Sunlight

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...

When creating a new game character it's crucial to get a feel for his in-game poses and movement as quickly as possible. During the visual design of a character you shouldn't just wonder how he looks, but also how he moves. If a character looks cool while standing still but bad while in motion, you have a problem. Not only is this a key part of a character's personality and look, it also helps discover problems early on. Maybe that big weapon is obstructing the dynamic actions your hero needs to do? This is why our artists first draw key animation poses and throw those into the game as quickly as possible. During early development of a new character for Awesomenauts we playtest with just those key poses, without any animation. Less than 10 frames represent the entire movement set of the character. One frame for a jump, one for a fall, a couple for a walk, one for each attack, for sliding to a halt and for idling, and that's roughly it. It's surprising how smooth an...

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 ...

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...

A challenge that is faced in the development of many games, is how to animate shooting, and other actions that can happen at the same time as general movement. In Awesomenauts , the player can shoot while walking, standing still, jumping, falling and sliding. How to make animations for this? The first idea might be to simply make an animation for each combination. This means animating both walking+shooting, walking+sliding, walking+jumping, etc. This is a lot of work, especially since in the console version of Awesomenauts, characters need to be able to shoot in 5 different directions. That is just a lot of animations. And that is not even the worst of it. The real issue is that this doesn't actually work. The player can shoot at any moment in time . This means that shooting can start at any point during another animation, not just at the start of an animation. So if the player is already halfway through his current walking animation, then the walking+shooting animation will not co...

In Awesomenauts we have characters that can aim in all directions. How does that work? In a 3D game this would be quite straightforward: you just make animations in a couple of directions and blend those. Blending angles of bone-animations is a really simple thing. To make it easier, you might animate the upper body and the legs separately and blend those parts as well. In 2D, however, this is a wholly different story. Awesomenauts characters don't have bones: the game simply gets a series of frames for each animation and shows those in order. So how to do this, then? We started by having a look at several other games. An older game that solves this problem, is Abuse (1996). Looking at footage from that game, I think what they did is that the upper and lower body are animated entirely separately and then combined in the game. The legs just do the walking and jumping and such, and totally ignore the aiming. The arms have been drawn for each aiming direction they support, which I t...