Sunlight

The most complex graphics effect in Snowball Earth is without a doubt the snow. As the player walks around and heats up the area around him, the snow melts, forms puddles and finally becomes grass. This is completely dynamic: the player can turn his heating on and off at any point, and the snow reacts correctly to that. The snow even has little piles around trees and rock walls, and these piles lower and disappear when the snow melts. So how did we make this? A slow motion video of how the snow melts around the player. Before I continue, I would like to mention once more that Snowball Earth is Ronimo 's cancelled game from 2008, and that the complete prototype can be downloaded here: Download Snowball Earth prototype (Torrent) So how did I implement this melting effect? The basic trick is that for every vertex, I store the 'meltness': to what extend the ground at that vertex has already been melted. A value of 0 means snow, 0.5 means water and 1 means grass. The pixel shad...

The part that I find most interesting and am most proud of in Snowball Earth (our cancelled game from 2008), is the melting effects. Every piece of the world is frozen and covered in snow, and by walking around with the heating turned on, the player can melt it all. In the prototype this had very few gameplay mechanics attached to it, but just seeing and hearing everything come to life is already so much fun that it could carry half the game on its own. Today, I would like to dissect this effect and give an overview of what went into it. (Spoiler: a lot of custom art by our artists Gijs, Ralph, Olivier and Martijn, and a lot of coding by me). The melting effects in Snowball Earth For those who haven't tried it yet: a couple of months ago (in this blogpost ) we released the entire prototype we made at the time, so you can download and play it yourself. Note that this is a Torrent file, so you will need something like BitTorrent to download the game. Here is the download link: Down...

In last week's blog post , I mentioned several times that doing marketing as an indie requires creativity. It is easy to buy advertisement space, but it is a lot more challenging to come up with things that are so interesting that press will write about them for free. At Ronimo we greatly enjoy coming up with such weird marketing stuff, so here are some of the most fun/creative/weird things we have done so far, and also some that I did myself for Proun . Some only cost us time to do them, while others did require small amounts of money to produce. Note that not all of these actually worked as well as we hoped, but they are hopefully still fun to see! ^_^ Swords & Soldiers hot sauce! The game's story is all about barbeque sauce, so giving press special branded hot sauce seemed fitting. Of course having these made would be very expensive, so we simply bought standard hot sauce, removed the labels, and put our own stickers on them. All of this was done in a hotel in San Fran...