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...

Matchmaking is a touchy subject and this has previously made me somewhat hesitant to write about it in an open and frank manner. Today's topic especially so, since some players might interpret this post as one big excuse for any faults in the Awesomenauts matchmaking. However, the psychology of matchmaking is a very important topic when designing a matchmaking system, so today I'm going to discuss it anyway. For science! :) While we were designing the Galactron matchmaking systems I did quite a lot of research into how the biggest multiplayer games approach their matchmaking. The devs themselves often don't say all that much about it, but there's plenty of comments and analysis by the players of those games. The one thing they all have in common, is that whatever game you look for, you'll always find tons of complaints from users claiming the matchmaking for that particular game sucks. My impression is that no matter how big the budget and how clever the programmer...

I've finished a new song for my cello album! This one revolves around a gently bobbing... typewriter! Most of the song has my cello as the main melodic instrument, plus some humming vocals here and there. My goal with this composition was to give it a really relaxed feel, which I think worked out quite well. :) As with all my songs, sheet music for cello can be found at music.joostvandongen.com . I've also included a recording of the song without the cello, to play along to. Vocals and artwork were done by Marissa Delbressine. Guitar was played by Thomas van Dijk. One thing I had a lot of fun with for this composition, was cutting up a sample of a typewriter into separate keystrokes, so that I could then play typewriter on my keyboard. This allowed me to create a typewriter that's typing freeform, but at the same time does keep to the rhythm a little bit.

Giving players access to the beta of a new game or new content before it's released is a great way to get feedback and find bugs, allowing you to add that extra bit of polish, balance and quality before the official full release. There are many different ways to give players access to a beta. Which to choose? In this article I'd like to give a comprehensive list of options in today's market and discuss the differences. Traditionally bugs in games are found by QA testing companies. However, hiring a QA company to exhaustively test a complex game is very expensive. Many smaller companies don't have the budget to hire QA at all, or can only get a limited amount of QA and can't let QA cover every aspect of the game, let alone doing so repeatedly for every update. However, even if you do have the budget for large amounts of QA testing, that won't give good feedback on whether a new feature is actually fun or balanced. That requires real players, experiencing the cont...

The recently released game Marvel's Spider-Man has interiors behind windows in many buildings. This looks great and it seems to be done using a rendering trick: the geometry for the interiors isn't actually there and is generated using a shader. I haven't seen any official statement by Insomniac regarding how they made this, but based on how it looks it seems very likely that they implemented interior mapping : a technique I came up with in 2007 as part of my thesis research. I've never written about this on my blog before so I figure this a good moment to explain the fun little shader trick I came up with. Let's start by having a look at some footage from Marvel's Spider-Man. The game looks absolutely amazing and Kotaku has captured some footage of the windows in particular: As you can see around 0:40 in this video the rooms aren't actually there in the geometry: there's a door where there should clearly be a window. You also see a different interior wh...

Matchmaking is a big topic with lots of challenges, but at its core is a very simple question: who should play with whom? A couple of years after releasing Awesomenauts we rebuilt our entire matchmaking systems, releasing the new systems in the Galactron update. Today I'd like to discuss how Galactron chooses who you get to play with. While the question is simple enough, the answer turns out to be pretty complex. Many different factors influence what's a good match. Should players of similar skill play together? Should players from the same region or language player together? Should we take premades into account? Ping? Should we avoid matching players who just played together already? Should we use matchmaking to let griefers play against each other and keep them away from normal folks? If the answer to all of these questions is 'Yes, let's take that into account!', then you'd better have a lot of players! I've previously written about how many players yo...

I've finished recording a new composition! It's a cello trio inspired by minimal music (Philip Glass and such). Sheet music can be found at music.joostvandongen.com . This contains the version for cello trio and also an arrangement for violin, viola and cello. This composition started out as something I was improvising while warming up for a Cello Fortress performance in Dublin last year. I had a lot of fun playing repetitive parts with varying rhythms and afterwards I heard from some people who were sitting nearby that it sounded really tense. Good music provokes some kind of emotion so I figured I should turn that little improvisation into a real song. Recording this one was a challenge since it needs to be so rhythmic and precise to work. It took me a lot of practice and editing but in the end I'm happy with the result. :) I also had fun making an image for this one: I combined a photo of my own cello with a photo of machinery I found online. Unfortunately I couldn'...

I recently watched Jan Willem Nijman's great talk on The Art of Screenshake and noticed an interesting YouTube comment to that video by someone named SquidCaps. SquidCaps mentions that for an unknown developer, it's really hard to find playtesters who actually test regularly. I agree that this gets a lot easier the more well-known you are, but I think it might also help to try a different approach to playtesting. So I figured it would be interesting to discuss how we approach playtesting at Ronimo and how to find playtesters. Let's start by having a look at SquidCaps' comment. It's quite long so I've selected only the parts that I'm going to reply to: Heh, "let people play your game and iterate".. quite a bit easier to say when you have plenty of gametesters already in the office.. For solo, unknown developer, having just ONE game tester that suffers 10 minutes per week is too much.. What you need is full game, with menus, high scores save games ...

One of my current hobby projects is creating a procedural music system: a computer program that composes and performs music all by itself. It's still a work-in-progress in its early stages, but some recent improvements have gotten it to produce quite interesting music already, so I figured it's about time I share some of my thoughts around how it works. Let's start with a little video that lets you hear the amount of variation it can currently do: Note that this video contains a selection of the nicer pieces, so it isn't all this good. Most of the other music it currently produces is a bit more boring, or too similar to these fragments. The program is a work-in-progress and it should improve a lot as I spend more time on it. I started programming this for a rather odd reason: I wanted to practice improvising on my cello over complex chord schemes and figured a program that automatically produces those would do the trick. As usual with this kind of thing, it got out of h...

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...