Sunlight

The indie explosion has finally happened. New indie companies and teams appear every day. At the same time a lot of pessimism has entered the scene: so few indies are actually making money! This is mostly because the market simply isn't big enough to support us all. But I believe another cause is that a lot of indies are all making the same mistakes. Here is what I think many indies are doing wrong. Before I continue, a little disclaimer: this post is about what I think gives indies the best chance at making a reasonable income from their games. If you don't care about that and just want to have fun making games, then none of this applies. Too small games Every day dozens of indie games are released. During big game jams this can even be hundreds during a single weekend. To stand out from this crowd more indies should focus on making larger games. If you and your team spend dozens of man-months on a single game, then that game is much bigger than most competing games. This way ...

An important goal in the game design of Swords & Soldiers , Awesomenauts and Swords & Soldiers II is gameplay variety. We try to make all the classes, units and factions play and feel as differently is possible. This makes it more fun to try them all and allows for much more interesting and varied tactics than if everything feels the same. It seems quite obvious that a game gets better if more diversity is added, as long as you have the budget to do so and it does not take away from the core vision. However, there are some serious downsides that are not as obvious. Adding more diversity can hurt many different aspects of a game, as I will explain in this blogpost. When striving for variety it is important to be aware of the trade-offs. It does not mean that you should avoid diverse mechanics, far from it: it is a key element of the games we make at Ronimo ! But consider the consequences before blindly adding variety. A great example of such trade-offs can be found in the move...

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...