Sunlight

In previous blogposts I shared the statistics of our games, talking about files and textures and about assets and audio . Today we get to the final part of this short series: code! Code is where size matters most. Not because creating 751 different particle systems wasn't a lot of work for our artists, but because unlike with particles, every additional line of code makes every existing line of code more complex. No matter how many particle systems there are, when creating one, an artist only has to care about that single particle system. The rest hardly matters. With code, the opposite is true: the larger a codebase, the more complex it all becomes. Of course, object oriented design principles say everything should be separated as much as possible, and this is a goal we work hard for, but in practice that is just not always doable. For example, the 15 characters in Awesomenauts all need to interact with each other. Any skill from any character needs to be able to handle interfer...

Last week I shared the first part of the statistics from our games . Today let's look at the second part: numbers about assets and audio. Plus a bunch of (hopefully) interesting contemplations and anecdotes about them. In fact, I had intended to also include stats about code today, but I typed so much text about all of this that I had to split it further. This series is now three blogposts instead of my originally intended two. Before I continue, let me abuse this moment for a short commercial break by (again) marketing our Kickstarter campaign for the Awesomenauts: Starstorm expansion ! Including PayPal pledges we have by now reached the first stretch goal (a new map) and are working towards the second stretch goal: Custom Games! Now, let's get to the actual numbers! Assets Levels 1 1 42 42 5 3 4 Skeletal animations 12 82 n/a n/a 0 n/a n/a Particles systems 2 10 43 43 2 526 751 Animation templates n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a ...

As you might know, we are currently running our Kickstarter campaign for our big Starstorm expansion to Awesomenauts. While we were preparing for that, I was thinking about how much Awesomenauts has grown since launch, and how much further it would grow by creating the Starstorm. Being a programmer, I love numbers and started collecting data on just how much Awesomenauts has been growing. Today I would like to share the first half of those with you! Since I like comparing, I have also added the other games I have worked on: De Blob, Snowball Earth, Swords & Soldiers and Proun. Hopefully you will find this as fascinating to look at as I do! But first, let me abuse this moment to blatantly market our Kickstarter campaign ... ;) We have already reached our main goal, and there are still tons of fun things in the stretch goals, including releasing our editors for modding. So please help make those features possible by backing the Starstorm, and scoop up lots of goodies in the reward ...

The most complex graphics effect in Snowball Earth is without a doubt the snow. As the player walks around and heats up the area around him, the snow melts, forms puddles and finally becomes grass. This is completely dynamic: the player can turn his heating on and off at any point, and the snow reacts correctly to that. The snow even has little piles around trees and rock walls, and these piles lower and disappear when the snow melts. So how did we make this? A slow motion video of how the snow melts around the player. Before I continue, I would like to mention once more that Snowball Earth is Ronimo 's cancelled game from 2008, and that the complete prototype can be downloaded here: Download Snowball Earth prototype (Torrent) So how did I implement this melting effect? The basic trick is that for every vertex, I store the 'meltness': to what extend the ground at that vertex has already been melted. A value of 0 means snow, 0.5 means water and 1 means grass. The pixel shad...