Sunlight

Designing a free to play game with microtransactions is a huge challenge. It is incredibly difficult to find the perfect balance between giving players a strong incentive to pay something while still making the free experience good enough that they keep playing. This challenge is crippling to the game itself. It is impossible to make a game as fun as it could be for both paying and non-paying players. At least one of those groups gets a game that is less fun. Game design is all about making a certain concept as much fun as possible. By tweaking things like difficulty, flow, reward systems, variation and complexity the game designer tries to create the best experience possible. This "best experience" is an invisible target: you can never know whether you have reached it, or whether tweaking some things would make the game slightly better. It is also something that differs depending on the target audience. Some players like a challenge, others like a more relaxed experience. So...

Last month we fixed one of the most notorious bugs in Awesomenauts , one that had been in the game for very long: the infamous "sliding bug". This bug is a great example of the complexities of spreading game simulation over several computers in a peer-to-peer multiplayer game like Awesomenauts. The solution we finally managed to come up with is also a good example of how very incorrect workarounds can actually be a really good solution to a complex problem. This is often the case in game development: it hardly ever matters whether something is actually correct. What matters is that the gameplay feels good and that the result is convincing to the player. Smoke and mirrors often work much better in games than 'realism' and 'correctness'. Whenever the sliding bug happened, two characters became locked to each other and started sliding through the level really quickly. With higher lag, they usually kept sliding until they hit a wall. I have recorded a couple of mi...