Sunlight

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...

When we developed Awesomenauts for console, we had the benefit of working with a publisher that helped us with QA (Quality Assurance, also known as testing) and translations. However, on PC we have self-published Awesomenauts, and that means that we had to take care of these things ourselves. Being low on budget and time, we decided to take the more radical route: we crowdsourced large parts of both. For those who don't know the term: crowdsourcing means asking the public to help you, outsourcing to the crowd . So we did a beta where people could play the game before launch, and tell us if they found any bugs. And we asked players to help us translate all the new texts to German, Italian, Spanish and French. Since crowdsourcing is such a hot topic these days, I figured it would be interesting to share our experience with the translations. At first, I was quite reluctant about letting players do translations. Despite our budgetary problems a few months ago, I was in favour of payin...

Joysticks on PC are absolutely insane. Not only are there all kinds of joysticks, but the creators of joysticks and joystick libraries have added some ridiculous inconsistencies and omissions, making supporting them a lot more hassle than it could have been if sensible people had made these. This is quite common knowledge among developers, of course, but while adding proper joystick support to Awesomenauts for the PC version, I learned that it was even worse than I thought. So for anyone who wants to have a very sour laugh, or considers supporting joysticks in his own game, here is a list of the oddities I have encountered. Note that when I say joysticks, I actually mean all kinds of controllers, so also steering wheels, big force feedback flight simulator joysticks and of course the kind of controllers used on the Xbox and Playstation. Joysticks have different layouts This one is rather obvious, because you can actually see this when you look at a joystick: they all look different an...

Yes! Awesomenauts is out now on PC on Steam! I'm really happy with how it turned out, so I hope you will like it as well! You can get it here !

To finish my little series on CPU optimisation (here were part 1 and part 2 , today I bring out the big guns: threading and timing! This is where optimisation really shines as a form of pure entertainment and delight. I can honestly hardly imagine why anyone ever does Sudokus or crosswords. Puzzling to find the best optimisations is so much more fun! Hiccups are horrible without the right tools Framerate hiccups are a special case. This is when the game is running at a high enough framerate, but once in a while a single frame takes a lot longer. Hiccups cause that a game running at 55fps might look a lot less fluent than one running at 30fps, if every second the 55fps consists of 54 smooth frames and one really long one. The difficulty here is that when you gather performance data, the time spent in each function will usually be averaged. This means that if a function runs really fast most of the time and is really slow only once per second, then it will look like a normal function in...

Yesterday we have announced that Awesomenauts is coming to Steam! Woohoo! We have been working on it for quite a while already, so it will release really soon. There will even be a closed beta, which will start within a week. Exciting times! I am kind of surprised that I managed to write those optimisation blogposts in the past weeks at all, because we have been crunching like crazy to iron out all the bugs. In particular we spent a lot of time on getting the controls just right for PC, and personally I feel it plays great, so I hope the players in the beta will agree! Here's a trailer showing Coco and Derpl on PC:

Last week I talked about some rather general things that I learned about CPU optimisation, when spending a lot of time improving the framerates of Awesomenauts , Swords & Soldiers , and even Proun . Today I would like to discuss some more practical examples of what kind of optimisations are to be expected. Somehow I like talking about optimisation so much that I couldn't fit it all in today's blogpost, so topics around threading and timing will follow next week. Anyway, forward with today's "lessons learned"! Giant improvements are possible (at first) The key point of my previous blogpost was that you should not worry too much about optimisation early in the project. A fun side-effect of not caring about performance during 'normal' development, is that you are bound to waste a lot of framerate in really obvious ways. So once you fire up the profiler for the first time on a big project, there will always be a couple of huge issues that give giant frame...