Sunlight

Game balance is often approached from the angle of the pro-gamer: how strong are things when used by a skilled player? However, the balance as it's experienced by beginners is equally important, since a large portion of the playerbase will never reach pro skill levels but will still want to have a fun experience. Today I'd like to discuss three different approaches we've used in our games Awesomenauts and Swords & Soldiers II to make the gameplay fun for beginners but also balanced for experienced players. The big challenge here is that in a complex game with varied characters/weapons/factions/etc. it's nearly impossible to achieve perfect balance under all circumstances. Balance is influenced by almost everything and if you want variation, then that variation is undoubtedly going to upset the balance. For example, if some characters are faster than others, then having maps of different sizes can greatly change the balance on one map compared to another. The alter...

I've finished a new cello song! :D This one started out as a travelling theme for a game concept with a little boat, but will end up on my album as the intermezzo where the story jumps from the 1850s to the 1950s. The title reminds of both uses. I hope you like it! Musically the idea behind this song was to play with delay/echo: two of the instruments get a rhythmic echo. This is a fun little musical effect with a big impact, as it results in these instruments constantly playing chords with their own previous notes. It's easy to mess this up by choosing the wrong progression of chords and making it sound dissonant and ugly (or to do this on purpose, if dissonance is the goal). During most of the song I steer away from this and choose notes that sound nice with the notes that came before. However, at the end of the cello melody (at 1:10 in the video) I go from C# to C. This is very dissonant but at the same time brings us back to the chords at the start of the song. I really lik...