Sunlight

Many people in the games industry think the word "indie" stands for "financially independent", and indeed this is something that a lot of indie game developers care about a lot. Although it is an important topic, I think we should care about it less: being indie should be about creative independence, not about financial independence. You might argue that one is impossible without the other: if someone is funding your game then of course that someone is also influencing your creative decisions. However, what a lot of people don't seem to realize is that no one funding your game is also a big influence on your creative freedom. You will need some way to get food and pay the rent if you want to spend a significant amount of time making your game the best you can. Disclaimer: this post is only targeted at those who want to make a living making games. If you are making games as a hobby in your spare time, then please ignore this post and do whatever you want! ^_^...

For our new game Swords & Soldiers II (coming to Wii U on May 21st!) we wanted to create detailed and varied levels. Because of the number of maps and their large size we needed art tools that provide a lot of automation to be able to populate them quickly. At the same time we wanted to allow customisation and control over the details to create unique, designed places. Today I would like to show the tools that Ronimo programmer Machiel van Hooren developed for our artists. Check especially the awesome demo video at the end! Our starting point was the level editing tools we made for Awesomenauts . Those are very flexible and not tied to a single game, so we could pretty much use all of them directly in Swords & Soldiers II. However, the shape of the levels in Swords & Soldiers II is very different: the Awesomenauts tools are built around rectangular boxes, not curving landscapes. Nevertheless they provided a really strong beginning. I made a short video montage about the A...