Sunlight

So far I have focussed all my efforts for Cello Fortress on the gameplay. Controlling a game with a live cello is a big challenge, both technically and in terms of game design. Now that that is turning out well, the next step is to get rid of the prototype art and give the game real graphics. I have been thinking a lot about the exact visual style and the goal is of course to make Cello Fortress look really good. While the current version of Cello Fortress does not contain any of these visual ideas yet, today I'd like to show my inspirations, and some visual experiments that I did. The base inspirational image for Cello Fortress' visuals comes from the special edition booklet to Radiohead's album Amnesiac . It is a really noisy and small image, and the scan makes it even worse, but the core of it is this: extremely low-polygon mountains with extremely low-res textures, so that there are big square pixels on the flat triangles. Taking this idea, I did a quick experiment in ...

Everything in our tools is animatable. Not just position, rotation and scale, but also things like colour, skew, taper, texture scroll and the number of particles emitted. This is a feature that I know from 3D Studio MAX and that I had been admiring for ages, so as a programmer I really wanted to come up with a neat system to build this. Being able to animate everything also happens to be really useful for our artists... ;) Today, I would like to explain how we built this. You might already have seen our animation tools in the Ronitech tools trailer I made a while ago, but that was only a very short fragment, so here is a more complete demo of the animation capabilities of the Ronitech animation editor: Before I continue, I should note that although I designed most of this system, the real credit should go to Thijs (at the time a coding intern at Ronimo , now a gameplay programmer): he implemented it all, figured out the nitty-gritty details, and built the editor's animation UI. W...

Many people probably won't realise this, but while Awesomenauts may feel like a logical translation of the MOBA genre (games like DotA and League of Legends) to a 2D platformer, the design process was in fact long and difficult. Striking the right balance between tactical gameplay, platforming combat and match flow took a long evolution, with tons of experimentation and careful design. A little bit of that process shows through Sheriff Lonestar's evolution , which I talked about last week. Awesomenauts' design originally featured tons of features that didn't make it into the game. Probably the most striking of those is the disappearance of most heros' melee skill. Originally all classes in Awesomenauts had both a ranged skill and a melee skill, including Lonestar. Looking back, this surprises me, since the current distinction between ranged and melee characters feels so natural. It took us a long time to figure this out, though! Originally we wanted to make someth...

We have just released this press release, figured I should share this awesome piece of news with you! Today Ronimo Games announces that their massively successful platforming MOBA Awesomenauts is coming to Hollywood! Awesomenauts The Movie will be directed by the award-winning director G.G. Abrams. The announcement is celebrated with a teaser trailer: Awesomenauts The Movie will be released in full 3D and will reach theaters around the globe this Fall. Joost van Dongen, co-founder of Ronimo Games, says "This movie is a dream come true. Plans for an Awesomenauts movie have been in development since we started working on the game, and now that the game has reached such huge success, we have finally been able to break into Hollywood and get the production of the movie started!" Actors have not officially been announced yet, but rumours currently suggest several famous Hollywood actors might have enlisted to play the roles of Froggy G, Clunk and Sheriff Lonestar. About Awesomena...

Quite a few players asked to see more concept art of Awesomenauts , so who am I to not oblige to this request? This is actually a great excuse to talk a bit about the design process of Awesomenauts in general, by looking at how Sheriff Lonestar evolved during the three years it took us to create Awesomenauts. Before I get started, I should mention that today's post is mostly about the great work of my colleagues. I myself am lead programmer at Ronimo , so although I am involved in the design and art process, the real work is done by our designers (Fabian and Jasper) and our artists (in the early stages of the project as described here, those were only Ralph, Martijn, Olivier and Gijs). So all credit for the great work done on finding the right style for the gameplay and graphics should go to them! :) In our first designs of Awesomenauts, there were going to be only three classes, but each of these three classes was going to have an extremely diverse set of skills. The final version...

I usually try to write these blogposts in a way that is readable for most game developers and enthusiasts, but today for a change I'd like to dive deep into a detail of C++: why sometimes the this pointer can differ even though it is being used within the same object . This is a problem that one can spend a lot of time debugging on before finding out what happens. I encountered it last week, and the only reason it didn't cost me several days of debugging to figure it out, is because I ran into the exact same problem during a project at University years ago. Let me first sketch an example of a situation in which this might occur. In some cases a unique identifier for an object is needed, but we don't actually need to do anything with that object, so it doesn't matter what type it is. In such cases, an obvious and easy solution is to simply use the address of the object itself and store it as a void* . This way we can, for example, register whether a call to a function i...

One topic that I have been asked repeatedly to write about, is how we made the animations for Awesomenauts . This is indeed a big and interesting topic, so today, I would like to discuss that in more detail! I have previously shown how we make characters aim in all directions and shoot in all directions , but that did not explain the workflow and tools that our artists use to actually make those animations and put them in the game. Today's post will! The core animation work for Awesomenauts is done in After Effects. This may come as a surprise to people who don't know the tool, since After Effects is mostly known as a video editing tool, but it is actually a great general animation tool. It is also a big step up in comparison to Swords & Soldiers , which was animated in Flash. The biggest problem with Flash was that it only works well with vector-art. Our artists generally don't like working with vectors and would rather paint in Photoshop instead. This was especially ...