Ahoy ye freelancers! Almost Human is looking for talented freelance artist to create new awesome character portraits for the upcoming Legend of Grimrock 2. If you think you got what it takes, send us a link to your portfolio or webpage to:
juho
Mar 062013
New game needs new monsters. We already have a bunch of new deadly monsters roaming in the dungeons, but in this post we’re going to take a quick look to our old friend: The Ogre! Ogre went through a radical makeover and it was modeled and textured almost from scratch. To reflect the new tricks ogre has learned, he was given a bit more clever look than the familiar cave ogre that only had a loin cloth and some random armor parts slapped on him. But hey, let’s look at some pictures instead of me typing nonsense.
First I did a quick concept sketch of the new look and then it was off to Zbrush to sculpt the high resolution version. At the bottom is the textured game model and a “clay render” with wireframes. The Ogre is built from 9058 polygons and is using three 1024×1024 maps (diffuse, specular and normal).
Jan 172013
Ok, we know we’ve been awfully quiet with our blog lately, but that’s only because we’ve been working very hard. Working hard on what, you say? More about that a bit later. Let’s first look back all the way to year 2012.
Last year was an incredible success for Almost Human. We released our first game, Legend of Grimrock, which was the best seller for two weeks in Steam and has continued to surpass our expectations. LoG reached 82 points in Metascore declaring it officially to be a great game (but we already knew that, right). We also released the Dungeon Editor that has spawned lots of brilliant mods and Steam’s Legend of Grimrock Workshop has over 450 entries already! Our great community is always surprising us with their skills, creativity and activity in the forums with 50.000 posts and counting. And those post are really high quality stuff too, unlike most forums dedicated to games 
. That means you don’t run out of dungeons to explore in the future. Towards the end of the year we also released the highly anticipated Mac and Linux versions of LoG with great new features and optimizations. And to sum up the year, we’re now proud to announce that Legend of Grimrock has sold over 600.000 copies! We would’ve been happy with just one tenth of the sales numbers, so needless to say we’re very happy and the future of our company is secured for a long time.
But great success doesn’t mean we haven’t lost our passion for making great games. So, what’s next, you might ask. We thought we could share with you a glimpse of some new exiting things we’ve been working on. But beware, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Enjoy!
Dec 212012
Folks here at Almost Human are going to take a small well deserved break and hibernate through the holiday season under the vast snow drifts that cover Finland. But don’t worry, we’ll be back (in Arnold’s voice) next year with new adventures! Big up’s to all our fans and awesome community. Thank you for all your support, we hope you stick with us also the next year! Have merry Holidays and happy New Year. Cheers!!!
Monsters are an essential part of Grimrock’s dungeons and I thought I’d share some in-depth look at some of them. Legend of Grimrock features twenty unique monsters whose shape and size range from green jelly to… well, all you who have finished the game know to what. Here I have picked three of my favorite monsters that I enjoyed making the most and still feel happy about.
Editor’s Note: For the next couple of weeks we are going to feature a set of articles that should shed some light on how Legend of Grimrock was made. The articles range from graphics and animation to sound design and programming. For gamers or hobbyists we hope to give you some idea what game development is about. If you’re a fellow game developer hopefully these articles will give you some ideas for your projects. Without further due, let’s give the floor to Juho! -Petri
Legend of Grimrock has a storyline running under its hood and to help it get it moving we needed an intro sequence in the beginning of the game. Naturally some fancy big money cinematic was out of the question, so we had to come up with some more down to earth type of solution. Pretty quickly we narrowed our options to still images with overlaid text. That was relatively easy and fast to do, but allowed more freedom for the player to watch the images and read the texts in his/her own pace. Intro sequences’ main purpose was to set the mood and setting for the game with the help of iconic tune by Stakula (which we talked earlier in here).
Feb 172012
It’s been another busy week at the AH office. Last week’s compatibility test kept us occupied couple of days, but we managed to squash some nice juicy bugs. The game now works better with older graphics cards like NVIDIA 6000 and 7000 series. Overall the test went really fine and we’re happy with the results. Thanks again to everybody who participated.
As the post’s title says, this week has mostly been about tweaking stuff. As we’re getting every day closer to finishing the game, major feature implementations get scarcer. We are focusing on testing, tweaking and fine tuning things here and there. Creatures have learned some nasty new moves to make the escape from the dungeons yet a bit harder. We also now have a big TO DO list on our whiteboard that we need to clear before the launch. Luckily the list gets shorter as the days pass. GUI got some tender loving as we merged the attack buttons and character portraits to the bottom right side of the screen. Now the marching order is much clearer and it is also easier to change the order by dragging the panels and everything looks a lot better and cleaner this way. The tutorial has been cleaned up and it is now easier to digest. On the business side, things nudged a bit forward, which is nice, but we can’t say anything more about that in here this time. Sorry
And hey, remember to subscribe to the newsletter. Do it. Do it now. 
If you haven’t checked out what our dear friends at Theory Interactive, who have their office in the neighborhood, have been doing check this out.
Jan 132012
We’ve been iterating the GUI graphics and functionality quite bit lately and as promised in the last weeks post, let’s talk more about the changes.
The Almost Human team wishes you a very Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and an Awesome New Year! It’s been a hectic autumn and we’re taking a small well deserved holiday break. We’ll be back at the start of the year, hopefully well rested and well fed to be able to finish the game and get it out. We’d like to thank all the fans for the overwhelming support for the past months. Your support has been giving us the strength to push ourselves to the limit and to do the best possible game for you. So better start gathering your rations, because next year you’ll be trapped in the dungeons!
Dec 142011
Yes, we know our regular updates have been a bit irregular lately. Fear not, we’re not dead, but these guys have been decaying for a while now. As you saw in the beta video, the undead haunt the dungeons in numbers. As you make your way deeper into Mount Grimrock, you’ll encounter rotting warriors still patrolling their ancient guard posts.
sending...
