Sunlight

Okay, maybe more like an indie marketing plan than the plan, since every game and every company comes with its own approach to marketing. Nevertheless, at Ronimo we have gathered a ton of experience with marketing through Awesomenauts and Swords & Soldiers , and I have also done quite a bit of marketing for my hobby project Proun . Today, I would like to share this knowledge in the form of a rather complete plan that other indies hopefully find useful to help guide their marketing. Traditionally marketing is the field of the large companies and the large budgets, who buy advertisement space on television, magazines and websites. However, today a small indie studio with hardly any marketing budget can still get a lot of attention going. In fact, I think indie studios can potentially market downloadable games better than big companies! When we launched Swords & Soldiers, we were a pretty much unknown company with no marketing budget, and yet we managed to get enough attention...

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...

When at Ronimo we released the prototype for our cancelled project Snowball Earth last week, I mentioned that we pitched it to tons of publishers. So what is that like, pitching to publishers? In the past five years we did a lot of pitching for a lot of different projects. Despite that the pitches for Snowball Earth were not successful enough to land us a deal, we did get the hang of it enough to get some good deals going: we managed to sign Swords & Soldiers HD for PS3 with Sony, and we managed to sign Awesomenauts for XBLA and PS3 with DTP. We learned a lot from our contacts at publishers on how the process works, and today I would like to share that. Before I start this story, please note that pitching can have many forms. For small distribution-only deals, things can be a lot simpler than this, and each publisher will have his own way of handling things. This text is my impression of how it works when you want to sign a larger title and want not just distribution, but also ...

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.