Sunlight

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...

The recently released game Marvel's Spider-Man has interiors behind windows in many buildings. This looks great and it seems to be done using a rendering trick: the geometry for the interiors isn't actually there and is generated using a shader. I haven't seen any official statement by Insomniac regarding how they made this, but based on how it looks it seems very likely that they implemented interior mapping : a technique I came up with in 2007 as part of my thesis research. I've never written about this on my blog before so I figure this a good moment to explain the fun little shader trick I came up with. Let's start by having a look at some footage from Marvel's Spider-Man. The game looks absolutely amazing and Kotaku has captured some footage of the windows in particular: As you can see around 0:40 in this video the rooms aren't actually there in the geometry: there's a door where there should clearly be a window. You also see a different interior wh...

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...

One of my current hobby projects is creating a procedural music system: a computer program that composes and performs music all by itself. It's still a work-in-progress in its early stages, but some recent improvements have gotten it to produce quite interesting music already, so I figured it's about time I share some of my thoughts around how it works. Let's start with a little video that lets you hear the amount of variation it can currently do: Note that this video contains a selection of the nicer pieces, so it isn't all this good. Most of the other music it currently produces is a bit more boring, or too similar to these fragments. The program is a work-in-progress and it should improve a lot as I spend more time on it. I started programming this for a rather odd reason: I wanted to practice improvising on my cello over complex chord schemes and figured a program that automatically produces those would do the trick. As usual with this kind of thing, it got out of h...

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...

Matchmaking is a highly important part of most modern multiplayer games. Build it badly and the user might be stomped by players way too good for them, get a really laggy connection or wait forever to get into a match. It's also a difficult topic to analyse and test before launch because there are so many unpredictable factors. For example, how are your players spread out over the globe? How much do match durations vary? How long are players willing to wait? How good are their internet connections? All of these and many other factors influence whether any given matchmaking implementation actually works well. Surprisingly few developers have written about the matchmaking in their games in detail, so I figured it would be useful to share our experiences. Over the years we've had several different approaches to matchmaking in Awesomenauts , and have iterated live on each of those, so let's have a look at what we've learned so far! Matchmaking is such a big and complex topi...

Last week I showed the coding methodology that we use at Ronimo , which describes our workflow. This week we'll have a look at what our actual code looks like, which is defined in our coding style guide . The idea behind our style guide is that if all code is formatted in a similar manner then it's easier to read and edit each other's code. For example, reading a different bracing style or naming convention usually takes some getting used to, and we avoid that altogether by having a strict style guide that all programmers at Ronimo must follow. I haven't seen a whole lot of style guides from other companies, but from what I've heard our style guide is quite a lot stricter than what's common elsewhere. I'm not sure whether that's true, but I can totally imagine it is since I'm known for being precise (sometimes maybe overly much). Our style guide isn't set in stone though: there's an exception to every rule. If our style guide really doesn...