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An overview of many ways of doing a beta

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Giving players access to the beta of a new game or new content before it's released is a great way to get feedback and find bugs, allowing you to add that extra bit of polish, balance and quality before the official full release. There are many different ways to give players access to a beta. Which to choose? In this article I'd like to give a comprehensive list of options in today's market and discuss the differences. Traditionally bugs in games are found by QA testing companies. However, hiring a QA company to exhaustively test a complex game is very expensive. Many smaller companies don't have the budget to hire QA at all, or can only get a limited amount of QA and can't let QA cover every aspect of the game, let alone doing so repeatedly for every update. However, even if you do have the budget for large amounts of QA testing, that won't give good feedback on whether a new feature is actually fun or balanced. That requires real players, experiencing the cont...
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The Ronimo coding methodology

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I'm a strong believer in working in a structured way. As a game programmer you need to build complex systems and just going with the flow isn't good enough. That's why I've written two documents to describe how we code at Ronimo , which every programmer and intern gets to read on their first day. Our Methodology document explains the workflow while the Style Guide explains the layout of our code. Today I'd like to show our Methodology and describe the reasoning behind the rules in this document. Note that the contents of this document aren't very original: most if it is a combination of common agile practices that I like. Let's start by having a look at the actual methodology document: The Ronimo coding methodology General method of implementing a new feature: Analyse what should be made. Discuss approach with end users (usually artists and/or designers) and lead programmer. Split into small tasks of a day at most. Make a basic planning for the small task...
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Why good matchmaking requires enormous player counts

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Good matchmaking is an important part of creating an online multiplayer game. One thing you may not realise is that no matter how you build it, truly good matchmaking requires enormous numbers of players. Awesomenauts often has well over 1,000 people playing the game at the same time, which is very high and successful for an indie game. It certainly sounds like a lot to me, but this is only a fraction of what would be needed to do everything with matchmaking that we would want to do. Today I am going to explain why tens of thousands of concurrent players are needed for truly awesome matchmaking. Matchmaking has two main goals. The first is to let people play together who will have a good internet connection to each other. We would like to avoid Australians playing together with Europeans because their ping will be very high. High ping decreases the quality of the game experience, especially in a fast and highly competitive game like Awesomenauts. Finding good connections is more compl...
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