Sunlight

Luck is an important part in the success or failure of any game studio. Why do some studios succeed while so many others never make a significant amount of money? Regardless of how good your theories are on what makes a successful business, you can never know for sure which games are going to be a hit. Games are entertainment and hit-driven and thus their success is inherently unpredictable. Luck cannot be controlled, but you can help it a bit by making the right choices. Looking at what many starting indies are doing right now, I think a lot of them don't think about luck enough. Here are some of my thoughts on the matter. The success of a game is determined pretty much equally by three factors: the game, marketing and luck. Marketing and luck are just as important as the game you are making. If you do not market your game, then no one will know it and thus only a LOT of luck can make it a success. Similarly, if your game is not good enough, then it is also very unlikely to sell ...

During the Christmas vacation I read the fantastic book Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter by James Gurney. It contains a number of really interesting ideas about colour schemes, so I was curious how these relate to existing games. I was especially curious about Proun : when creating the art for this game I did not know anything practical about colour theory. I just tweaked the colours until they looked good. Apparently this was successful, since reviewers were extremely positive about Proun's visuals and vibrant colours. How then do the colour schemes in Proun relate to Gurney's colour theories? To analyse this I have developed a simple little tool that visualises the colour scheme in an image. You can download the tool and source further in this post. So let's have look: what are Gurney's ideas and how do they relate to Proun's art? The concept I found most interesting in Gurney's book is gamut mapping . To understand this we first need to know ...

In the past 7.5 years I have supervised over a dozen programming interns at Ronimo and have seen hundreds of portfolios of students and graduates. In almost all of those I saw the same things that they needed to learn. One might expect that I think they need to learn specific techniques, algorithms or math, or other forms of specific knowledge. And of course they do, but in my opinion that is never the main thing. The main thing they need to learn is self discipline . The discipline to always write the clearest code you can, the discipline to refactor code if it becomes muddy through changes later in development, the discipline to remove unused code and add comments. Most of the time I spend supervising programming interns is spent on these topics. Not on explaining advanced technologies or the details of our engine, but on making them write better code in general. I always ask applicants what they think is important in being a good programmer and they usually answer that code should ...

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!