Sunlight

This Monday we've announced a new expansion for Awesomenauts : Overdrive! Lots of cool things under way, like 4 new characters, graphics improvements, new matchmaking and the Starstorm map! Most of that content will be added in free updates to the base game, while 3 of the characters will be sold as a premium DLC. That DLC is coming in March and can already be pre-ordered on the new Overdrive website (pre-ordering grants a free skin for Professor Yoolip). Here's a cool trailer to show what's cooking:

In my last three blogposts I've discussed the details of various texture formats. Now that we've seen them, it's time for an overview. Below you'll find a big table that lists the properties of a lot of different formats and shows their results. I'll also discuss some final considerations on performance. The important thing here is to realize that there is no perfect solution: every choice has its own drawbacks, so even with the same art style you might end up with different texture formats depending on the platform. These are the main arguments to consider: Quality Size in video memory Size on disk Download size Loading time Framerate Development time Most of these are pretty obvious and I've already discussed quality and size in video memory extensively in my previous posts. The reason I'm listing them here is that it's important to keep in mind that you can mix and match formats for different goals. There are also more complex things that might m...

DXT is the most used texture format in games and it is what we use most in Swords & Soldiers II and Awesomenauts . DXT is easy to use but provides some weird compression artefacts, so a good understanding of how it works is very useful for both artists and graphics programmers. Since DXT is not supported on iOS I will also shortly discuss the quite similar PVRTC format. This is part 3 in my short series on texture formats for 2D games. Here are part 1 and part 2 . Note that DXT is often also referred to as DDS because DXT textures are usually saved as .DDS files. DXT is also known as S3 Texture Compression . There are several versions of DXT. The most versatile type is DXT5, which stores an alpha channel that can be used for transparency. DXT5 uses only 8 bits per pixel, making it 75% smaller than full 32bit RGBA. If no alpha is needed or only on/off alpha, DXT1 can be used, which is even smaller: 4 bits per pixel, making it 87.5% smaller than RGBA. That's quite a spectacular...

After last week's introduction to texture formats we are going to look at palette textures today. Palette textures are an interesting and underused option for 2D games. Using them is quite a hassle since normal videocards don't support them, but for certain art styles they offer high quality and small texture size. Palette formats are similar to GIF files. The idea is that we have a palette, a list of all the colours in a specific texture. In the actual texture we don't store the colour of each pixel, but rather a reference to the palette. If the texture doesn't have a whole lot of colours we can get away with using only 256 different colours. References to these can be stored in 8 bits per pixel, so this format is 75% smaller than uncompressed RGBA. Palette textures are particularly useful for cartoony styles with flat shading, since those have fewer colours per texture. If your textures have more than 256 colours, you can reduce the number of colours. Depending on th...

When making a large scale 2D game like Swords & Soldiers II or Awesomenauts using the right texture formats can make a big difference for visual quality, video memory, loading times and download size. What format works best varies depending on art style and platform and a good understanding of the options helps a lot in making the right choices. This is a huge topic so I've split it into four posts. Today I'll cover the basics. The other three posts will discuss the more obscure palette textures, DXT and finally a comparison table of all the discussed techniques. This short series will get a bit technical at points but I've tried to make it as readable for artists as possible: knowing how your art will be compressed is important for game artists. While the texture formats available for 2D and 3D games are the same, 2D games have different requirements, so it is interesting to approach this topic from a 2D standpoint. Also, 2D games usually don't have things like n...

The number of indie games being released on Steam and consoles has sky-rocketed this last year. At the same time, the amount of money being spent on indie games doesn't really seem to increase. In other words: the average indie game is making much less money! SteamSpy recently released some graphs that show that while total sales for all games together are pretty stable, median sales per game have dropped enormously. You only need to open Steam's list of new releases to see why: so many new games launching every day! Five years ago only a couple of games launched on Steam per week. Now there are dozens launching daily , and they're all competing for the same players. The average income of a new indie game has dropped so far that some even call this current trend the 'indiepocalypse'. There are several reasons we're seeing this now. The most obvious reason is that marketplaces like Steam have made worldwide distribution easy. They have become more and more open...

Most multiplayer games die within a week. Not because the multiplayer doesn't work, but because there aren't enough people playing online. If you look for opponents and don't find any, then the multiplayer mode might just as well not have been made. This is even more of a waste because online multiplayer is so much work to develop, as I recently explained . The vast majority of online multiplayer games ever made isn't playable any more because of this. Partially this is because not all games can be a success, but there is a much more important reason: often the matchmaking is poorly designed for a smaller playerbase. With clever choices multiplayer can flourish even with a tiny community. For an average indie game that is doing okay but isn't a big hit it is pretty decent to have 40 simultaneous players a few weeks after launch. Our own game Awesomenauts did really well so our daily peak is usually above 1000 players, but expecting such numbers is unrealistic for m...