here: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014889/Evoking-Emotions-and-Achieving-Success It is one of three lectures that were put up (so far) and it is 100% free for you to watch :)

Just wanted to inform everybody that I will be holding a lecture and be part of a panel at GDC Europe next week. The lecture is called "Evoking Emotions and Achieving Success by Breaking All the Rules" and will be about some of the design in Amnesia and also touch upon a lot of subjects discussed in this blog. The panel has the name "Beyond Fun: Perspectives on Video Games as Expressive Experiences" , which will include 4 other swell guys and gals. In it I will have a lil rant called "Games or Toys". Both of these will take place on Monday and be one after another. Hopefully I can put something or link to video after the convention is over. Will anybody here be attending?

Amnesia on Steam now comes with with 20% more horror and 10% less cake. Enjoy this brand new flavor of canned horror - manufactured with license by Aperture Science. (Might contain traces of potatoes) UPDATE : Now with the Portal 2 ARG over, we will release the new content, an add-on story called "Justine", for all non-steam versions of the game aswell. And there might be other surprises too ;)

(Not read part 1? Do so here .) Molding the Abomination by Olof Strand ( www.OlofStrand.com ) As a modeler the first thing I noted about this character was that the concept design demanded it to be completely unique in all of its parts. Usually it is possible to mirror some parts (e.g. an arm, a leg or some cloth piece) to save texture space and maybe some production time when modeling game characters. Not so this time. The character was based on a human body type with various deformities and modifications done to it. This meant that I could easily use a regular human base mesh as a starting point. Using already existing meshes as a starting point is, when possible, very important for production efficiency. Another thing that needed to be taken into consideration was how the character would be rigged for animation later on. In this case the rig would be shared with another character from the game and therefore needed to be built under certain specifications (joints in specific places,...

(The following was supposed to be an article in a Russian magazine, but was never published. So because of that, I decided to post it on the blog instead. It was written in June 2010 by myself, Jonas Steinick Berlin and Olof Strand. Jonas and Olof were working as contractors for Frictional Games at the time. ) Creating Unspeakable Guidelines by Thomas Grip ( Frictional Games ) The following article outlines the process of creating a creature model from scratch for our first person horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent . It will go through the basic thinking that went into the design of the enemy, how the concept images where made, how the mesh was built and finally how it was put into the game. For this work we used two extremely talented external artists and they have themselves outlined how their horrific creations came about below and it a future part. Before moving on to their work though, I will detail the thinking that went into the basic design of the creature. When creating a...

As we have released all of our games for Windows, Mac and Linux and because we also release our games on Steam , this will be a quick reflection over the lack of games available for Mac that are not on Steam. Looking at the Steam forums you can find a thread or two every now and then that brings up the topic "why are there many well known games, that are ported to Mac, but are not on Steam??". The reason for this can be many: Perhaps there is a contractual limit or perhaps the company that did the Mac port have their own online store and only wants to sell the game in that store. There has also been a mention here and there about SteamPlay, the feature on Steam that gives you a game for all platforms, even if you only bought it for Windows to begin with. This means that if you have a Mac as well, you get the game for Mac for free on Steam. Or the other way around of course. This might be viewed as a negative thing , because as the company porting the game, you have a lot of...

Introduction Frictional Games have now officially existed for almost exactly four years (4 years and 7 days to be exact), Amnesia: The Dark Descent is our fourth game and it is now four month since we released it. Because of this we thought it was time for another round-up of sales and other stuff that has happened. Those who have read our two previous reports might have noticed a small trend of the later being a little bit more positive than the earlier. This post will not be an exception and we can happily announce that things are looking better than ever for us. Summarizing all sales since release actually puts us in a state that we never imagined being in. Sales Let's start with what I guess people are most interested in - sales. When counting all online sales as well a the Russian retail copies, we have now sold almost 200, 000 units ! This is a tremendous amount and more than we ever thought we would. Our "dream estimates" before release was something around 100k,...

Now that northern hemisphere people move into darker times what can be better than to indulge in some horror! Read along to get some tips on games, books and movies to check out this Halloween! What to Play? First of all we have to recommend our own creations that are now available at a very low rate! Amnesia and Penumbra can both be gotten for as low as 50% the price on several online stores. Right now discounts are available at Our Own Store , Steam , GamersGate , ImpulseDriven and the voices tell me Direct2Drive will have discount very soon too. I would also like to put special attention on our newly launched Mobile Store . It is an ordinary internet store where you can buy the game by simply sending an SMS. It does not get much easier than that and is especially nice for anyone missing a credit card! All our games are on sale there too and if you are lucky they might cost you less than half the normal price! So do not hesitate and check it out now: http://mobile.frictionalgames.co...

Introduction It has now been pretty much exactly a month since we launched Amnesia: The Dark Descent . And since the post on a week after release was quite popular, we have decided to do a new overview on where we stand now. This time we will mainly focus on the sales and give some more accurate figures on how things have turned out for us. The big picture So, with one month of data to analyze, how did things go? I think it can be summed up with: Better than expected on all accounts ! As of today we have sold a total of 36, 000 units (including pre-orders, but excluding boxed sales in Russia), and our goal, which would determine if we would continue or not, were 24,000. Having met and exceeded that goal already feels quite nice. Frictional Games will live to create another game! 15,000 (41.7%) of all sales were in the form of pre-orders, which is quite significant. Part of the explanation for this is that there was a 20% discount during pre-orders and we also believe that people are ...

Not too long ago, there was a coordinated blog effort with developers like Jonathan Blow , 2D Boy and more commenting on the length of games. The general consensus of these posts was that games should not be judged by their length, but if the experience feels complete or not. Something that we here at Frictional Games agree on. Now that we have released Amnesia: The Dark Descent , game length has once again come into our lives. There have been several reviews of the game that have stated that the game's length, 6 - 10 hours, was a major negative. Especially considering that the game does not have any replayability (although that is up for discussion). This has made us a bit concerned. A major goal with our games is to have no fillers, to have a game where everything is focused on creating a certain experience. Since we do not have combat in our games, there is no way to extend length in a simple way (like filling a room with enemies). Just about every minute in our games requires...

Just wanted to notify all that the editor tools for Amnesia: The Dark Descent are out. These are the same tools that we used the create the game, so at a minimum you will able to do all that is done in the game. All info is being collected here: http://hpl2.frictionalgames.com/ I suggest you start by first downloading the tools here, then follow the guide here and finally start checking some tutorials . If you have any questions about the editors, please use our modding forum found here: http://frictionalgames.com/forum/forum-35.html Happy editing! :) NOTE: Only windows version released so far. Other platforms coming shortly!