Sunlight

I had a lot of fun writing the water shader for Awesomenauts , especially since it allowed me to use all kinds of small and subtle tricks to get exactly the right effect. Using shaders creatively to get precisely the right look is one of the things I enjoy most, but it is not a very common pleasure when developing 2D games. So I sneaked in this water effect during a weekend just because I really wanted to make it. Before I implemented this water, our artists weren't really convinced by the necessity of creating it at that point, but once they saw it, they were really happy with the look. :) There is nothing ground-breaking here, but I am quite happy with the specific combination of little tricks I used to get the best water effect for Awesomenauts, so here is a little graphical overview of how I made it! (Raytracing like this in a shader is actually very similar to what I did during the research for my Master's thesis at Utrecht University. My Interior Mapping and volume rende...

I posted about depth of field blur last week and discussing it in the comments got my mind back on the "Bokeh" effect. Bokeh is an advanced form of depth of field blur that is currently used in lots of tech demos to show what the next console generation will be capable of. So that got me curious again as to how Bokeh is made. I have been experimenting with it in Proun and have some nice images to share! Bokeh is the effect that when there is strong depth of field blur, bright lights in the background become bright spots, often visible as circles or hexagons. This is a real lens effect that can also be seen in photographs, and it looks pretty cool, since it adds some definition to an otherwise completely blurry depth of field blur effect. A nice example of rendering Bokeh on the videocard can be found in Epic's Samaritan demo. Although the style and look of this demo don't really appeal to me, Epic shows lots of really cool effects here that they think will be possi...

Depth of field blur is an effect that is used in many modern games as a cool graphics effect. A nice example of this is of course my own game Proun (for which I discussed the depth of field blur in one of my very first blog posts ). However, while making Awesomenauts , I learned that it is much more than just a graphics effect. In fact, it even improved the framerate a lot ! Initially we didn't have depth of field blur in Awesomenauts, but then the first trailers of the beautiful Rayman Origins were released, and they have some levels where they add a ton of depth of field blur to the backgrounds, which looks great. So we wanted something similar, especially as these kinds of effects help make a 2D game look more like "triple A 2D" (for as much as that is an existing term). Unlike in 3D, doing depth of field blur in 2D is actually incredibly simple. You can just render the furthest objects to a separate texture, blur that, and then render the closer objects on top of th...

The Awesomenauts are nearly ready to blast away onto the screens of XBLA and PSN gamers! But we are already looking forward towards the long term for the Awesomenauts franchise. Soon we will have announcements regarding the oft-requested Awesomenauts themepark, Awesomenauts bikiniliners and Awesomenauts catfood. But some recent market research (on Kickstarter) has also shown a spike in interest for point and click adventures. That's why we're very pleased to announce Day of the Awesomenauts: Monkey Throttle! Pushing gameplay innovation to previously imaginable levels, Day of the Awesomenauts: Monkey Throttle is a Storydriven Sidescrolling Point And Click Online Multiplayer Adventure Brawler Arena Role Playing Shooter game. Sweet pixel art! Click for a larger view Soon you can also click your Awesomenaut to victory through sweet pixel art, hilarious dialog trees and clever item puzzles. But watch out! Enemy players will stand in your way, attempting to talk you out of your offe...