Sunlight

I've previously written about how Rene Derks and I did a live musical improvisation to someone playing Journey and Ori And The Blind Forest. This was a pretty unique experiment already, but recently we kicked it up a notch with an even bolder performance: instead of knowing what was coming, we let players choose whatever game they wanted to play and we had to improvise live music to that. Since this was an experiment not all of it worked well, but I think it was a success: a bunch of games turned out pretty awesome and we learned a lot. Today I'd like to explain how we approached each game and why some of them worked, and others turned out not to be a great fit for this format. I've included a couple of short videos from the performance, check 'm out! The basic idea for these performances is that we mix live improvisation with gameplay. Instead of playing the original game's soundtrack we come up with new music on the spot and try to respond to whatever is happenin...

Matchmaking is a highly important part of most modern multiplayer games. Build it badly and the user might be stomped by players way too good for them, get a really laggy connection or wait forever to get into a match. It's also a difficult topic to analyse and test before launch because there are so many unpredictable factors. For example, how are your players spread out over the globe? How much do match durations vary? How long are players willing to wait? How good are their internet connections? All of these and many other factors influence whether any given matchmaking implementation actually works well. Surprisingly few developers have written about the matchmaking in their games in detail, so I figured it would be useful to share our experiences. Over the years we've had several different approaches to matchmaking in Awesomenauts , and have iterated live on each of those, so let's have a look at what we've learned so far! Matchmaking is such a big and complex topi...