Sunlight

On 27 November Proun+ launched on iOS! The first reviews are extremely positive, both from the press and from users. We also got a big feature in the European App Store, so it seems like Apple itself also likes the game. :) Here are some quotes from the reviews and the launch trailer: " A bright, searingly good twitch racer that takes the fundaments of the genre and builds something staggeringly entertaining on top of them. " 9/10 PocketGamer.co.uk " Previously a successful indie release on the PC, it deserves your attention and patience. [...] Throw in a funky jazz based soundtrack and Proun+ has a lot going for it. " 4/5 stars 148Apps.com " this self-styled �journey through modern art� exudes an endearing weirdness that sets it apart and nestles it in your brain. Like that off-beat game you used to play, that you�re convinced only you can remember, which you can�t possibly forget. " 4.5/5 stars Gamezebo.com Proun+ is available in the App Store for iPhon...

Good matchmaking is an important part of creating an online multiplayer game. One thing you may not realise is that no matter how you build it, truly good matchmaking requires enormous numbers of players. Awesomenauts often has well over 1,000 people playing the game at the same time, which is very high and successful for an indie game. It certainly sounds like a lot to me, but this is only a fraction of what would be needed to do everything with matchmaking that we would want to do. Today I am going to explain why tens of thousands of concurrent players are needed for truly awesome matchmaking. Matchmaking has two main goals. The first is to let people play together who will have a good internet connection to each other. We would like to avoid Australians playing together with Europeans because their ping will be very high. High ping decreases the quality of the game experience, especially in a fast and highly competitive game like Awesomenauts. Finding good connections is more compl...

Changing the lighting in hand-drawn art is a challenge. While in 3D games you can simply modify the light, there is no such thing when using 2D assets. In our new game Swords & Soldiers II all the level assets have their lighting drawn in. Of course you can ask the artist the redraw the image with different lighting, but that costs a lot of additional time and texture memory. We managed to re-use our daylight textures to create convincing nighttime levels, so today I would like to explain the tricks used to achieve that goal. Today's post is all about the artistry of Ronimo artist Ralph Rademakers. He uses images drawn by Adam Daroszewski* and Gijs Hermans to decorate the levels in Swords & Soldiers II. Ralph keeps surprising me with the unexpected tricks he manages to pull off with our internal tools . *By the way, note that Adam works as a freelancer these days. He drew most of the level props in this post and you can see some more of his amazing work here . There is ba...

We have released the first trailer for Proun+, the biggerbetter Proun that is coming to 3DS, iOS and Android! Proun+ is being made together with Engine Software and will have six new tracks and a completely new soundtrack: more songs and all the songs have now been recorded by real musicians for a much better sound. In this trailer you can hear the new version of one of the old songs and see one of the awesome new levels in action, plus footage from some of the original tracks. I am really hyped for the return of Proun, so I hope you like it!

While working on the visual style for my weird live performance game Cello Fortress I came up with a new technique for depth of field blur: area based depth of field blur. As far as I know this is not an existing technique so today I would like to explain how it works. The visual style for Cello Fortress is far from finished at the moment, but I decided early on that I wanted strong depth of field blur to play a major role. I had already implemented depth of field blur for Proun (which by the way is coming to 3DS, iOS and Android soon!) and I copied that to Cello Fortress. Proun does not have blur on the foreground, so I added that and tried it in-game. The result turned out to not work at all, as you can see in this image (be sure to click the image for a larger version, since this is difficult to see in these small blog-sized images): click for larger image The problem is that with standard depth of field blur, only one specific distance to the camera is sharp. In Cello Fortress th...

Last week I wrote a blogpost about how we think it is better to have a bigger patch once every one or two months than to have really small weekly patches. I was curious what other developers' experiences with this are, so I asked around for more opinions on this. Since patching on console and mobile is so different I looked for developers who have a game on Steam, which is the platform that enables regular patching best. Someone also pointed me to the Valve talk where they explained the importance of communication around patches and how this helped them grow Team Fortress 2. This is an incredibly interesting talk, so be sure to check it out: Here are the replies I got from fellow developers: Jamie Cheng from Klei developer of Don't Starve " While I have lots of opinions, I think it comes down to "it depends". Personally I think many devs try to do it the Valve Way only to find they don't really, truly understand why it works for Valve. " Mark Morris fro...

Recently I have seen quite a few games that launched with the plan to patch really often, especially Early Access games. Most of those games patch once a week or once every two weeks. This may seem like a good idea: iterate quickly and show clearly to the user that you really do the best you can to make good on the promise of improving the game. For a time with Awesomenauts we also tried to patch as often as possible, but by now we think that is actually a bad idea. The main reason for this is that the more often you patch, the smaller the patches are. Lots of small patches means lots of hardly noticeable changes to the game. Why would a user come back to your game because of 5 balance tweaks, 3 bug fixes and improved graphics for 2 weapons? Why would a regular player be exited about this? The changes done in weekly patches are just too small to make an impact. Combining a bunch of those smaller patches together creates something much more noteworthy. In a bigger patch once every one...