Sunlight

We have a release data for Awesomenauts : coming May 2nd to XBLA and PSN! Woohoo! We are getting some really nice press for the game right now, so I hope it will do as well as that when it launches! Joystiq , for example, can't seem to get enough of Awesomenauts: " The game will be playable at PAX East next week at booth 754. Be aware that you might have to knock a few Joystiq staffers out of the way if you want to play. "

In today's blogpost, I'd like to do something radically different: I'm going to ask you a question . I know that quite a few of the visitors of my blog are hardcore programmers, and since I have a complex situation for which I would like to improve the performance, I figured I could ask for advice here! :) The problem is pretty complex, though, so I figured a short blogpost would be needed to really explain it. In short, this is the question: What is the most efficient way to synchronise renderable objects between the game thread and the render thread? There are a couple of subtleties you need to know to answer this for our situation, though. Let me start with a scheme that shows the approach to threading in the Ronitech (our in-house multiplatform 2D engine), as we use it in Awesomenauts on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3: This works fine and we managed to get 60fps on console this way. However, the copying phase takes relatively long, so I am still wasting a lot of perfor...

When we started development of Awesomenauts , one of the first issues we had a good look at was how to create the graphics for our world. In Swords & Soldiers all the levels were mainly randomly generated from a construction set. This looks good, but the result is rather repetitive and it is difficult to really make unique places. Also, we had quite a few people who saw screenshots of Swords & Soldiers and concluded it should be a free Flash game. Some gamers totally ignored the size and quality of the game, just because the graphical style could also be achieved in Flash. So for Awesomenauts, we wanted to step up our game and create something more painterly. But how to go about that? Most 2D games build their levels out of square construction elements. This is very fast, but it results in rather blocky graphics, no matter how good the construction set. The ultimate example of this is of course the classic Mario games. Square construction sets can of course be a lot more free-...

Last week we released a patch on Steam that finally fixed the networking issues some people were having with the PC version of Swords & Soldiers . I'm afraid that because of the work on Awesomenauts , we didn't come to it any earlier. But we finally fixed it now! :) Now this bug we fixed was a pretty interesting one. Not as interesting as the bug I posted about last December that got my blog a whopping 40,000 viewers in a couple of days, but still interesting enough to share it with you. This one is another nice example of how bug fixing sometimes requires thinking far outside the box. We were getting two bug reports from users: Some users always got a Network Error at the start of a match. Some users encountered cheaters who introduced so much lag, that the game became unplayable for the player on the right side of the map. We initially just assumed the Network Errors were being caused by firewalls or bad router settings. But these users were not having trouble in other ...

Today's post is a guest post by Sonic Picnic , the team that did the incredibly awesome music and sound design for both Awesomenauts and Swords & Soldiers . Especially the Awesomenauts theme song is mindblowingly awesome and got our game a lot of love from gamers and the press. Sonic Picnic is a small team of audio designers who create audio for all kinds of media, not just games. For example, they also worked for television shows, documentaries, and the games Rocket Riot and Toki Tori . So, here is their Dev Diary for Awesomenauts. Enjoy! The intro sequence to Awesomenauts Music The development of the music for Awesomenauts started halfway through 2009, at a listening session with the whole Ronimo team, the four members of SonicPicnic, and a few beers. Based on the first sketches and early prototypes of the game, everyone brought along a couple of existing music tracks which they found particularly fitting to the theme and style of the game. Everyone at the table had a diffe...