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...

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...

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...

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 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 ...

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...

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 ...

When creating matchmaking for a game you can either build it all yourself, or use a generic system provided by the platform you're releasing on. Steam, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo all offer similar room-based systems. The basic idea is that clients can create, search for and join game rooms, and the actual decision which room to join is entirely made by the client. There's very little actual logic happening in those matchmaking servers. Today I would like to discuss how they work and what benefits and limitations they come with. As far as I know most smallish games build their matchmaking using these generic room-based systems. The big triple-A developers seem to usually build everything themselves from scratch, but that's too much work and too much server maintenance to be feasible for most smaller developers. Our own game Awesomenauts initially launched using these basic room-based systems. We didn't develop our own matchmaking system Galactron until years later wh...