Sunlight

Bokeh is an effect that pops up in a lot of new games. It is one of those effects that makes a game instantly feel a lot more "next-gen". It is also an effect that usually eats up a lot of performance. For Cello Fortress I came up with a simplified version of bokeh that looks really high quality, is very fast to render and even very easy to implement. My implementation also has some severe limitations, but I think it can work really well for many games. Bokeh is a part of focal blur, which is also known as depth of field blur or DoF. DoF is the effect that only objects at a certain distance are sharp, while everything closer and further away is blurred. This is an effect that every lens has, and the larger the lens is, the stronger the blur is. Focal blur has been done in many games for quite a while now, but with the normal DoF rendering techniques the bokeh effect is usually lost. Bokeh means that extremely bright spots grow with the blur and appear as clearly recognisable...

Last week we were at Gamescom, showing Swords & Soldiers II and Awesomenauts to the public. Gamescom is the biggest game convention in the world, drawing in a whopping 400,000 people. We have had booths at several conventions in the past years so I figured it might be interesting to share some tips and tricks based on our experiences. Our booth at Gamescom was part of the Indie Megabooth. The Indie Megabooth is an awesome initiative where a lot of indies hire a big area together and fill it with their games. Since the Indie Megabooth has been so successful in recent years it is now a real organisation with dedicated people to manage it all. There are several advantages to being part of the Indie Megabooth. For starters it is quite affordable and they take care of a lot of the organisational complexities. More importantly it gives gamers who like indie games a clear spot to go to, hopefully making indie thrive more on a big convention where most booths are gigantonormous monsters ...

As a cellist, one of my biggest challenges has always been to play notes at the exactly correct pitch. While the keys of a piano and the frets of a guitar make sure that those instruments basically always play notes at the right pitch (as long as the instrument itself is tuned correctly, of course), instruments like a cello and a violin allow the musician to play notes at any pitch, not just at the pitches of real notes. This gives endless possibilities, but it also means that if you put your finger just one millimeter too high or low, it already sounds out of tune and horrible. Playing in tune has always been a big topic to me, always striving for that oh-so-difficult 'perfect pitch'. Not that I am horribly good at it, but that is exactly why I practice so much to get closer to it. This is why it came as such a shock to me to learn that there is no such thing as 'perfect pitch': several tuning systems exist and they all come with different opinions on what the exact f...