I’m leaving Ronimo, here’s why and what’s next

After 14 years at Ronimo, I’m leaving the company I co-founded. I’l keep making games, but starting this months it’s on my own (and in the future maybe I’ll start a new studio). This news makes me both very sad and very enthusiastic. Sad that I won’t be working with my amazing friends at Ronimo anymore; enthusiastic that I will have total creative freedom to make exactly what I want to make. Today I’d like to share why I’m leaving, and what I’ll be doing next.

The reason I’m leaving is that I want the creative freedom to carry out my own ideas. I have tons of concepts for games, music and art, but I can’t execute them at Ronimo. I might have had a leading role at Ronimo as technical director, producer and co-owner, but when it comes to creative choices, Ronimo is a pretty democratic company: everyone has input on creative choices. That’s great for the creative process: tons of ideas bubble up and stuff that a lot of people are enthusiastic about makes it into the games. However, with 7 founders and a dozen employees that means that my actual creative say wasn’t that large. Especially since Ronimo makes only one game every 3 years.

That used to be fine for me since I had a creative outlet in my spare time. I made Proun, Cello Fortress and The Ageless Gate that way over the years. However, three years ago I became a dad and this has reduced my spare time a lot.

I solo developed Proun and Cello Fortress in my spare time, including code, design, music and 3D art.

The trigger for me to decide to leave Ronimo was a conversation with my wife, Marissa Delbressine. I always write down my ideas in my notebook. However, this became pretty depressing when I realised that I didn’t expect to be able to do anything with all those notes. So I said to Marissa: “I might as well not write down my ideas anymore, since it feels so useless if I can’t do anything with them.” This made her very sad, more than I had expected. Marissa is a creative person herself (she’s a comic artist, currently publishing The Shadow Prophet on Webtoon) so she could imagine the pain of telling yourself not to be creative anymore.

Marissa’s response got me thinking: maybe instead of dropping my own ideas, I should quit Ronimo instead. But I also didn’t want to abandon my friends. So in Autumn 2019 I told the other founders of Ronimo that I wanted to leave, but that I wanted to first finish Blightbound with them. They were sad to see me leave and tried to convince me to stay, but they also supported me in wanting to follow my own path. Their response was heart-warming to me. After all these years the co-founders are still my friends, but I will see them a lot less now. I will miss them dearly, as well as the rest of my former colleagues at Ronimo.

The 7 founders of Ronimo back in 2007, a few months after we founded the company. I'm on the left, lacking both a beard and grey hair back then.

Since people often leave their company because of frustrations or disagreements I would like to stress that that’s not the case here. I just want full creative freedom to explore my ideas, and that’s the only reason for my departure. I still love the folks at Ronimo and I plan to keep hanging out with them regularly (well, once the current pandemic dies down, I guess).

When I first talked about this with the other founders, we still thought I would be able to leave Ronimo in Summer 2020. But Blightbound got delayed and I decided to finish the game with the team. Then the game got delayed some more, and we agreed to set a final date, since I got restless as my departure kept moving. That date is now. As of this month I don’t actively work for Ronimo and I don’t have any management responsibilities anymore.

Blightbound, which is currently in Early Access on Steam.

So, what will I be doing next? I mentioned I had tons of ideas, so I won’t be spending any time brainstorming or soul-searching. Instead, I’ve started already. My plan is to spend the next year learning new tech and skills and doing a bunch of smaller projects. After that I want to start making a bigger game that will hopefully be the start of a new studio.

I’ve already taken the first step last week: I’ve finally released my album The Ageless Gate. I’ve been working on this album for years and it’s great to finally get it out there. It’s available on all the streaming services, with links to all of them here. The Ageless Gate is an instrumental concept album with lots of cello and a narrator that tells an overarching story in short fragments at the starts of the songs. It’s quite a unique thing and I hope it will find an audience!

Here's a preview of Sandrider, an intense cello trio and the opening song of The Ageless Gate.

As for the coming year, for now these are the smaller projects I intend to do:

• Finish the Steam version of Cello Fortress. This should become playable with any musical instrument (instead of just cello) and won’t require an audience to play against anymore.
• I’ll apply for a government grant to experiment with my procedural music system and to turn that into a streaming radio station.
• Make a minimalist railroad building game.
• Make a crowd physics puzzle game with ballet and monsters, inspired by the art of the Dufy brothers.

I also intend to learn a lot of new stuff. The main big things will be switching to Unreal Engine and Blender and learning the ins and outs of both. I also plan to expand my knowledge of UI design, design of management games and economies, task-based multithreaded programming and data-oriented code.

Then later on I hope to start working on a bigger 3D management/building game. I have a bunch of concepts for such games lying around and I currently tend towards one of the sci-fi ideas. I hope to build a bigger studio around this, focussing on high-quality 3D management games, similar in production value to games like Frostpunk, Planet Coaster and Two Point Hospital. I hope I’ll be ready to start pitching to investors with that in a few years.

It will undoubtedly take quite a while before all of these plans start making me a decent income. However, I’ve always been rather frugal, so I’ve collected enough savings that I can survive on those for long enough.

One thing you can see here is that I plan to do a LOT. Way too much, probably. I think this is going to be my biggest challenge from now on: keeping the scope of my projects small and limiting my expectations of how much I can do in a week. For years I’ve bottled up so many ideas and plans that I want too much too fast now. I’ve noticed that I’m already experiencing some stress because of how much I want to do, so keeping my plans realistic and doable in a chill manner is going to be my biggest challenge.

A clear split between work and leisure is going to be paramount to that, since up until now my hobby projects were my leisure. Now that they’ve become my work, I should make sure to not become a gamedev monomaniac. I’m sure my wife and son will help keep me grounded though, so I expect this will turn out fine.

I would like to conclude by thanking all my friends at Ronimo for 14 years of great fun. Thanks for everything I’ve learned from you and thanks for sharing all the lows and highs of making games together. I’m sure I will miss the banter and the laughter at the office most!

On my last day at Ronimo, the art team chose me as the theme for their biweekly sketching session. I love the resulting portraits! Art by, from top to bottom: Gijs Witkamp, Koen Gabriels, Ella Kremer and Gijs Hermans.

5 years below minimum wage: the financial history of Ronimo

Starting your own game company is fun and exciting, but it’s also challenging. It takes courage and skill, but above all: patience and perseverance. Some become successful quickly, but in many cases it takes years to achieve financial success and actually make a decent living out of your own game company. It might take long to make your first product or get your first deal, and that first achievement might only be a stepping stone towards a next step that brings financial stability. Today I’d like to show an example of just how long that can take by sharing the financials of the first five years of Ronimo, the company I co-founded with 6 friends nearly 14 years ago.

TLDR: The very short summary is this: it took us 2 years to make any money from Ronimo at all, 4 years to earn (almost) our country’s official minimum wage and 6 years to receive a more decent monthly salary from our own company. During that period we were near bankruptcy twice. Why did it take so long? Read on and you shall know!

A note before I continue: this blogpost is partially about how long it took us to “make a decent living”, but the cost of living differs hugely per country. The Netherlands is a wealthy country so cost of living is relatively high. A quick internet search shows that cost of living is much higher in some countries and only half in others. Since most revenue is worldwide, the same sales might mean financial stability in one place, but not enough to pay the rent in another.

Also, for anyone used to reading US dollars instead of euros: if you just replace the € sign with a $ sign, you’re in the right ballpark (especially given that the exchange rates between dollars and euros have varied a lot over the years).

In our second year of studying at the Utrecht School of the Arts our classmate Fabian Akker brought up the idea of starting a company together, with a group. Around that time we had done a couple of school projects that had failed quite miserably, so my first thought was: “we suck, let’s not.” However, the third year was to bring the first major game project, so we figured that if we could make something awesome there, then maybe we could also start a company making our own games.

The resulting game was De Blob: a huge success! We put it online and got attention from gaming press and even had some publishers contacting us, wondering whether they could buy the rights to De Blob.

(Note that De Blob was not exactly made by Ronimo: of the 9 students who made De Blob, only 5 were part of the 7 founders of Ronimo.)

Convinced by De Blob’s success, we decided to really go through with starting our own company. However, each of us still had to do a 7 months graduation project. We combined them and made starting Ronimo our graduation project. Getting school to approve of that was a bit of a struggle, but once they did, we even got our own office inside school.

At the time, 'indie' as it's known today hardly existed and we had definitely never heard of it. We thought the only way was to make retail games and that required funding from a publisher. So we set out to make a pitchable prototype: Snowball Earth. This was intended to be a Nintendo Wii game and we hoped to find publisher funding once we had graduated. At this point Ronimo didn’t make any money at all, but that was okay since we were still students.

September 2007. We were so focussed on pitching to publishers that we did our graduation stuff on the side and crunched for what came a few weeks later: Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany! There we pitched to at least a dozen publishers. Some were interested and continued conversations with us afterwards. Hopeful, we continued work on the game, looking to improve it and increase our chances of signing a deal.

Our very first presentation was for a then pretty famous person from a big company. He was so excited that… he feel asleep during out presentation. Jet lag. Or disinterest. Or both. When we woke him up, he proceeded to try to sell us his own middleware and hardly looked at our game.

By this time we had graduated and had moved to our own office in Utrecht. A very small office for 7 people, but it was cosy and exciting. What we didn’t have, however, was money. We did some minor work-for-hire jobs, but since we weren’t fully committed to that, we hardly made any money there. Just enough to pay the rent of our office, but definitely not enough to provide ourselves with any income.

This is something I've seen quite a lot: studios who want to make their own games and finance that with work-for-hire rarely succeed at both. Either they hardly make any money from the work-for-hire, or they spend so much time on that that they can hardly focus on their own game. Often the result is that the game takes many years to build and turns out mediocre because of the lack of focus and time. The reason for this is simple: doing work-for-hire well and making it lucrative is hard and it's rare for that to work as an aside, especially for inexperienced recent graduates.

So, we didn’t make any money and we weren’t students anymore. How did we not starve? This varied amongst the founders. First of all, in September 2007 we managed to sell all the rights to De Blob to THQ, a then major publisher that’s now defunct. (Note that THQ Nordic is a different company that later bought the rights to the name and games of THQ, including De Blob.) For this we were each paid a nice amount (can’t disclose it due to NDA unfortunately), enough to pay the rent for quite a while. However, only 5 of the 7 Ronimo founders were part of the De Blob team, so 2 others didn’t have this.

Six of the founders had an additional source of income: the now defunct WWIK government subsidy. This paid recent art graduates around €600 per month. That’s less than half of the official minimum wage in the Netherlands at the time, but enough to not starve. To live cheaply, three of Ronimo’s founders rented an apartment together with one more person.

I personally didn’t get WWIK because I had some savings and thus didn’t qualify, so I went even cheaper: I kept living with my mum until I was 26 years old. I have a lovely mum though so I totally didn’t mind. Thanks, mum!

This is also a good moment to mention how privileged we are to be doing this in the Netherlands. In many places in the world all of this would have been much harder.

So, how did the pitching go? A few publishers were interested and one even flew over to do due diligence: judging whether we would really be able to make the full game. In the end none of them actually offered us a deal because Snowball Earth was too unique and we were too inexperienced to be trusted with that much money. We were asking for €1.5m development budget. Not much for the big game we envisioned, but definitely too much to give to a bunch of students who had so little clue about business and production processes.

Snowball Earth was too big a game to finish without funding, so we ended up cancelling it altogether. Years later we did release our prototypes, which you can still find here together with videos and screenshots.

What next, then? By this time indie was on the rise and we had managed to get Nintendo Wii devkits. We decided to make something small that we could finish and publish ourselves: Swords & Soldiers for WiiWare (the predecessor of the current Nintendo eShop).

We estimated we could make this game in 3 months. One year later, we finished and launched it. I’m still impressed that we managed to make something of that size and quality in just one year, and I’m even more impressed that we were stupid enough to think we could make something like that in just 3 months...

Throughout this year we still didn’t make any money, but we did hire interns. In the Netherlands internships are a standard part of many schools and are not paid like normal jobs. So for only €200 per month we could have a game student work for us full-time. Despite that low compensation, those interns were getting more money from Ronimo than we were! On average, we had 2 or 3 interns at a time helping with development.

In May 2009 Swords & Soldiers launched on Nintendo Wii. It got critical acclaim, reached the #1 selling spot on WiiWare in Europe and #3 in America. In total it sold 30k copies and made €146k during the first year (and very little on WiiWare afterwards). A big success for us at the time, but not that much money in retrospect.

In August 2009, after 2.5 years of working full-time with seven people, we were finally able to pay ourselves a monthly income. A whopping €600 per month! Oh wait, that’s super little… but it certainly felt like a big step forward!

Something we hadn’t realised yet at the time is the importance of porting our games to different platforms. That is, until Sony offered us money to make a PlayStation 3 port of Swords & Soldiers, including multiplayer.

To make this port and continue work on our next game OMG Space! (which would later be renamed to Awesomenauts) we needed more programmers. Up until this point I had been the only programmer at Ronimo (besides interns) and that wasn’t enough to make a port and a new game. We hired two programmers. Unlike us, those coders were paid real wages (though not very high ones). And so, while we the founders finally made more than our interns, we instead now had employees who made way more than us.

In September 2010 Swords & Soldiers released as a downloadable game on PlayStation 3. Unfortunately it didn’t make break even, so the only money we made from this was the initial porting budget we got from Sony.

Now that we realised that porting is a super important source of revenue, we also ported Swords & Soldiers to Steam and released that in December 2010. Making a port is only a fraction of the effort of making a full game, and every new platform is a new roll of the dice: a new chance at success. And indeed, while the PS3 version hardly sold, the Steam version would make us €120k in its first year and €35k in its second year.

Now that we had employees and paid ourselves a little bit, we had significant monthly costs. Too much to carry ourselves, so we were looking for a publisher for Awesomenauts. Near the end of 2010 this was becoming dire: we were only a few months away from being out of money altogether.

We were saved when we signed a publishing deal with DTP (yet another company that doesn’t exist anymore). The total development budget we got from them was €300k. Not much for a game of this size, but it was a lot for us! As is common, we received that money spread out over milestones and not all at once.

Awesomenauts was a very ambitious project, with complex multiplayer and simultaneously launching on two platforms that were new to us (Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3). We needed more programmers to pull that off. Good thing the budget we got from the publisher allowed us to grow a bit more. In the first half of 2011 we hired two more programmers and a producer, bringing the team’s total size to 12 full time employees. On top of that we usually also had 3 or 4 interns working with us.

The funding also allowed us to finally pay ourselves almost minimum wage: €1400 per month. Still less than our employees got, but at least we felt like we were finally making real money.

In March 2012 we managed to secure some additional income: Swords & Soldiers was included in the Humble Android Bundle and this made us €37k. Towards the end of the year it got included as a bonus in another Humble Android Bundle, making us another €10k.

This money was needed desperately, since Awesomenauts had seen numerous delays at this point. I don’t remember the exact original planned release date, but I think in total the console release got delayed by around half a year. The publisher didn’t give us extra budget for that, so we had to make do with the money we had.

In May 2012 Awesomenauts finally launched on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. But not before our publisher DTP went insolvent a mere week for launch. This made everything extremely complex and we didn’t know whether we would see any royalties at all. We got lucky: we had some unreleased DLC they wanted so we managed to strike a deal with the trustee for the insolvency so that the DLC would be released and we would still get royalties.

Nevertheless, Awesomenauts initially didn’t sell all that well on consoles and it took long before we got any royalties at all. We were nearly out of money but had one more card to play: a Steam port of Awesomenauts. Finances were so tight that we couldn’t pay ourselves anymore for a short period. We continued to pay our employees though, so only the founders were hit.

Then in August 2012 Awesomenauts launched on Steam and this version turned out to sell way better than the console versions. We were saved! And we had gotten lucky again with our publisher: since DTP was insolvent, they couldn’t pay for development of the Steam port of Awesomenauts, and thus we got the full rights to that version.

Awesomenauts kept doing very well so we supported it for 5 more years with tons of additional content. It also allowed us to finally switch what type of company we were: we switched from being a V.O.F. to a B.V. These are Dutch legal terms so let's not go into the details here. What it comes down to, is that a V.O.F. is strongly tied to the owners’ personal finances. If the company goes bankrupt, so does the owner personally. Being a B.V. is much safer, since now the company can go bankrupt without giving creditors the right to come after your personal belongings as well.

Being a B.V. does come with a requirement here in the Netherlands: unless you have good reason not to, the company needed to pay the active owners at least €2300 per month (after taxes). So in February 2013, six years after we started the company, we finally started to make a wage significantly higher than minimum wage. And even then it wasn’t that much: this excludes some insurances that are standard for employees but not for owners, and for me personally as a programmer: I’m pretty sure I could have made more had I worked elsewhere.

As far as I can tell, most game startups take several years to become financially successful. I think it might have taken us longer than most, but we made it at all and that’s already special. In fact, since the 'indiepocalypse' happened a few years ago most people who start a game company never manage to make a living at all (as I've previously said: the future of indie is amateur). With Ronimo we were lucky that we happened to start our company at a time when indie was hip and happening and it was relatively easy to reach players. Today, competition is much tougher than it was when we started, so chances of success are lower as well.

What’s the moral of this very long story? It’s simple: to start a game company, you don’t need just skill, vision and bravery, but also perseverance and a willingness to make little money for a long while.

So much awesome news in the week Ronimo turns 7!

Today Ronimo Games turns 7. Seven years old already, it definitely doesn't feel like we have been around for so long already! This week was also marked by the biggest amount of awesome news in a single week so far, so let's have a look.

Most importantly, we announced our new game: Swords & Soldiers II for WiiU. This game has been in the works since November 2011, so it is good to finally reveal it. Right now we are not discussing any specifics yet: more information will come at GDC in a couple of weeks, where press will be able to play it. What I can say right now is that I think the game looks incredible and I am really stunned at the quality of the graphics and animations that our art team has been creating.



It is pretty incredible to read online that the original Swords & Soldiers has so many people who remember it fondly. These are just some of the heart-warming quotes I saw in the comments beneath news articles about the sequel:

-"Hp hip hooray. One of my all time favorite games finally getting a sequel. Can't wait."
-"Ooh, nice! The original was great!"
-"Love it. LOVE IT."
-"Got up, read this = instantly made my day :D Awesome, The original is one of my all time favourite WiiWare titles."
-"Swords and Soldiers was the most underrated wii ware game. This is great news."
-"the original title was one of the WiiWare's hidden gems"

We thought the Kickstarter backers of Awesomenauts Starstorm might have some questions about how this relates to Starstorm, so we put up a public statement explaining how long Swords & Soldiers II has been in development and how we have been growing the team to 21 people to make both projects happen simultaneously. In fact, two new programmers will be starting next Monday! This is also a new challenge for me personally: the Ronimo coding team will now be 7 people and I have never been lead programmer to so many people at once. I am looking forward to this new experience!



Another big announcement is that we finally have a release date for Awesomenauts Assemble on PS4! It took a while to get all the bugs ironed out, but Abstraction Games made a great port and we are really looking forward to playing next-gen Awesomenauts.



This week we also released patch 2.2 for Awesomenauts on Steam. This is a smaller in-between patch that mostly fixes a lot of bugs and improves the balance. It contains one bug-fix that we have been looking for for ages: the infamous sliding bug should be gone now. This was a complex synchronisation bug that is interesting enough that I will be writing a separate blogpost about it soon to discuss the cause and the solutions we tried.

Patch 2.2 also added collecting of anonymous gameplay metrics, so we now have a much better view of how people play the game and how characters and individual items are balanced. For example, we can now actually see how many people play splitscreen, or Custom Games or Baby Kuri Mammoth.



Together with patch 2.2 we also revealed Voltar's Vault. Voltar's Vault is a device that we use to overheat and cook player's brains with anticipation for the awesome new things coming to Awesomenauts. Deliciously cooked brains, they taste so good!



The final bit of news is that the Clunk figurines finally arrived in our office. They turned out much slicker and bigger than I had expected when we started work on this. Very cool! European pre-orderers should mostly have received them by now, while Kickstarter backers and American pre-orderers will have to wait a while longer until they have been shipped to them. This whole process of shipping and physical production is new to us and we are trying to have them delivered to everyone as soon as we can. You can order one these brutal robots over here.

A wise man once said that the final goal of any game developer is to have action figures of his games. Seems like I am ready for retirement now!

Shining a light on how pitching to publishers works

When at Ronimo we released the prototype for our cancelled project Snowball Earth last week, I mentioned that we pitched it to tons of publishers. So what is that like, pitching to publishers?

In the past five years we did a lot of pitching for a lot of different projects. Despite that the pitches for Snowball Earth were not successful enough to land us a deal, we did get the hang of it enough to get some good deals going: we managed to sign Swords & Soldiers HD for PS3 with Sony, and we managed to sign Awesomenauts for XBLA and PS3 with DTP. We learned a lot from our contacts at publishers on how the process works, and today I would like to share that.

Before I start this story, please note that pitching can have many forms. For small distribution-only deals, things can be a lot simpler than this, and each publisher will have his own way of handling things. This text is my impression of how it works when you want to sign a larger title and want not just distribution, but also a serious development budget to be part of the deal.

The first step is what most people think of when they think of "pitching": a meeting with someone from a publisher, where you show your project and hope to get their interest. Most of these meetings happen at big events, like Gamescom and GDC. They usually last exactly half an hour, as the publisher is having meetings all day, every 30 minutes. The person at the publisher you talk to, is often called the "acquisition manager". Events like GDC are very exhaustive for him/her: seeing a new pitch every 30 minutes for three days, easily means listening to fifty pitches!

Getting an appointment for such a pitch is not very difficult. For our first pitches of Snowball Earth we just emailed a ton of publishers about a month before the event, and quite a few were willing to see what we got. If you want to meet one specific publisher, it can be difficult to get to the right person, but if you just mail a ton of publishers, then getting 10 to 20 different appointments at an event like Gamescom is quite doable. When we did our first pitches we hardly had any track record and we still managed to do around 15 pitches in only three days.



Note that arranging an appointment at the event itself is a lot more difficult, since most agendas will be full already. It is always possible to arrange a couple of extra meetings on the spot, though.

Many people claim that it is important to first check whether a publisher is doing stuff in your field, and of course it is, but this shouldn't be a restriction. Publishers are often shifting from one market to another and it is not always possible to know they are doing this. For example, when we pitched to DTP, they hardly had any presence in the console downloadable market, but they were apparently shifting in that direction and launched several such games in the years after we signed with them.

At a first pitch, you don't need a lot of details yet. You need to show the game and communicate why it is going to be awesome. Details are not important. A rough ballpark figure for the development budget and when the game would launch is enough at this point: details will be discussed later, and only if the publisher turns out to actually be interested in the game.

A common remark from publishers is that a pitch does not require a fancy playable prototypes. They claim to be interested in awesome concepts in their early stages as well. In our experience, this is only true for experienced studios. If you don't have a proven track record yet, then you need to compensate for that and having anything less than a really cool, playable demo makes it impossible to get a deal with anyone.

As I said, the publisher-person you pitch to is usually called an "acquisition manager". This person's role is a bit more complex than I realised beforehand. Of course, at first you just need to make him (since I never met a female acquisition manager, I will use "him" here instead of "her") enthusiastic about your game and interested in signing it. The acquisition manager is the gatekeeper: if you can't get him to like your game, then he won't show it internally to his colleagues and you definitely won't sign a deal.

However, the acquisition manager is not the person who can actually greenlight a project. For that, the game needs to be approved by several departments inside the publisher:

• The marketing department needs to see how they could reach an audience with this game.
• The sales department will want to calculate how much sales the game is likely to make. Of course, this is impossible to know beforehand, but they can for example look at how similar games did in the past and base an estimate on that. The expected sales should of course be higher than the budget. The budget does not only contain the development fee that the developer might be asking, but also things like marketing, localisation and QA.
• The content specialists (I don't know whether there is an official name for these) need to agree that this is going to be a good enough game and that the mechanics will work in a full game.
• The producers need to check the studio to see whether the team is good enough to actually finish this game and get it through all technical checks.
• Due diligence: the publisher is going to check whether the developer's company and team are stable enough that the developer is, for example, not going to go bankrupt in the middle of development.

To sign a game, each of these departments need to agree that it is a good idea to do so. So just having a good game is not good enough. You really need to raise enthusiasm on a lot of fields outside the game itself to make it work.

Now where does the acquisition manager stand in all this? If he likes the game enough that he wants to take the next step, then he is going to show the game to all the other departments to try to get a greenlight from each of them. This brings the acquisition manager into a wholly different position than one might expect. Suddenly he is not the person you need to persuade, but the person who is going to persuade others on your behalf! If you can make him love your game, the acquisition manager is your most important friend inside the publisher!

Therefore, if the game is good enough that you can get beyond the first pitch, then it is key to provide the acquisition manager with all the info and material he needs to pitch the game internally. If you showed him a trailer during the pitch, then he will also need that trailer to show the game to his colleagues. Schedules, budgets, track record, prototypes, design documents, concept art, trailers: the acquisition manager is going to need all the good stuff to pitch the game internally, and as a developer you need to provide it to him.

We got deeply into this stage with Snowball Earth with a couple of publishers, and the first part of this trailer (which I posted two weeks ago) was made specifically to show their marketing departments what kind of vibe their advertisements could have.



Having explained what departments need to greenlight the game, where did Snowball Earth fail? I think almost everywhere. Successful 3D platformers are a rare genre, so the sales department might not think the game is going to make enough money. Since the game had some innovative mechanics, it was even more difficult for them to estimate how it would sell. (This is a general trend we see in publishers: our games always have unique, innovative elements and publishers don't really understand those until the game is quite far along in production.) Marketing didn't know how to sell a game that was so split between more serious and more kiddy mechanics and graphics. And above all, the producers will have noted that at that point, no one in our team had ever released a full commercial game or touched a console devkit...

If all the steps above go right, the result is "greenlight": the publisher decides they want to sign the game! After this come negotiations for the rough deal, followed by the draft contract and negotiations about contract details. And then, finally: a signed deal, which will hopefully result in a good game and budget!

The history of Snowball Earth - now playable!

Today we release the complete playable prototype of our cancelled game Snowball Earth! This is the game that we worked on at Ronimo for a full year before we made Swords & Soldiers. Since Snowball Earth was never finished, we never really talked about it either and kept the prototype hidden. Such a waste! The prototype contains over an hour of gameplay and some really cool ideas, so it is awesome to finally show it to the world!

Snowball Earth is a really interesting game, both in how it failed and in the things it did well, so it provides tons of material for future blogposts. Today: what it is, and why it was cancelled!

Download:
Snowball Earth Prototype

Note that because this is an early prototype, this is all pretty unpolished! No tutorial, ridiculously long loading times, quite a few bugs and it only plays well with an Xbox 360 controller. However, the concepts of the game are really interesting and work well, so give it a try!


The trailer that we made early 2008 to pitch the game to publishers. Showing the player in the trailer was all the hype in Wii commercials at the time, so we tried a bit of that here.

Snowball Earth was our first official game as Ronimo Games. De Blob was not entirely made with the same team, and for Snowball Earth we had decided to really start our own company and make a commercial game. We were still students at the time, and this was our group-graduation-project. After we graduated, we kept working on it, but mainly on extra stuff, like the puzzles prototype that is also in the Torrent. The main game that we are releasing today was basically our graduation project at the Utrecht School of the Arts, and it was also our official start as a company.



Snowball Earth was to be a console game for the Wii or the Xbox 360. A 3D adventure in the style of Ratchet & Clank, although for our first game we wanted to keep things a bit simpler and more doable than the fantastic Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools Of Destruction, which launched around that time, and was a big inspiration for us.

After the colouring gameplay of De Blob, we wanted to find some new innovative mechanics, and went all out on that. So much so, that we ended up with not one, but two really interesting mechanics. These two mechanics are not just what makes Snowball Earth shine, but also its downfall...

The first and most striking mechanic is the melting. The entire world is frozen, and the player melts the snow by simply moving through it. This is a pretty spectecular effect: snow turns into puddles and then into grass, plants pop up everywhere and the ice disappears from the rocks. It is quite a sight to behold, and simply walking around while transforming the world around you is already a lot of fun.


When melting is enabled, everything around the player comes to life. I consider this completely dynamic system one of the most impressive things we have made so far. It was also an enormous amount of handwork to create, though...

The sound effects for Snowball Earth were made by Aline Bruijns, and the music by Erik van Woudenberg. They graduated in audio in the same year as we graduated in game development, and they did some great sound work on Snowball Earth! Aline later started the sound studio Audio Rally Sound Design.


Click for high resolution

By now several other games have done kind of similar mechanics, like Prince of Persia 2008's restoration of life after a boss has been killed. The effect there is a lot less dynamic, but it was still kind off odd to see a game release with a similar idea after we had already cancelled our own take on it. (By the way, I absolutely love that Prince of Persia game, definitely my favourite in the series! I think it's a very rare open-world platforming gem!)



The other unique mechanic of Snowball Earth are the Robodogs. These are little robots that run along with the player. When you shoot them with the right stick, they become physics balls and can be used as projectiles in combat, or to get them to spots where the player cannot go. The player can press the right trigger to pull them back. This allowed for some great combat and puzzles. For example, hitting enemies in the back does extra damage, so deliberately shooting your Robodogs past an enemy and then pulling them to hit him in the back is a great tactic, and a lot of fun to do.


The physics gameplay with the Robodogs turning into balls.

In terms of story, the premise was as weird as one would expect of a Ronimo game. In prehistoric times, a little alien robot on an orbiting spaceship accidentally pressed the wrong button and thus froze the entire earth! As punishment, he is sent down to fix his mistake. He goes looking for sources of heat, like volcanoes, to melt the snow. However, during his quest he finds strange fridges everywhere, and discovers that he has been deceived: a fridge manufacturing company has illegally sold all these fridges to the yetis, and this is what really froze the earth! On his epic quest, our little hero must battle the evil polar animals, close all the fridges, and prove his innocence!

With the two unique mechanics and all the hard work that went into Snowball Earth, why was the game cancelled? The answer is quite simple: no publisher was willing to fund the game, and it was too big to make ourselves. We pitched to all the big publishers: dozens of meetings at Gamescom 2007 and GDC 2008. Quite a few liked the game and kept communications with us going, and some even invited us to do internal pitches to the entire team in their offices, but in the end no one wanted to really go with this.



I think there were two main reasons why publishers didn't want to fund us. The most important was properly that we had no track record. Making a big 3D game with a team that has no console experience whatsoever is an extremely risky endeavour, and no publisher would want to fund that until we had proven that we could actually finish a game on console.

At the time I was totally convinced that we could make this game, but right now I am very happy that no one funded us. We wanted to make the game in only 1.5 years, and wanted to grow the team from 7 to 15 developers for that. Just finding 8 experienced developers is already a difficult challenge... Let alone finishing such a big game with such an inexperienced team!

Swords & Soldiers and Awesomenauts were both much more realistic plans than Snowball Earth, and they both took way longer than we expected. If we had actually started making Snowball Earth, it would probably have taken us at least 3 years to make it. In fact, with our current team (13 full-time developers plus a number of interns) and my current experience (two multi-platform console titles), we still wouldn't be able to make this in 1.5 years. Snowball Earth was just way too big for our team size and total lack of experience at the time...


Click for high resolution

The other reason publishers didn't want to fund the game, is that it was a difficult sell to their marketing departments. What similar games were out there, and had been a success? At that point 3D platforming had not been a big market for years (except for Mario Galaxy, of course), and our game also had all these original mechanics that could not be easily compared to other marketing campaigns.

Of course, I know now that making weird stuff is a good way to gain attention and thus great marketing for indie studios like us, so I don't necessarily agree with these marketing arguments. But there is another, deeper problem within Snowball Earth: the mechanics around the Robodogs were all pretty complex, and thus for a slightly more mature audience. The melting mechanics, however, were very kids-friendly, but didn't bring us any gameplay depth besides the simple fun of walking around melting everything. So our two innovative gameplay concepts just didn't mingle all that well. Now add that our main characters were robots, and that robots just don't work for mass audiences. Except in Wall-e, of course, but that's not enough to go by.

We tried addressing these issues by focussing more on the physics gameplay. So after we had graduated and had finished the main prototype, our game designers made a whole bunch of puzzle levels. They bundled those in a prototype level with hardly any graphics, but some really interesting gameplay. This level is much less polished, and the physics are not precise enough for such puzzles, but it does show the great potential of these mechanics. With more time, I think we could have turned that into a great 3rd person physics puzzler. These puzzles are pretty difficult with all their bugs and the lack of a tutorial, but I still think the ideas are great, so they have been included as a second level in the version of the game that we are releasing today.


Some gameplay from the puzzles level of Snowball Earth.

To react to the publisher critique on the robots, we also made tons of designs for non-robot characters. We have some absolutely ridiculous concept art of dogs in round spacesuits, so I will post those soon as well!

After a year of work on the game and no money and no publisher, we finally got access to Wii devkits. This allowed us to start developing Snowball Earth on console, so that we could finally prove to publishers that we could actually make this game. However, what if publishers still didn't want the game at that point? Then we would have wasted even more time on what already seemed like a failed project! So we decided to cancel Snowball Earth altogether, and start working on something smaller, something that we could actually finish ourselves, on those Wii devkits that we got. The became a little game called Swords & Soldiers...

(Of course, the history from then on was paved with a lot more success: Swords & Soldiers came out on Wii, PS3, PC, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android, and got great reviews and won several awards. Awesomenauts was recently released on PS3, 360 and PC, again to great reviews. Seeing Snowball Earth fail because it was too big, was exactly the lesson we needed to learn to keep it smaller and more doable in our next games!)

Cancelled game Snowball Earth playable at Indigo

In 2007, after we had made De Blob, we worked on a big game that was intended to be the first real commercial game by Ronimo Games. It was called: Snowball Earth. However, we couldn't find a publisher for it and the game was cancelled. After that, we went on to make Swords & Soldiers.

Since the game was cancelled, we never showed it to anyone after that. However, this weekend at Indigo, the prototype we made at the time will be playable! It is a 30 minute completely playable demo that shows the visual style and gameplay we were aiming for.



We will soon release a lot more information on what this game was all about, and even the complete playable prototype! I think it has some great original and unique gameplay ideas, so I am actually looking forward to showing those to the world! However, for the moment, enjoy these two screenshots!



To play Snowball Earth this weekend, visit Indigo! Indigo is a yearly exhibition by Dutch Game Garden that shows the best new work by Dutch game developers. This year it is held in Utrecht's town hall, at Korte Minrebroederstraat 2. On September 28 it is open mainly for press and business people, while on September 29 it is open to the general public. Entrance to Indigo is free, so be sure to visit and give Snowball Earth a try! Awesomenauts and my new project Cello Fortress will also be playable at Indigo!

Visit Indigo if you want to give Snowball Earth a try, or follow this blog for more info soon!

How to really involve a larger team in the creative process

At Ronimo we strongly believe in involving the entire team as much as possible in the creative process of game development. No matter whether someone is a lead, a developer or an intern, everyone's opinion is valuable. This is, however, an incredibly difficult thing to do. In the past months we had 16 people working in our office. That means sixteen different opinions, and even just understanding each of them is already incredibly difficult, especially when it comes to difficult-to-explain graphical concepts. Let alone if you want those 16 people to agree, or to least all feel like their voice has been heard and seriously weighed in.

There are two big problems involved in this, and this blogpost outlines a method that tries to work around both:
-A decision might be made without really taking everyone's opinion into account.
-The process might take endlessly, as everyone has a different opinion and we keep trying to find a middle ground.

So today I would like to talk about the way we do that at Ronimo for our art styles. Since we started on De Blob 6.5 years ago (when we were still in school) we have been in a series of larger game projects and in each project we have learned more about how this works best for us. To keep this blogpost focussed, I am only going to talk about art style development today.

Before I start out, let me first note that this is a very flexible process for us. We don't follow a step-by-step plan and we constantly adapt to what works in the current situation. This blogpost is just my analysis of how this practically pans out for us, and since I think it works quite well, I figured other creative teams might have a use for this information.

Step 0: Communicate visually
This is not really a step in itself, but more a general concept. Describing art styles in words is incredibly difficult and in practice always ends in everyone having a different vision in their minds. So we try to communicate visually as much as possible. We don't do art style meetings or brainstorms without a computer with internet at hand, so that references can always be shown and pointed at. Clear communication is key and visual concepts should be communicated visually.

Step 1: Collect inspiration
We usually already have a rough gameplay concept before we start on the art style, and that means that most people also already have some ideas about how the game should look. So we start by making a topic on our internal forum where everyone just posts inspirational images. Images can come from any source (movies, comics, art, concept art, other games), and may contain just a couple of interesting elements, or be relevant in their entirety. Since posting other people's images does not require any drawing skills, even programmers can easily propose styles here.

Step 2: Create concept art
Our forum topic will quickly contain several dozen images and ideas. From those our artists create a series of completely different designs, trying to take in all the ideas. This should result in wildly different images. The art team tries to also express the ideas that they personally don't like. Everyone's views ought to be represented here somewhere.


(Check this previous blogpost for bigger versions of these images.)

Step 2b: Forum feedback
While the art team is making concept art, they regularly post their results on our internal forum, and everyone can add suggestions for variations and changes.

Step 3: The big feedback meeting
Now that we have around 10 vastly different designs, we do a big meeting with the entire team, around a big screen that shows the images. Since this is a meeting with the entire team, it can easily take several hours. First the art team shows each image and gives some background info on what their ideas were with it. Then we do a round where everyone in turn gets to express their opinions and elect a couple of favourites. Our producer writes down the votes and at the end we discuss the results.

Letting everyone speak in turn here is very important for this meeting: an open discussion with 16 people always has some people constantly talking, and some others who never say anything. Giving everyone a turn gives more equal weight to different personalities.

Step 4: Iterate on the favourites
Usually the meeting has not resulted in a single image that everyone is happy with. So the art team takes the two or three favourites and makes variations on these, taking into account any feedback given during the meeting or on the forum (e.g. "How about style B, but with more colour and with that tough guy from style D"). Again, results are posted and discussed on our internal forum.

Step 5: Make a final choice
Now we do another meeting like in Step 3, only this time with the goal of in the end choosing the final style. First we discuss a bit, then we do a vote where everyone can elect his 2 favourites. The style with the most votes ends up in the game.


(Check this blogpost for more on why this style was cancelled in the end.)

Step 6: Make game!
The process is done and we have a style and theme! Woohoo! The art team can now start working on designing all the different characters, elements and levels in the game, and on trying to get the style working in our engine.

A key thing to understand here, is that this process involves a limited number of meetings with the entire team, and each meeting has a clear goal. Since we usually cannot reach a unanimous decision, voting is used to make sure we never end up without a conclusion. These limitations guard us from iterating endlessly based on all the different (and shifting!) opinions.

With sixteen people in the team, the end result will rarely be a unanimous decision. However, by involving everyone in the team, and by making the art team make designs that incorporate everyone's opinions (even the ones the art team does not actually like themselves) we have a process that really gives everyone a voice and gives even the weirdest ideas a change to flourish.

Monster Truck VS Zombies - A cancelled Ronimo project

At Ronimo Games we make lots of stuff that is never released or shown outside our office. Kind of a pity, really, because quite a lot of that is really cool! So I am really happy that today I can show one of the cancelled projects that I personally like most: the insane mockup trailer we made in May 2009 for Monster Truck VS Zombies!



This is a pitch video we did for a big mobile publisher (can't say who, since that's confidential). They wanted fresh games for something, and in a couple of days we came up with a concept, made concept art and produced a pitch video to show all of that.

This was to be a really small game, so we came up with a slightly simpler concept than what you usually see from Ronimo. The idea was to make a side-scrolling stunt-driving game, much like Excite Bike and Trials. You drive a giant monster truck and the goal is to kill zombies through stunt kills. After each level you can buy upgrades and weapons for your truck and driver. But really, the video says at all, so just have a look:



The music is Sad Man's Tonque by Volbeat. Since this is just a pitch video and not an actual product, we used an existing song that fits the game.

The art in this video was of course made by our art team, but I got lucky and could animate the gameplay sequence in the middle (the part with the stick figures ;) ) and do the video montage. Since I am lead programmer at Ronimo, it rarely works to let me do art things: it is impractical for our planning and our artists are way better at it than I am. However, I really enjoy the rare moments when there is an opportunity for me to do some 3D art, animation or lighting! :)

As far as pitch-videos for new concepts go, I think this is a pretty good one. I think it communicates both the style and the actual gameplay pretty well. Through the choice of music and the logo and concept art, it gives a good feel for how the player will experience it.

The gameplay mock-up video in the middle shows what the actual gameplay will be. We deliberately made this with stick figures, so that it is absolutely clear that this is not the graphical style the game would have. Since we wanted to make this video in only a couple of days, trying to show what the real graphics would look like in the final game during gameplay would not have worked: it is simply too much work to make that on a high enough quality level. In practice, it is always difficult for a viewer to look beyond mediocre graphics and realise that the real game is going to look better. So I think if you want to pitch something, it is a good idea to make things either look/play absolutely fantastic, or make it super clear that only parts of what you are seeing represent the final product.

So since the gameplay animation didn't show the graphical style of the game, our artists instead made two concept art pieces for that. One is the 'standard' concept art image. It features the main elements of the game and looks as cool as possible:



However, this kind of concept art is not very useful for anything but setting the mood and character. At no point in the game will you play anything that looks even remotely like this. After all, the game itself is side-scrolling and shows the monster truck from quite a distance.

This is a pitfall that lots of concept artists seem to fall for. How often does a concept artist design a character specifically to look good from the front, even though the game is third person, so you look at his back all the time? So at Ronimo our artists mostly make concept art from exactly the perspective of the actual game. So when we decide on a style or design, we decide based on what things will actually look like in the game. So for Monster Truck VS Zombies, our artists also drew an image of what the actual game would look like in the end:



Monster Truck VS Zombies was cancelled and nothing was ever made for it besides this trailer. So what went wrong with this game? A couple of things. First: the publisher didn't like it, so there was no financing. Then there was the platform: we had never worked with that mobile device before, so doing a new device was going to make the coding team too much of a bottleneck. Especially since I was still the only programmer at the time.

Finally, and this killed a lot of the enthusiasm in our team for this project: we discovered a Flash game that was almost exactly the same. A side-scrolling stunt-racer where you kill zombies with a monster truck. That Flash game was so badly made that it was no fun at all, but still, seeing something so literally the same is far from inspiring. We always try to make something that is at least slightly original and innovative, and this wasn't that any more after we saw that video.

Anyway, I still really like this little over-the-top pitch video for Monster Truck VS Zombies, so it is really nice to finally show it here! :)

Proun OUT NOW for PC! And: the long history of Proun

Yes! After six years of development, Proun has finally been released for PC! I hope you like it! Proun is sold as Pay What You Want, which means that you can set your own price. You can choose to pay nothing at all, or you can pay some amount of money. You can even choose to first get it for free, and then pay afterwards if you like it! As a little extra incentive, you get a short and colourful bonus track if you pay at least $2! To celebrate Proun's launch, here is a new trailer:



So, six years of development, how did that even happen? It's not like Proun is the size of a game like Love, so six years may seem a bit long. In short, there are two reasons:
-I created Proun in my spare time;
-there were long intervals during those six years when I didn't work on Proun at all.

Since Proun pretty much evolved around my life and many projects during the past six years, I feel it makes an interesting story to tell how it came to be. :)

The very beginning of Proun happened on the grave of the most failed project I ever did. In November 2004, during our second year at the HKU (Utrecht School of the Arts), our class was split into two groups of thirteen students each. We were to create a race game. Being young and stupid, both groups tried to create really big 3D racing games with unique mechanics. We were way too ambitious and both groups failed horribly. Half the models that were made for our game Speedcore were made with broken bone sets and could not even be put in the game... Speedcore was playable though, it just totally sucked!



Afterwards, my friend Huub van Summeren told me that he had proposed a really simple project to his group, and that that was rejected as not interesting enough. Oh the irony... He told me it was a racing game in which you rotate around a cable to avoid obstacles. Simple and fun. I really liked how the entire world could rotate around the player, so since Huub was not planning on doing something with it, I started developing it myself. Of course, this is the concept that later became Proun! So, thanks Huub, for the great idea! :)

Being an art academy, the HKU leaves a lot of room for students to do their own projects and get grades for those. So in May 2005, I started working on Proun, then called CableRacer. I was still a student and had to learn a lot about the Ogre engine and generating meshes and bezier curves and such, and I decided to build my own exporters and plugins for 3D Studio MAX. Yet I still got the game up and running in a couple of weeks. It looked terrible and some of the math was pretty broken, but it was already a lot of fun to play. Proun has a really simple concept, but everyone I playtested it on enjoyed it almost immediately!



After the Summer of 2005 I stopped working on CableRacer for almost a full year. First I went to Germany to do an internship at the now defunct Collision Studios, where I created 3D normal mapped models for the shooter Red Ocean. A funny coincidence here is that the publisher of Red Ocean was DTP, which is currently also the publisher of our own Awesomenauts!



At the time I didn't know whether I wanted to be a programmer or a 3D artist. I am really happy that I did my internship as a 3D artist, though: I have been a full-time programmer on everything but Proun since then and I would never have experienced what it is to be an artist if I hadn't done that at the time. And in case you are wondering: I had a lot of fun doing 3D art and programming and in the end only became a programmer because we didn't have any other programmers for Ronimo Games, and already had enough artists.

When I came back from my internship, the school project De Blob started right away. Since I already had a good core code base for Proun, development for De Blob started with stripping Proun and working from its foundations. This way we got the 3D physics gameplay of De Blob running in a couple of days and could continue from there. I didn't work on Proun during this period, but when De Blob was finished, I immediately went back to Proun and added all the improvements I had made for De Blob to Proun as well.



So now we get to Summer 2006. The biggest topic to me at that point was Proun's graphics. I first wanted to go for Mondriaan's Victory Boogie Woogie, but Mondriaan's work is so incredibly straight, that I didn't see how to get that to work with the curves of Proun.



So instead I went for my new love: Kandinsky. The expressionist abstract works of Kandinsky are my favourite paintings in general and I wanted something similar for Proun. However, I wasn't that good at shader writing yet and had no idea how to get this to work. Just have a look at the horrible picture below to give you an idea...



While looking through a book about Kandinsky, trying to think of a way to do 3D graphics in that style, my eye fell on Kandinsky's later geometric abstract works. These are beautiful as well, and here I immediately knew how to implement this! I had already been doing lighting of 3D scenes for many years at that point (I started playing around with 3D Studio MAX when I was 13!), so I immediately started experimenting with shapes, colours, and above all: lighting.



Now just when Proun's graphics and gameplay were finally coming together, I got so busy with various other projects, that I had to stop working on it for three full years. The first project was another school project, this time an assignment for Guerrilla. This became a crowd control game set in the Killzone universe, and just like De Blob before it, it was build on the tools and core code of Proun.



After this project, we started Ronimo Games and started working on our first official Ronimo game, which was again build upon Proun's foundations. This project was called Snowball Earth and in the end got cancelled because we couldn't find financing for it. We intend to release the prototype at some point, but for now I cannot say too much about that. Anyway, keeping to tradition, this project was built on Proun's foundations as well.

Of course, after that we started working on Swords & Soldiers, which became our first console game at Ronimo, and went on to win awards and get tons of really good reviews!

Anyway, so Proun is a spare time project, why didn't I work on it next to Ronimo at that time? Well: I was also studying Game & Media Technology at Utrecht University and finishing my Master's Thesis for that was my spare time occupation at that point. I spent my weekends writing and researching for that during two years.

So when that was finally finished in June 2009, I spent three weeks gaming all day during my long Summer vacation. And then I got bored and made a 3D baroque church dome. Euhm, a what? Somehow, once in a while I just have to make a 3D model with lots of ornamented pillars. No, don't ask why, I don't know either!



At some point I got stuck on the baroque dome, due to a computer that was too slow and a lack of skill with truly realistic lighting and materials, and decided to give Proun a try once again. After three full years, I hardly knew in what state I left the game, but I quickly got up and running with it. I had learned a lot at Ronimo during the past three years, so I went about development a lot quicker now, and released a trailer a couple of months later.

Around this time I read an article in a newspaper about an exhibition at the Van Abbe Museum that featured a number of El Lissitzky's works called Proun. I had been looking for a proper name for CableRacer for ages and somehow this fictive word that El Lissitzky had made up perfectly fit my game. El Lissitzky made dozens of works called Proun and calling my game like that as well felt like a nice homage to the abstract pioneers of the early 20th century.



At this point I thought the game was almost finished, and I had the luck of finding someone who was willing to help out with the music and sound of Proun. I had initially planned to do everything myself, but I couldn't get my songs to sound as good as I wanted, and I hated making sound effects. So it was a small miracle to me when Matthijs (from Control Magazine) introduced me to Arno Landsbergen. Arno had made an album called Dirty Rock. That album not only sounds great, but also reminded me of early David Bowie, who happens to be one of my heroes! So I rejoiced when Arno got on board! Arno improved and produced my compositions, and created all the sound effects for Proun.

Little did I know at that point that I was going to spend two more years creating more tracks and polishing everything to make it a complete game... But I have to say, if I look at the end result, I feel very proud that I actually finished it, and I hope you will like it! During those six years I grew a lot, both as a person and as a game developer, and I think this shows in the final result! ^_^



Congratulations on reading through this enormous wall of text. Now head over to the Proun website and download that game!

Awesomenauts trailer released!

At Ronimo Games we recently announced our new game, Awesomenauts, and today we have released the first trailer!



There is also a bunch of new screenshots on the Awesomenauts website.

The first thing everyone notices here is the incredible theme song that Sonic Picnic created. They did a great job at reviving eighties hair metal and created just the right tune to get gamers pumped up for some hot action with the Awesomenauts! This will shine even more once we reveal the intro animation (!) that comes with it...

However, I would like to point your attention at something that few people will notice with these short bursts of gameplay footage: the graphics. When we made Swords & Soldiers, we hardly had any tools, as I described previously on this blog. Since then our team has grown and we have spent many months creating real-time editors for levels, animations and particles.

During Swords & Soldiers, our engine (the RoniTech 1) was a very minimalist creature, but now with Awesomenauts the RoniTech 2 has evolved into a grown-up multiplatform engine with tools and everything else one expects from a full 2D engine.

The result is that artists can decorate our worlds and animations with all kinds of details. Leafs move in the wind, waterfalls flow in the background, dust swirls up when you walk and we even have some aliens peeking from behind rocks once in a while. The level in the trailer contains some 6000 objects, and that is excluding the static ground over which the player walks (and which actually fills half the screen). Many of those 6000 objects are particle systems that emit dozens of particles. If you look at this trailer really closely, you can see all kinds of details and parallax layers.



As we release more info and footage of Awesomenauts over the coming months, I will show clearer examples of this, and discuss how we managed to create a real-time editor that gives artists the possibility to literally animate every property of every object. And I guess I will also have to discuss the challenge of getting a good framerate in the vicinity of team of artists-gone-wild...

Anyway, for now enjoy the awesome trailer! And as soon as I get back to regular posting on this awesome blog, look forward to lots of awesome articles about the awesome tech of the awesome Awesomenauts!

(Sorry, from now on I will try to keep the usage of the word 'awesome' to a minimum...)

PS. Next week, when the storm that is called E3 has lessened a bit, I will release a new trailer of Proun and announce the exact release date and method!

Awesomenauts announced!

Last week we have announced Awesomenauts, our new game at Ronimo Games! It is an online multiplayer game for PSN and XBLA. The gameplay combines MOBA with platforming. Most people don't seem to know about that genre yet, but MOBA means Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. It is the term used to describe games like Defence of the Ancients (DotA), League of Legends (LoL) and Monday Night Combat. Only Awesomenauts is a platformer, so that makes it quite different in many ways.



I don't have time yet to get back to regular posting on this blog, but we have been working on Awesomenauts for quite a while now and it is going to be really awesome (hence the name), so I felt like sharing this with you! :) Also, Awesomenauts features lots of interesting concepts and technology, especially on the engine and tools side, so you can expect a load of posts here on this blog later this year. Our multiplatform 2D engine, the RoniTech, is now at version 2 and has finally grown mature with this game!

For the moment we are not disclosing all that much info on Awesomenauts yet, since we will be showing it in motion for the first time at E3. I really hope the press and gamers are going to like it! In the meanwhile, here are some screenshots:







Ow, and for those wondering: I am doing some final bugfixes on Proun and will indeed release it in Spring! So that means June 20th at the latest! I haven't decided on the exact release date yet, but you can expect it within a month!