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Showing posts from October, 2016

Analysing the new Awesomenauts matchmaker

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We're currently rebuilding the entire matchmaking, menus and party system of Awesomenauts . This rework is called Galactron. This is a huge operation: especially the matchmaking part is highly complex. We've done a bunch of betas for it so far and last week we let it run live for everyone for 48 hours. After that we turned it off again to analyse the results, read player feedback and fix bugs. Today I'd like to discuss the most interesting results. I plan to do an overview of how Galactron works in a future blogpost, but today I'm just going to focus on what we've encountered in last week's beta. Ragequitters and the removal of latejoin This is probably the hottest topic in Galactron. Latejoin was probably the most hated feature of the old Awesomenauts so we've removed it altogether. In Galactron players are never put in a match that's already in progress. We've also added a rejoin option so if you're kicked out of a match due to a network error ...

The big list of ways to create varied weapons

When designing weapons, there are many ways of differentiating them and spicing them up. To help anyone who is working on that, I would today like to give a big list of weapon parameters that one can play with. Most can be applied to ranged, melee and special attacks, but obviously not all can be used for everything in every genre. I hope this list can be used as an aid, regardless of genre. Note that I only focus on gameplay here: graphics are also an important part of the feel of a weapon, but his post is entirely about gameplay. I made most of this list a couple of years ago when I was thinking about creating an open world game with randomly generated enemies. As a first step I made a long list of weapon properties and side effects that could be combined to create attacks for those enemies. As with many of my game ideas I doubt I'll ever get around to actually making this game, but I figured this list might also be useful to others, so I've extended it into this blogpost. Mo...