Sunlight

In a game where high quality matchmaking is important (like competitive team-based games), waiting times to find suitable opponents are often unavoidable. Today I'd like to discuss the problems we had in Awesomenauts with our initial approach to this and how we made waiting a bit less boring later on. Until the launch of the Galactron update in 2016, this is how it worked in Awesomenauts: when you started searching you got into a matchroom right away. You selected your character, and then you had to wait in the loading screen until the match was full with 6 players. This could take several minutes and there was no interaction possible whatsoever: just a loading screen that says the match isn't full yet. To show progress we did have six tickboxes that showed how many players had joined and whether they had already selected their characters, but that was it. A static screen with no interaction possible is probably the most boring type of waiting imaginable. Compare this to curre...

Here's my newest composition: Sandrider! It's a cello trio that revolves around fast arpeggios. At a whopping 5 minutes this one was a LOT of work to record and edit to get it to sound just right. But it was worth it: I'm really happy with the result. :) Sheet music can be found at music.joostvandongen.com , including arrangements for violin, viola and cello, plus solo versions for if you don't happen to have a cello trio around. This track was inspired by the way Ernst Reijseger plays in his beautiful song Strabismo Di Venere (from the album Colla Voche). He plays really fast arpeggios there by sweeping over the four strings. I experimented with this way of playing quite a bit and discovered that it also works really well when you play a bit louder than what Reijseger does in Strabismo Di Venere. I played around with this technique in the live improvisations that djembe player Rene Derks and I did to the game Journey. I liked the sound of that so much that I decided t...

I've previously explained how Steam, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo all offer similar generic matchmaking systems based on rooms . These systems are great for quickly getting things going and are fine for most smallish games. However, if matchmaking is very important for your game and the requirements for matchmaking become more complex, these generic systems turn out to be pretty limiting. Today I'd like to discuss how we tried several approaches to get the best out of such generic systems in our game Awesomenauts and how the problems we encountered ultimately led us to develop our own matchmaking servers altogether. Keep in mind that whether these problems are truly important depends on the game. If your game is a bit more casual, or has fewer players per match, or less focus on online multiplayer, or allows late-join, then the requirements for matchmaking become a lot less stringent. Depending on how demanding the matchmaking for your game is, none of these problems might be ...