Sunlight

On 27 November Proun+ launched on iOS! The first reviews are extremely positive, both from the press and from users. We also got a big feature in the European App Store, so it seems like Apple itself also likes the game. :) Here are some quotes from the reviews and the launch trailer: " A bright, searingly good twitch racer that takes the fundaments of the genre and builds something staggeringly entertaining on top of them. " 9/10 PocketGamer.co.uk " Previously a successful indie release on the PC, it deserves your attention and patience. [...] Throw in a funky jazz based soundtrack and Proun+ has a lot going for it. " 4/5 stars 148Apps.com " this self-styled �journey through modern art� exudes an endearing weirdness that sets it apart and nestles it in your brain. Like that off-beat game you used to play, that you�re convinced only you can remember, which you can�t possibly forget. " 4.5/5 stars Gamezebo.com Proun+ is available in the App Store for iPhon...

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...

Changing the lighting in hand-drawn art is a challenge. While in 3D games you can simply modify the light, there is no such thing when using 2D assets. In our new game Swords & Soldiers II all the level assets have their lighting drawn in. Of course you can ask the artist the redraw the image with different lighting, but that costs a lot of additional time and texture memory. We managed to re-use our daylight textures to create convincing nighttime levels, so today I would like to explain the tricks used to achieve that goal. Today's post is all about the artistry of Ronimo artist Ralph Rademakers. He uses images drawn by Adam Daroszewski* and Gijs Hermans to decorate the levels in Swords & Soldiers II. Ralph keeps surprising me with the unexpected tricks he manages to pull off with our internal tools . *By the way, note that Adam works as a freelancer these days. He drew most of the level props in this post and you can see some more of his amazing work here . There is ba...