Sunlight

We're currently rebuilding the entire matchmaking, menus and party system of Awesomenauts . This rework is called Galactron. This is a huge operation: especially the matchmaking part is highly complex. We've done a bunch of betas for it so far and last week we let it run live for everyone for 48 hours. After that we turned it off again to analyse the results, read player feedback and fix bugs. Today I'd like to discuss the most interesting results. I plan to do an overview of how Galactron works in a future blogpost, but today I'm just going to focus on what we've encountered in last week's beta. Ragequitters and the removal of latejoin This is probably the hottest topic in Galactron. Latejoin was probably the most hated feature of the old Awesomenauts so we've removed it altogether. In Galactron players are never put in a match that's already in progress. We've also added a rejoin option so if you're kicked out of a match due to a network error ...

When designing weapons, there are many ways of differentiating them and spicing them up. To help anyone who is working on that, I would today like to give a big list of weapon parameters that one can play with. Most can be applied to ranged, melee and special attacks, but obviously not all can be used for everything in every genre. I hope this list can be used as an aid, regardless of genre. Note that I only focus on gameplay here: graphics are also an important part of the feel of a weapon, but his post is entirely about gameplay. I made most of this list a couple of years ago when I was thinking about creating an open world game with randomly generated enemies. As a first step I made a long list of weapon properties and side effects that could be combined to create attacks for those enemies. As with many of my game ideas I doubt I'll ever get around to actually making this game, but I figured this list might also be useful to others, so I've extended it into this blogpost. Mo...

An odd effect that can be very noticeable in 2D games is the distortion that happens when deforming a texture. Especially when tapering a polygon the art can become really weird. This has been a problem in our engine for years, but since strong taper isn't used often I didn't think it needed fixing. However, when I added trails last year the distortion became much more problematic and I had to look for a solution. If you're not very familiar with how videocards work this looks really weird. To a human it is very clear how the texture should be squashed when tapering a polygon, why can't my computer figure this out? The reason is that videocards only handle triangles. They don't really know what a square is so if you want a square, you need to create two triangles that happen to form a square together. Many 3D tools hide this, but that's what happening under the hood. When applying this taper to a square that consists of two triangles we can see why the weird di...

Last week I discussed our tools for making trails . One problem I encountered with trails is that they often don't look very good when attached to a character. Player movement in a platformer like Awesomenauts is not very smooth: all of a sudden you jump, or land, or turn around, and this creates a trail with lots of angles in it. For some effects this is fine, but especially for wider trails a smoother, curvier look is much better. Today I would like to discuss the smoothing algorithm I implemented to solve this. Before I continue, here's last week's overview video of our trails again, since it also contains some footage of the smoothing: Key when smoothing a trail is that the trail should always remain attached to the emitter (in this case a character). If the smoothing makes the trail detach from the emitter just a little bit, it starts to look floaty and incorrect. An artist can work around this by fading out the trail near its start, but this is not always desired. Th...

Until recently most special effects in Awesomenauts were either animated by hand or made using particles. This seemed to give enough possibilities, until we played the gorgeous Ori and the Blind Forest , which has very crisp special effects. We analysed how they achieved this and one of the conclusions was that for many things that we would make with particles, they used trails. Trails are quite an obvious concept, but for some reason it had never seemed like a big problem that they weren't an option in our tools. So about a year ago I added trails to our engine. How to implement trails seems quite obvious: it's just a series of triangle segments, what's interesting about that? However, when I started implementing trails it turned out there are quite a lot of different approaches imaginable. I went with one that's extremely flexible, but also sometimes slightly difficult to control for certain effects. Today I'd like to share how I built our trails tool and what th...

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...