Sunlight

While creating levels for Awesomenauts and Swords & Soldiers 2 our artists often struggled with how to create more depth. All those background elements from one area would slide into view in other parts of the level, limiting how deep the backgrounds could be. For the Starstorm level in Awesomenauts I've added a trick to our editors that solves this problem: scissor rectangles. It's a neat little trick that not only makes Starstorm have backgrounds with much more depth, but also makes rendering them a lot more efficient. So let's have a look: what's the problem exactly, and how do scissor rectangles solve it? In a purely 2D game like Awesomenauts there's no real perspective: backgrounds are just a lot of 2D textures. As the camera moves all those layers move at different speeds to suggest depth. Traditionally in games that's called parallaxing . From a technical perspective that's basically all there is to 'perspective' and 'distance' i...

An odd effect that can be very noticeable in 2D games is the distortion that happens when deforming a texture. Especially when tapering a polygon the art can become really weird. This has been a problem in our engine for years, but since strong taper isn't used often I didn't think it needed fixing. However, when I added trails last year the distortion became much more problematic and I had to look for a solution. If you're not very familiar with how videocards work this looks really weird. To a human it is very clear how the texture should be squashed when tapering a polygon, why can't my computer figure this out? The reason is that videocards only handle triangles. They don't really know what a square is so if you want a square, you need to create two triangles that happen to form a square together. Many 3D tools hide this, but that's what happening under the hood. When applying this taper to a square that consists of two triangles we can see why the weird di...

Last week I discussed our tools for making trails . One problem I encountered with trails is that they often don't look very good when attached to a character. Player movement in a platformer like Awesomenauts is not very smooth: all of a sudden you jump, or land, or turn around, and this creates a trail with lots of angles in it. For some effects this is fine, but especially for wider trails a smoother, curvier look is much better. Today I would like to discuss the smoothing algorithm I implemented to solve this. Before I continue, here's last week's overview video of our trails again, since it also contains some footage of the smoothing: Key when smoothing a trail is that the trail should always remain attached to the emitter (in this case a character). If the smoothing makes the trail detach from the emitter just a little bit, it starts to look floaty and incorrect. An artist can work around this by fading out the trail near its start, but this is not always desired. Th...

Until recently most special effects in Awesomenauts were either animated by hand or made using particles. This seemed to give enough possibilities, until we played the gorgeous Ori and the Blind Forest , which has very crisp special effects. We analysed how they achieved this and one of the conclusions was that for many things that we would make with particles, they used trails. Trails are quite an obvious concept, but for some reason it had never seemed like a big problem that they weren't an option in our tools. So about a year ago I added trails to our engine. How to implement trails seems quite obvious: it's just a series of triangle segments, what's interesting about that? However, when I started implementing trails it turned out there are quite a lot of different approaches imaginable. I went with one that's extremely flexible, but also sometimes slightly difficult to control for certain effects. Today I'd like to share how I built our trails tool and what th...

In Swords & Soldiers 2 we are stepping up the quality of everything compared to the original. Level art is one of the areas where we are improving the game a lot. With our improved tools we can make them look a lot more detailed and varied. We also approach level art in a very different way now. Today I would like to discuss how the approaches in both games differ and why we switched to different techniques. In the original Swords & Soldiers the levels were mostly procedurally generated. The only parts that were placed by hand were the ground itself and the small props on it, like grass and flowers. The foreground and background layers were randomly filled with objects. Since this is essentially a 1D game I simply wrote an algorithm that placed mountains (or trees, or houses) at varying distances from each other. Each layer had a bunch of different textures and settings for how densely it should be filled with objects. There are many arguments in favour of procedurally placing...

When we started developent of the bots for Awesomenauts , we started with the most complex part: how to do path finding and movement? When people think of path finding, they usually think of A*. This well-known standard algorithm indeed solves the finding of the path, and in games like an RTS that is all there is to it, since the path can easily be traversed. In a platformer however the step after the finding of the path is much more complex: doing actual movement over the path. Awesomenauts features a ton of different platforming mechanics, like jumps, double jumps, flying, hovering, hopping and air control. We also have moving platforms and the player can upgrade his jump height. How should an AI know which jumps it can make, how to time the jump, how much air control is needed? This turned out to be big challenge! Since there are so many potential subtleties in platforming movement, my first thought was that handling it in our behaviour trees might not be doable at all. Behaviour tr...

With the next Awesomenauts patch (patch 2.5) we will release our AI editor and enable players to load modded AIs in Custom Games. The editor is in beta right now and a surprisingly large amount of new AIs have already popped up. Other game developers can also use our AI editor for non-commercial purposes, or contact us to discuss the possibility of using our tool in a commercial product. This all makes for a great occasion to discuss how we made the AIs and what kinds of tools we have developed for this. Anyone who wants to give making AIs for Awesomenauts a try can check this little starting guide that explains the basics. I have previously discussed in two blogposts how we made the AI for Swords & Soldiers ( part 1 and part 2 ). Since then we have changed some of the fundamentals and those blogposts are well over three years old now, so I will write this blogpost assuming you didn't read them. When people think about "AI" they usually think about advanced self-l...

Everything in our tools is animatable. Not just position, rotation and scale, but also things like colour, skew, taper, texture scroll and the number of particles emitted. This is a feature that I know from 3D Studio MAX and that I had been admiring for ages, so as a programmer I really wanted to come up with a neat system to build this. Being able to animate everything also happens to be really useful for our artists... ;) Today, I would like to explain how we built this. You might already have seen our animation tools in the Ronitech tools trailer I made a while ago, but that was only a very short fragment, so here is a more complete demo of the animation capabilities of the Ronitech animation editor: Before I continue, I should note that although I designed most of this system, the real credit should go to Thijs (at the time a coding intern at Ronimo , now a gameplay programmer): he implemented it all, figured out the nitty-gritty details, and built the editor's animation UI. W...

One topic that I have been asked repeatedly to write about, is how we made the animations for Awesomenauts . This is indeed a big and interesting topic, so today, I would like to discuss that in more detail! I have previously shown how we make characters aim in all directions and shoot in all directions , but that did not explain the workflow and tools that our artists use to actually make those animations and put them in the game. Today's post will! The core animation work for Awesomenauts is done in After Effects. This may come as a surprise to people who don't know the tool, since After Effects is mostly known as a video editing tool, but it is actually a great general animation tool. It is also a big step up in comparison to Swords & Soldiers , which was animated in Flash. The biggest problem with Flash was that it only works well with vector-art. Our artists generally don't like working with vectors and would rather paint in Photoshop instead. This was especially ...

The latest Awesomenauts patch increased the framerate a lot for players with older videocards, especially during fierce battles. We managed to optimise our special effects without making them look noticeably different. Today I would like to explain how we did that! Before I dive into the details, let me first give some background. In a 2D game like Awesomenauts, most objects are just a square with a texture on it. The texture contains an image, and you only see that image, not the entire square. However, the videocard renders the entire square. So from a performance perspective, it doesn't matter how much of the texture is actually visible . The entire square is rendered and the every pixel uses performance! Our artists know this, so they try to crop the image to have as few transparent pixels as possible (without changing the actual looks of the end result, of course). Since objects in Awesomenauts contain so many (partially) transparent pixels, we cannot easily detect whether an...

If you don't feel like reading through this entire blogpost, be sure to scroll down to the video in the middle for a demonstration! Those who read my blog from the very beginning, might remember a blogpost that went by the illustrious title Designing Levels Without Tools . When we made Swords & Soldiers , I was the only programmer at Ronimo , so I had to resort to drastic measures to be able to develop a complete console game in one year. The result was that our designers had a rather odd level design tool: Notepad... So much has changed since then! Awesomenauts was made with a larger team over a longer period of time and in this time we managed to make top-notch tools. So today, I would like to introduce the editors of the Ronitech! We have three in-game editors, plus an in-game AI debugger, which can step through our AI trees. The in-game editors are a Level editor, a Particle editor and an Animation editor. Next to that, we also have an AI editor and a Settings editor. Th...

Joysticks on PC are absolutely insane. Not only are there all kinds of joysticks, but the creators of joysticks and joystick libraries have added some ridiculous inconsistencies and omissions, making supporting them a lot more hassle than it could have been if sensible people had made these. This is quite common knowledge among developers, of course, but while adding proper joystick support to Awesomenauts for the PC version, I learned that it was even worse than I thought. So for anyone who wants to have a very sour laugh, or considers supporting joysticks in his own game, here is a list of the oddities I have encountered. Note that when I say joysticks, I actually mean all kinds of controllers, so also steering wheels, big force feedback flight simulator joysticks and of course the kind of controllers used on the Xbox and Playstation. Joysticks have different layouts This one is rather obvious, because you can actually see this when you look at a joystick: they all look different an...

I had a lot of fun writing the water shader for Awesomenauts , especially since it allowed me to use all kinds of small and subtle tricks to get exactly the right effect. Using shaders creatively to get precisely the right look is one of the things I enjoy most, but it is not a very common pleasure when developing 2D games. So I sneaked in this water effect during a weekend just because I really wanted to make it. Before I implemented this water, our artists weren't really convinced by the necessity of creating it at that point, but once they saw it, they were really happy with the look. :) There is nothing ground-breaking here, but I am quite happy with the specific combination of little tricks I used to get the best water effect for Awesomenauts, so here is a little graphical overview of how I made it! (Raytracing like this in a shader is actually very similar to what I did during the research for my Master's thesis at Utrecht University. My Interior Mapping and volume rende...