Friday 4 January 2013

What would you like me to write about?

I have been writing articles for this blog for almost 2.5 years now, and I have strived to cover a very diverse set of topics around game development. I don't really know my readers, though, so having such a broad range of themes has made me curious: what subjects on this blog do you enjoy reading about most? What would you like me to write about in the future?

To the right you can see a little poll with the broad topics, please select your favourite! I'd also love to hear about specific topics you would like to read about. Please leave a comment and let me know! Any other feedback on this blog is also welcome.

In the coming year, I'd like to try to cover some of the requests with (hopefully) interesting articles!

23 comments:

  1. How do you prefer to handle the mapping of uniform variables CPU side, for example view & projection matrices, to the shader?

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  2. More game development and more gameprogramming

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  3. I only get to vote on one favourite? Over the past couple of years, one aspect of this blog I've enjoyed is the *variety* of things you post. I love the debugging stories and artwork retrospectives, particularly. It's interesting to see how other professionals are handling day-to-day life-of-the-software-developer issues and what worked and what didn't.

    I'm not a professional game dev, but the stories even from the marketing side are interesting. Keep up the variety (and thanks!), Joost.

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  4. Make more posts about Awesomenauts please:)

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  5. gameplay programming !! there no books about the subject. Things like the upgradable settings are greate.

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  6. Your game design comments are definitely what pull me back to this blog.

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  7. Having read all of your articles, I find that I have been most interested by your graphics (bokeh, DoF blur in Proun) articles. I really like all of the articles you have posted so far though; even the articles that go mostly over my head I can always get some concepts from.

    In any case, I really appreciate all of the time you spend on the blog!

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  8. Hi, thank you for your great! Please, if it is possible create more articles about how to draw and make animation of heroes and their new skills and how to connect it with sounds and shaders ... about how to put life into pictures and environments. I am also interested to listen about option in menu - multithreading. How it exactly affects game engine ? MrHappy

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  9. Hi,
    I have been following this blog for quite some time :).
    Congrats on keeping up delighted with new and interesting posts.
    I recently bought Awesomenouts on steam for me and my friends.
    It is truly an awesome game. Congrats to you and your team for the awesome work you did on it.
    One thing bothers me tho. When I am low on health is it possible to disable the red effect that flashes on the screen. I know I am low on health and i want to stalk an enemy while low like that. It is a deliberate choice. But it's difficult and distracting to play because of the effect. I often need to go back and replenish health because of that efect, thus sometimes loosing a potential kill. (i like stalking other players while invisible).
    I do play dota alot (and dota 2). Often I find myself sitting with a low health near enemies because i know the game and i know i can survive. That effect is basically forcing me to go back home and heal or look for a healing orb. Could I possibly remove it?

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    1. An option would be godsent. ( disable near death warning screen or something )
      Thank you.

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    2. It is just a small change to an if and an ckeckbox entry in the menu.
      It would make a lot of people happy.

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  10. Would be great to know about how to program in such a way that models/games pop-out extra nicely on a 1080p passive 3dmonitor for example gioco? Mrhappytoo

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  11. Honestly, just keep posting high level concepts with a few one-liners and infographics and I'll keep reading.

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  12. It's really interesting for me to know how to release a new title and not "burn out" the team behind. How do you handle so called "crunch time" in your studio? Is it possible to release a quality product without spending all weekends by the dev.toolkit? ;)

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  13. About your romino engine and how was it done.Please

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  14. So I was wondering, how have you (and other devs?) started working in gaming development? What were your backgrounds? How have you found each other? How was it to bunch up and start making something together, wasting your time on it, not even knowing if any publisher would even be interested?

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  15. What an amazingly impossible question, Joost. I've loved all your posts so far, they show a real level of insight into the various processes of making a game. I wouldn't gave anyone up for the world.

    So, no, I don't have a specific topic I'd like you to cover. What I can say is that the thing I like most is how oftentimes the solutions and creative ideas leave me flabbergasted. So anything that achieves that is gold. So, you know, talk about Ronimo and your own projects, as you've been doing. To another good year!

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  16. Thanks for the feedback, folks! I'll try to cover some of the topics you guys requested in the coming months! Feel free to post any more requests! And yes, I will definitely keep posting about all kinds of subjects: the diversity is what I enjoy most, and apparently it is appreciated! ^_^

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  17. Also, here are the results of the poll (107 votes in total):

    Programming 47 (43%)
    Graphics 20 (18%)
    Game / level design 28 (26%)
    Sound / music 2 (1%)
    Business / marketing 9 (8%)
    News / announcements 1 (0%)

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  18. More Awesomenauts-specific stuff, such as post-mortem details about all of the recent characters, would be really nice. Programming and graphics are also great stuff to hear about.

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  19. Just wanted to say I really enjoyed reading the variety of articles that you posted. If you don't mind, I hope you could write about the network architecture of Awesomenauts. Eg. Is it peer-peer or client-server or hybrid. And if its client-server how much of the authoritative work does the server do like verifying player position and collision detection. I'm guessing Awesomenauts has a hybrid model where each client does it own hit detection but only the dedicated server verify the actual damage done and whether the player has the necessary skills and relay it back to the clients?

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    1. I am a bit reluctant to write too much about that, because it might give hackers too much information to make hacking easier. Hackability is also a very important part of deciding on the core networking architecture in general. That is why I haven't written an in-depth article about it.

      In short, though: Awesomenauts is entirely peer-2-peer. The only thing the host does, is manage bots and turrets, decide who wins the match, and manage the game room. Beyond that every player is responsible for his own character.

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    2. I've been curious about this too. I've only seen a couple decent resources on multiplayer programming (valve), and Awesomenauts (PC) seems to have... interesting lag.

      There's been situations where you can't be sure if someone might be hacking, or if it's some form of extreme compensation.

      Would you be able to give more information on what resources you used to decide on going with p2p?

      Comparing to other games, the way Awesomenauts handles multiplayer seems ideal for mobile games.

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