Sunlight

When I revealed our cancelled project Snowball Earth from 2008 in my blogpost earlier this week, I said that one of the problems that publishers had with the game and that kept them from wanting to fund it, was that the main characters were robots. Apparently it is difficult to reach a large audience with robots, and the fantastic Wall-E is a rare exception to that rule. Although we had a clear vision for the game ourselves, we did not ignore this critique, and our art team (Martijn Thieme, Ralph Rademakers, Olivier Thijssen and Gijs Hermans) started making new concept art for the main characters. This was made after the main prototype was already finished, and was intended purely to show to publishers how the game could change to fit their marketing department's requirements better. Especially the dogs came out pretty hilarious. They were replaced with real dogs, but those still needed to be able to roll around. Our artists came up with a (for the dogs) quite dizzying solution......

Today we release the complete playable prototype of our cancelled game Snowball Earth! This is the game that we worked on at Ronimo for a full year before we made Swords & Soldiers . Since Snowball Earth was never finished, we never really talked about it either and kept the prototype hidden. Such a waste! The prototype contains over an hour of gameplay and some really cool ideas, so it is awesome to finally show it to the world! Snowball Earth is a really interesting game, both in how it failed and in the things it did well, so it provides tons of material for future blogposts. Today: what it is, and why it was cancelled! To play Snowball Earth, you have to download it through Torrent. If you don't have a Torrent client, you can for example use the free Bittorrent . Download: Snowball Earth Prototype Torrent Note that because this is an early prototype, this is all pretty unpolished! No tutorial, ridiculously long loading times, quite a few bugs and it only plays well with an...

In 2007, after we had made De Blob , we worked on a big game that was intended to be the first real commercial game by Ronimo Games . It was called: Snowball Earth. However, we couldn't find a publisher for it and the game was cancelled. After that, we went on to make Swords & Soldiers . Since the game was cancelled, we never showed it to anyone after that. However, this weekend at Indigo, the prototype we made at the time will be playable! It is a 30 minute completely playable demo that shows the visual style and gameplay we were aiming for. We will soon release a lot more information on what this game was all about, and even the complete playable prototype! I think it has some great original and unique gameplay ideas, so I am actually looking forward to showing those to the world! However, for the moment, enjoy these two screenshots! To play Snowball Earth this weekend, visit Indigo ! Indigo is a yearly exhibition by Dutch Game Garden that shows the best new work by Dutch gam...

Indeed! We have just released DLC skins for Awesomenauts on Steam! There is an awesome alternative look for every character, as you can see in the new trailer: This comes together with patch 1.5 , which along with skins also contains numerous balance fixes, and some big improvements to the matchmaker to make sure you play more against players of the same skill level.

Today I am announcing my new project: Cello Fortress ! Cello Fortress is a really weird game concept, very experimental. I am really happy to finally have started working on it, after having it floating around in my head for years. ^_^ Cello Fortress can only be played live at events, and it will debut at the Indigo exhibition later this month! Cello Fortress combines a live cello concert with a twin-stick-shooter, in which the cellist plays against the audience. It brings a unique experience in which I control the game by improvising on my cello, simultaneously fending off attacks and making music. The audience takes up controllers and tries to beat the fortress. The result is an exciting interplay between cellist, players and audience. Up to four players use controllers to navigate their tank, using one stick to move and the other to shoot. They dodge bullets and attack the turrets. At the same time, the game analyses the notes played by the cellist, as picked up by a microphone. Ag...

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...