Sunlight

A short blogpost this time, with a small but valuable lesson that we learned at Ronimo a couple of years ago. At some point we figured it would be wise to make two artists make designs for an important character, and then from all the designs they make choose the best. At first glance this looks like a really good idea: two people will come up with a much wider range of designs and the chances of reaching something really good are a lot higher than with one artist. However, there is a gigantic downside as well: in a sense making this design becomes a competition, and one of the two artists will lose. This can be incredibly demotivating, especially if an artists 'loses' a couple of times in a row. So we decided to not do this again, and just give a single character to a single artist to design. That artist makes a lot of different designs, everyone can give feedback and in the end we choose from his concepts. We can still have variation and something to choose, but whatever is ...

At Ronimo we strongly believe in involving the entire team as much as possible in the creative process of game development. No matter whether someone is a lead, a developer or an intern, everyone's opinion is valuable. This is, however, an incredibly difficult thing to do. In the past months we had 16 people working in our office. That means sixteen different opinions, and even just understanding each of them is already incredibly difficult, especially when it comes to difficult-to-explain graphical concepts. Let alone if you want those 16 people to agree, or to least all feel like their voice has been heard and seriously weighed in. There are two big problems involved in this, and this blogpost outlines a method that tries to work around both: -A decision might be made without really taking everyone's opinion into account. -The process might take endlessly, as everyone has a different opinion and we keep trying to find a middle ground. So today I would like to talk about the ...

I often talk to people about that good indie marketing requires doing all kinds of crazy stuff to get press to talk about your games. The good thing is that such "crazy stuff" usually is the same as just "awesome stuff". So even if a 'stunt' would fail and isn't written about that much, we still end up with awesome swag. I intend to some day write a couple of blogposts about marketing, but in the meanwhile I just can't wait to show the awesomeness I have for you today. I would like to present: The Shoes . Yes, we have Awesomenauts shoes. Only one pair, but they are just insanely awesome, and custom-made by Kyozokicks. And here's the best part: we are giving them away to someone who likes Awesomenauts on Facebook or who follows RonimoGames on Twitter . So if you are not doing one of these things yet, then please do so now and get a chance at winning The Shoes Of Cool! These shoes are even cooler than the custom Swords & Soldiers Move controll...

Last week I showed the various styles that our art team concepted for Awesomenauts . But I kept the most important one for this week: the one we actually chose to make! The Purple Style . We chose this one and worked on it for several months! This is what it looked like: click for high resolution I still consider this image to be one of the pretties things to come out of Ronimo so far. So just imagine how bad I felt about letting this one go. It was the right choice, though: this purple style is extremely difficult to read. It looks great, but in which teams are those characters? How could we visualise what skills a characters is using, when the colour palette is so limited and the backgrounds so dense? This style finally got cancelled when, while playing around with the gameplay, it turned out that Awesomenauts was going to be very chaotic. This chaos was part of the fun, but a chaotic game requires a lot of clarity in the art, which is just not possible in the Purple Style. So we s...