Sunlight

Last week I showed the concept art that our art team made once we had settled on the final style for Awesomenauts . However, to get there we always go through a period of exploration, where our art team tries out various things. Our games usually start with a gameplay concept, and once we have settled on what that is, we start looking for a world and visual style that fits this. This is a process I can personally take no credit for: our art team starts drawing cool stuff, and all I do as a programmer is give ideas and feedback. Obviously all the awesomeness comes from our art team here, and I am really honoured to work with people who draw such cool stuff! This period is a lot of fun, because they somehow always manage to surprise me with better and more interesting things than I had imagined myself. This was definitely the case for Awesomenauts, and even more so on the secret concept work that has happened more recently. Finding a visual style is quite a complex process, since Ronim...

Our art team made some great concept art for Awesomenauts , and now that the game is out, I can finally show a bit of how we envisioned it two years ago. Lots of things changed since then, so I will also give some fun notes on how we saw the game at that point. Let's start with the most noticeable change: At Ronimo we strongly believe that for a large part, concept art should look like the actual game. So when drawing a car for a racing game, the back of that car is actually its most important part, since that is what the player will see 95% of the time. Since we make 2D games, we can take this to the extreme: some of our concept art can easily be mistaken for screenshots. In fact, for Swords & Soldiers , many reviewers actually included early concept art in their reviews, thinking it was a screenshot from the final game. For Awesomenauts, our art team made three of these concept art shots that essentially look like fake screenshots from the final game. This helped us see what ...

Today brings the finale to this epic series of two posts on the many connections between Italian eating habits and creating games. Whereas last week I discussed how lasagne influences game design in a good way, today I will talk about all kinds of Italian food. I will explain why programmers should not only fear the dreaded spaghetti, but also the less-known evil of lasagne. And how about pizza and ravioli? What can they learn us about the art of code? Note that I realise that the food metaphors might be slightly lame, but the point of this post is that I think it is important to think about the implications of various structures and methods of programming, and this blogpost is basically just an analysis of some pitfalls and approaches. Most programmers know the term spaghetti code . It refers to a larger code base that is so intertwined, that is it impossible to know how the rest of the code reacts when you change something somewhere. Every line of code might be referencing almost any...

This is the first of a series of posts about lasagne. Lasagne is one of the most inspiring things that ever came out of Italy, and thinking about it is truly food for thought (sorry, I know that joke was bad) . In today's post I would like to introduce to you my lasagne theory of game design, followed next week by the lasagne theory of coding. Image from a Tesco lasagne recipe The game design theory I would like to discuss today is probably not super original, but I think lasagne is a useful tool that can be used to analyse a game. The point here is that lasagne contains layers, just like gameplay. A game like our just released  Awesomenauts  at all times has various game systems active in the player's head, and during different phases of gameplay they will vary in prominence and importance. To strike the right balance and make the game fun for a long time, it really helps to recognise and analyse the layers of the lasagne. An example will help to make this clear. Le...

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...

I posted about depth of field blur last week and discussing it in the comments got my mind back on the "Bokeh" effect. Bokeh is an advanced form of depth of field blur that is currently used in lots of tech demos to show what the next console generation will be capable of. So that got me curious again as to how Bokeh is made. I have been experimenting with it in Proun and have some nice images to share! Bokeh is the effect that when there is strong depth of field blur, bright lights in the background become bright spots, often visible as circles or hexagons. This is a real lens effect that can also be seen in photographs, and it looks pretty cool, since it adds some definition to an otherwise completely blurry depth of field blur effect. A nice example of rendering Bokeh on the videocard can be found in Epic's Samaritan demo. Although the style and look of this demo don't really appeal to me, Epic shows lots of really cool effects here that they think will be possi...