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...

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...

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 my last three blogposts I've discussed the details of various texture formats. Now that we've seen them, it's time for an overview. Below you'll find a big table that lists the properties of a lot of different formats and shows their results. I'll also discuss some final considerations on performance. The important thing here is to realize that there is no perfect solution: every choice has its own drawbacks, so even with the same art style you might end up with different texture formats depending on the platform. These are the main arguments to consider: Quality Size in video memory Size on disk Download size Loading time Framerate Development time Most of these are pretty obvious and I've already discussed quality and size in video memory extensively in my previous posts. The reason I'm listing them here is that it's important to keep in mind that you can mix and match formats for different goals. There are also more complex things that might m...

DXT is the most used texture format in games and it is what we use most in Swords & Soldiers II and Awesomenauts . DXT is easy to use but provides some weird compression artefacts, so a good understanding of how it works is very useful for both artists and graphics programmers. Since DXT is not supported on iOS I will also shortly discuss the quite similar PVRTC format. This is part 3 in my short series on texture formats for 2D games. Here are part 1 and part 2 . Note that DXT is often also referred to as DDS because DXT textures are usually saved as .DDS files. DXT is also known as S3 Texture Compression . There are several versions of DXT. The most versatile type is DXT5, which stores an alpha channel that can be used for transparency. DXT5 uses only 8 bits per pixel, making it 75% smaller than full 32bit RGBA. If no alpha is needed or only on/off alpha, DXT1 can be used, which is even smaller: 4 bits per pixel, making it 87.5% smaller than RGBA. That's quite a spectacular...

When making a large scale 2D game like Swords & Soldiers II or Awesomenauts using the right texture formats can make a big difference for visual quality, video memory, loading times and download size. What format works best varies depending on art style and platform and a good understanding of the options helps a lot in making the right choices. This is a huge topic so I've split it into four posts. Today I'll cover the basics. The other three posts will discuss the more obscure palette textures, DXT and finally a comparison table of all the discussed techniques. This short series will get a bit technical at points but I've tried to make it as readable for artists as possible: knowing how your art will be compressed is important for game artists. While the texture formats available for 2D and 3D games are the same, 2D games have different requirements, so it is interesting to approach this topic from a 2D standpoint. Also, 2D games usually don't have things like n...

Our awesome introduction trailer for Swords & Soldiers II just went live! Koen made a really nice trailer for our new game, with help from Ralph and Gijs. Swords & Soldiers II is launching on Wii U next week (on Thursday 21 May), exciting times! :D

Good game graphics are not just about being pretty. Equally important is that they communicate well. The richer and more detailed a visual style becomes, the more difficult it is to communicate gameplay clearly. With the amount of detail and variation we wanted in Swords & Soldiers II it was a challenge to make the units, spells and other gameplay objects pop out against the colourful backgrounds. Today I would like to show the tricks our artists used to make this work. The reason this is important is that otherwise it would not be clear which objects are interactive and which are not. For example, is a tree a wall that I cannot pass through, or just a backdrop that has no effect on the gameplay? Ideally these kinds of things are immediately and intuitively clear to the player, without requiring any explanation. Our new game Swords & Soldiers II launches on Wii U on May 21st. The easiest way to achieve visual clarity is to not have any backgrounds or effects. Just a flat-colou...

For our new game Swords & Soldiers II (coming to Wii U on May 21st!) we wanted to create detailed and varied levels. Because of the number of maps and their large size we needed art tools that provide a lot of automation to be able to populate them quickly. At the same time we wanted to allow customisation and control over the details to create unique, designed places. Today I would like to show the tools that Ronimo programmer Machiel van Hooren developed for our artists. Check especially the awesome demo video at the end! Our starting point was the level editing tools we made for Awesomenauts . Those are very flexible and not tied to a single game, so we could pretty much use all of them directly in Swords & Soldiers II. However, the shape of the levels in Swords & Soldiers II is very different: the Awesomenauts tools are built around rectangular boxes, not curving landscapes. Nevertheless they provided a really strong beginning. I made a short video montage about the A...

Changing the lighting in hand-drawn art is a challenge. While in 3D games you can simply modify the light, there is no such thing when using 2D assets. In our new game Swords & Soldiers II all the level assets have their lighting drawn in. Of course you can ask the artist the redraw the image with different lighting, but that costs a lot of additional time and texture memory. We managed to re-use our daylight textures to create convincing nighttime levels, so today I would like to explain the tricks used to achieve that goal. Today's post is all about the artistry of Ronimo artist Ralph Rademakers. He uses images drawn by Adam Daroszewski* and Gijs Hermans to decorate the levels in Swords & Soldiers II. Ralph keeps surprising me with the unexpected tricks he manages to pull off with our internal tools . *By the way, note that Adam works as a freelancer these days. He drew most of the level props in this post and you can see some more of his amazing work here . There is ba...