Five important realisations about game balance

The games we've so far made at Ronimo have all featured a heavy emphasis on competitive multiplayer. Designing, testing and iterating these games, especially our biggest hit Awesomenauts, has taught us many things about balancing. Today I'd like to share some of the most important lessons we've learned along the way.

1. Overpowered is much worse than underpowered

At first glance one might think that in game balance, underpowered and overpowered are equally bad: they both mean something is badly balanced and needs to be improved. This is true, but in practice overpowered things turn out to have way more impact than underpowered ones.

The reason for this is that players tend to flock to whatever is strongest and use only that. For example, Awesomenauts has 34 characters. If 3 of those would be underpowered, then most players wouldn't play those, leaving 31 valid characters. That's still plenty of choice and variation. On the other hand, if 3 characters were overpowered, then players would play only those 3 and would ignore the rest. That would make the game very repetitive and turn stale quickly.

This knowledge can be used as a crude tool in cases where no better solution is available. For example, if something is overpowered but only under certain circumstances, then you might choose to nerf it until it's okay under those circumstances only and is underpowered in all other situations. This way at least it isn't dominating the game anymore.

2. Variety always adds imbalance

A game with just one weapon on just one symmetrical map will pretty much automatically be balanced. Even if only because all players are in exactly the same situation. Such a game would however probably not just be balanced, but also be boring. So we need to add variety: more weapons, more maps, more items, more builds, more everything. Maybe even asymmetrical maps. The key thing to realise when doing this, is that as the game becomes more complex, 'perfect' balance becomes ever more difficult to achieve. This quickly gets to the point were 'perfect' balance is impossible, and every bit of variation you add makes the game a bit more unbalanced.

Let's look at a really simple example: walking speed. Let's say some characters are fast and others are slow. This gives the slow characters a disadvantage that can be balanced by giving them more health and damage. However, now we also add maps of different sizes. On a bigger map, the disadvantage for the slow characters will be bigger than on a small map. This is because if the arena is small, slow characters can get to the other side fast enough anyway. No amount of health or damage tweaks will fix this, since it differs per map.



One solution to this can be found in our game Swords & Soldiers 2. There in matchmade online matches, we only use certain maps: the ones that we feel are most balanced. On the other hand, when you invite a friend to play, you can choose from all maps, including a bunch of pretty weird ones. Those might be less balanced, but they add a lot of spice and fun. Depending on how much you want to appeal to players with a competitive mindset, you can choose to include those varied but imbalanced maps, or not.

3. Competitive players often dislike randomness and luck

When Awesomenauts launched, the game had random crits, which dealt a lot of extra damage. This added surprise and suspense: every hit might be extra strong! It also means that even if the opponent is better than you, you might occasionally win because you got lucky. This makes a game a lot more friendly for beginners. An extreme example of this can be found in Mario Kart: this game includes a lot of randomness. Combined with a bunch of catch-up mechanics, Mario Kart is a game where occasionally a n00b can beat a pr0.

However, randomess also adds bad luck: sometimes you clearly outplay an opponent and still lose, because the enemy got lucky and landed several crits in a row. In a sense this might feel nice: since the opponent clearly just got lucky, you don't need to blame yourself for losing. Many competitive players however don't want this to factor into the equation. They want a very simple thing: the best player should win. "If I practice more and get better, then I should always win." In the years after release many players in the Awesomenauts community got better and more competitive, to the point where a lot of players really wanted the random crits to be removed from the game. For this reason we ended up changing crits into a predictable system where simply every third hit deals more damage.

4. Balance automatically becomes worse over time

Even if you think the balance in your game is in a good place, by simply leaving it as it is for a while, it will deteriorate. The reason for this is that as time passes, players get better at the game, learn new tricks and talk to each other. This changes how the game is played, thus also changing how the balance is experienced. Usually not for the better: as time progresses and no balance tweaks are made, balance usually becomes worse.

One example we've seen with Awesomenauts was that at some point after a few months of stable balance, one specific team discovered a new tactic that was super strong. This tactic had been possible for months, but somehow no one had found it yet. This tactic was then first used in a tournament, where that team gloriously beat everyone else and won. After the tournament, news spread like wildfire and suddenly this tactic was used in almost every match. We had no choice but to quickly do a balance patch specifically to nerf this one particular tactic. (The fact that our game is deep enough that players can discover new tactics this way is one of the things I'm most proud of in all of my career as a gamedev.)

Another example of balance getting worse over time might not even be caused by something actually being way too strong. Maybe there's something that's just slightly overpowered, so mildly that it really doesn't matter. As time passes, players write guides and talk about the best tactics. They will point each other at this subtle advantage, causing more and more people to use it. Even if the advantage is really small, or, even more extreme, even if the advantage doesn't exist and players are just imagining it, this still ruins the game for the simple reason that everyone starts doing the same thing. This makes the game predictable and boring.

Sometimes you get lucky and players start responding to that imbalance. Maybe an underpowered character happens to be really strong in that particular situation. Since that situation now happens so often, that underpowered character is suddenly super strong in most matches, causing lots of players to choose him. This makes the dominant strategy shift naturally from one thing to another, adding variation and fun. I've been told some games in the Super Smash Brothers series have balanced excellently for this: as soon as one character becomes dominant, its counter becomes extra interesting and lots of players start playing the counter, at which point the counter of the counter becomes useful, etc. This causes the balance to slowly but constantly shift.

5. 'Perfect' balance is impossible

The final point I'd like to share today is both soothing and intensely frustrating: for any game that has significant complexity and variation, perfect balance is impossible. This is a soothing thought in the sense that it makes you realise that even if you were the best game designer in the world, your game would still not have perfect balance. It's also frustrating, because of course the goal of the game designer is to make the balance really good. Knowing that the balance will never be truly fantastic makes balancing a frustrating experience.

So, why is 'perfect' balance not possible? I've already mentioned above that as more variation is added, it becomes impossible to make all options equally strong under all circumstances. But there's more. What about players of different skills? Some characters/weapons/maps are bound to be more difficult to play than others. The result is that for beginners, the balance will be different than for pros. And what about simply different tastes? Some players prefer fun and variation, while other players prefer predictability and skill. The balance can't make both groups perfectly happy. Combined, all of these elements make it impossible to achieve 'perfect' balance.

This post has shared some of the things we've learned through the years about balance. What are your most valuable or most surprising insights regarding balance?

PS. Some of the topics in this blogpost have been discussed in more detail in previous blogposts. If you'd like to read more, have a look at the following posts:

• The surprisingly many subtleties of designing crits
• The downsides of gameplay variety
• Beginner balance versus pro balance

Beginner balance versus pro balance

Game balance is often approached from the angle of the pro-gamer: how strong are things when used by a skilled player? However, the balance as it's experienced by beginners is equally important, since a large portion of the playerbase will never reach pro skill levels but will still want to have a fun experience. Today I'd like to discuss three different approaches we've used in our games Awesomenauts and Swords & Soldiers II to make the gameplay fun for beginners but also balanced for experienced players.

The big challenge here is that in a complex game with varied characters/weapons/factions/etc. it's nearly impossible to achieve perfect balance under all circumstances. Balance is influenced by almost everything and if you want variation, then that variation is undoubtedly going to upset the balance. For example, if some characters are faster than others, then having maps of different sizes can greatly change the balance on one map compared to another. The alternative is to make all maps the same size, but that's boring. For this reason balance is a moving target that you're constantly trying to get closer to but a certain amount of imbalance is (grudgingly) accepted in almost every game.



To make a competitive game fun for players of all skill levels, the ideal situation is to make it balanced for pro players, intermediate players and beginners alike. An example of striving for this goal are the changes we've made to the Awesomenauts character Gnaw. At some point Gnaw was heavily overpowered for beginning players, but mediocre at best for pro players. That meant that if we had nerfed (weakened) Gnaw for the sake of the beginner experience, Gnaw would have become totally useless for pro players. If simple nerfing is not an option, then what to do instead?

When a character is overpowered specifically in matches with beginners, this is often either because the character is too easy to play well, or because the counters are too difficult to figure out and perform. The nice thing is that if we can change the difficulty, it won't matter much for pro players: if the character becomes harder to play, pros will still master it. And if the character becomes easier to counter, that also doesn't matter for pro players: their opponents already mastered the counters anyway. Realising this doesn't make fixing the balance easy, but at least it gives us a starting point for where to look for a fix.



To modify Gnaw's difficulty for beginners, our designers made a number of changes over the years. Most of these revolved around making it more work to be effective with Gnaw. For example, initially Gnaw's Weedlings (little creatures Gnaw can leave behind to attack enemies) would live forever. One of the changes we made was that Weedlings would die after a while, requiring Gnaw to place them again. Weedlings were also changed to start weaker and become stronger over time. The result of these changes is that the player needs to be a lot more active to keep their Weedlings in the right places. Also, if the enemy has destroyed the Weedlings, Gnaw can't just replace them with equally strong ones right away.



Of course these changes also influenced the balance for pro players, but combined with some further tweaks we managed to keep Gnaw about equally strong for pro players while making him harder to play well for beginning players. Hence the pro balance remained similar while the beginner balance was improved.

Another Awesomenauts character with a similar problem was Ayla. Here too we made changes to make her harder to play well and easier to counter. While our designers did manage to improve Ayla's balance for beginning players, she remained problematic to counter for beginners.

Therefore when going free-to-play we employed a different tactic. In the free-to-play version of Awesomenauts, characters need to be unlocked with Awesomepoints, which the player can collect by playing the game. Characters have different prices. For example, some characters are difficult to play so we made them expensive to keep beginners from unlocking them right away. Since we had a problem with Ayla not being so much fun to play against for beginners, we chose to make Ayla expensive as well. This way few beginners will have Ayla and thus few beginners will encounter other beginners who are playing Ayla. This feels like a crude solution, but sometimes crude is the best one can do.



An even cruder solution that might be considered is that if a character is too damaging for the beginner experience, then maybe it's worthwhile to nerf the character to the point where it's okay for beginners, despite that this makes the character not viable for pro play anymore. An important thing to realise here is that with a cast of dozens of characters, a single character not being viable in pro play doesn't make that big of a difference since there are so many other options. However, a single character being overpowered for beginners will mean that lots of beginners play this character and it will ruin many matches.



The third example of fixing beginner balance that I'd like to discuss today comes from our real-time strategy game Swords & Soldiers 2. This game has 3 wildly different factions (Vikings, Persians and Demons), which gives enough headaches in terms of balance already. However, on top of that there is also a tactic that may be balanced, but that's just not fun for beginning players: rushing.

Experienced Swords & Soldiers 2 players can have a lot of fun harassing each other's economy as early as possible, forcing the opponent to spend their gold on defence instead of upgrades, or maybe occasionally even winning the game in under a minute. However, beginning players rarely start a match effectively. They're likely still reading some upgrade descriptions or thinking about what to do next. The result is that if the opponent employs even a very ineffective rush tactic, a beginning player will still be overwhelmed and lose in less than a minute.

For beginners this is highly frustrating, but since rushing is so much fun for pro players we didn't want to remove rush tactics from the game altogether. Instead we came up with something that's just for beginners: Starting Gates. Starting Gates are gates in front of each player's base that need to be destroyed before the base can be reached. This slows down rush tactics a lot and gives the defending player quite a lot of extra time to respond once the enemy soldiers come into view. Starting Gates are truly only for beginners: in matchmade online matches they're not placed if both players have played a bunch of online matches already.



Making the balance as fun for beginners as it is for experienced players is a hard and sometimes nearly impossible challenge. In this post I've given examples of 3 different tricks we've employed to improve beginner balance: Gnaw was made more difficult to play without making him stronger, Ayla was made more expensive so that beginners would encounter her less, and rushing in Swords & Soldiers 2 was changed for beginners by introducing a new mechanic that only applies to beginner matches.

These are all examples of looking at balance as a creative challenge, not just as a topic that's about spreadsheets and tweaking numbers. Have you used any nice tricks to improve balance? Please share in the comments!

An overview of many ways of doing a beta

Giving players access to the beta of a new game or new content before it's released is a great way to get feedback and find bugs, allowing you to add that extra bit of polish, balance and quality before the official full release. There are many different ways to give players access to a beta. Which to choose? In this article I'd like to give a comprehensive list of options in today's market and discuss the differences.

Traditionally bugs in games are found by QA testing companies. However, hiring a QA company to exhaustively test a complex game is very expensive. Many smaller companies don't have the budget to hire QA at all, or can only get a limited amount of QA and can't let QA cover every aspect of the game, let alone doing so repeatedly for every update. However, even if you do have the budget for large amounts of QA testing, that won't give good feedback on whether a new feature is actually fun or balanced. That requires real players, experiencing the content in the wild. So whether you can afford paid QA or not, a beta might still be a good idea.

There are many aspects to doing a beta. Should everyone get access, or only a limited number of players? Is the beta for a new game that hasn't released yet, or for new content for an existing game? Is the beta also intended to gather additional development funds, or only for testing purposes?

Another interesting topic is what to actually put in a beta. Should it be all the content, or only a portion so as not to spoil the main release too much? (There's an interesting bit about that in this talk about Diablo 3.) How early should we do a beta? Although these are important questions, to limit the scope of this post I'm going to ignore the content of the beta: today I'm focusing exclusively on how the beta is delivered to customers.

Over the years at Ronimo we've done a bunch of different approaches to betas. With Awesomenauts and the recently released Swords & Soldiers 2 Shawarmageddon we tried betas before release and for new content, through DLC and through beta branches, limited paid betas and open betas, and more. That means a large portion of this post is based on our own experiences, but since I want this list to be as comprehensive as possible I'll also discuss approaches that we haven't tried ourselves.



Since consoles offer very few possibilities for betas and since Steam is the biggest and most complete platform on PC, this post mostly lists options in Steam. Some of these will probably be possible in similar ways on competing platforms like GoG or Itch.io. If I missed anything that's fundamentally different on other platforms or if I missed some approaches altogether, then please let me know below in the comments so that I can add them.

Steam beta branches

For updates to an already released game

This is the most common way to do a beta on Steam. When uploading a build you can select in which branch it should go live. This makes it possible to release a build under a 'beta' branch only. Users can then simply right click the game in Steam and select the branch they want, after which Steam will download it and replace the main game with the version from the branch.



If you want to limit access to the beta you can set a password for the branch. This works fine, but it's a single password for all users, so if you share this password with players there's a good chance that some might share it further with others. For Awesomenauts we got lucky with our community: no players posted the passwords for closed betas publicly online. Undoubtedly some players did share a password with a few friends privately, but that never caused any problems.

Branches are also great for internal testing purposes. When we want to test a build internally or want to provide a build to QA we also use Steam branches and simply share the password only internally or with the QA company.

Beta through (free) DLC

For updates

A downside of Steam beta branches is that when you switch to or from a branch, Steam downloads and updates the game to this version. In other words: switching takes time and bandwidth and it's not possible for users to have both the beta and the main game on their computer simultaneously. If updates are hundreds of megabytes or even bigger then this gets cumbersome for users. In cases where an Awesomenauts beta didn't get a lot of feedback we often saw players mention that they didn't like to wait for the download.

Our solution was to not use beta branches anymore and instead put the entire beta build in a DLC. Users can then enable the DLC to get the beta. This allows them to have both the main game and the beta on their computer simultaneously. On Steam it's possible to set a DLC to being disabled by default, so users can deliberately choose to get betas or not by enabling the DLC in the Steam interface.

That the beta is a DLC doesn't mean it needs to be paid: it's possible to do free DLC on Steam. Nevertheless, the option to make the beta paid is useful in some cases. For example, backers of the Starstorm Kickstarter campaign were initially the only players who got Awesomenauts beta access. We could have handled this by making the DLC unlisted in the Steam store and sending keys for it to Kickstarter backers. I guess it's even possible to make a beta a paid DLC directly on Steam, although I imagine this might rub some players the wrong way.

Giving out keys for the main game before launch

For new games

This is the easiest way to do a beta before the release of a game. Just put the build live before the store opens and give keys to the players you want to have access to the beta.

A big question with this approach is what to do once the game actually releases. Do those users keep the game, or do you revoke those keys? If this was an open beta then you'll probably want to revoke the keys, but in case of a closed beta with a small group you may also choose to consider the game a gift for those who did beta testing.

If you choose to revoke the keys, be sure to do so a few days before launch. I've heard of cases where users couldn't buy the game on launch because the revocation of the keys had been done too shortly before launch: Steam apparently hadn't processed that entirely yet. I have no idea how much time is needed for that to not go wrong, but revoking the keys a few days before launch seems safe enough I guess.

Beta as a separate app

Both for new games and for updates

An issue with giving users keys to the main game and then revoking those before launch is that if they had the game wishlisted, then the wishlisting will be gone after this. A solution for this is to do the beta in a separate app entirely. This way it's an entirely separate game with its own settings, achievements, leaderboards and AppID. This version of the game is not listed in the store, so it only exists for those users who activated the game with a beta key.



An additional option when doing your pre-launch beta through a separate app is that it can continue being used after the game has launched and can then be used to do betas for updates.

Note that some developers have reported that Steam didn't allow them to do this. We've applied this method in Autumn 2018 ourselves and it wasn't a problem then. Apparently Steam's rules for whether this is allowed or not are not entirely clear.

Steam Early Access

For new games

Early Access allows you to sell a game that's not actually finished yet. This way development of the game can be done in a very public and interactive manner, getting constant player feedback while still adding core systems to the game. Another benefit is that Early Access games are generally paid, so this can help generate additional funding before the actual launch of the game.

Common wisdom seems to be that the launch into Early Access should be considered the main launch of the game. In many cases the final launch of a game is completely ignored by press and players alike, unless the game became a success during Early Access already. This means that a game should be really strong before going into Early Access: it might have missing features and bugs but if it's not super fun yet, then you likely won't get a second chance when the game releases out of Early Access.

An interesting aspect of Early Access is that it functions as a strong excuse towards players for bugs, balance issues and a lack of content. Reviews by both players and press for an Early Access game will often mention things like "It's buggy but that's okay since it's still in Early Access." The equivalent of that for a normally released game is "Don't buy this buggy mess."

For some users Early Access has left a sour taste because some games never launched out of it or didn't deliver on the promised features. Nevertheless, Early Access remains a strong category with many successful games.

Xbox Game Preview

For new games

While Xbox Game Preview is roughly the same as Steam Early Access, I'm listing it as a separate option because it's the only form of beta or early access that's currently available on consoles (as far as I know), making it quite a unique thing.

I don't know what Microsoft's policy around Game Preview is exactly, but I expect this option is not open to just everyone, so if you want to go this route you probably need to talk to Microsoft. I'm guessing that for the right projects, Microsoft might even have some budget to help get them into Game Preview. One thing to keep in mind is that competing platforms might be less interested in featuring your game on launch if it has already been on Game Preview for a while, just as they are generally less interested in featuring a game that launched on another console first.

Soft-launch on a smaller platform

For new games

As I mentioned above, the Early Access launch version of a game needs to be pretty strong. That's kind of counter to the goal of Early Access: getting feedback in an early stage. To work around this problem some developers choose to release their games on a smaller platform like Itch.io first, and then come to Steam (with or without Early Access) once the game is strong enough.



One might expect this strategy doesn't work: by the time the game gets into Steam Early Access, it's been available elsewhere for a while so it's old news. However, I've heard from some devs that if a PC game is not on Steam, to a lot of people it doesn't exist. So even if it's been on another store for a while, the moment it gets to Steam is apparently considered the 'real' launch. (This logic of course doesn't apply to juggernauts like Fortnite, Minecraft and League of Legends.)

Regional soft launch

For new games and for updates

This is a common approach in the world of free to play mobile games: launch in a specific country, improve the game until it makes enough money per user, and only then launch worldwide. I haven't heard of any PC games using this approach, but undoubtedly it has been done. I expect the challenge here would be that hardcore gamers are much more informed and internationally connected than casual free-to-play mobile gamers. If your game is to sell through word-of-mouth then it's going to be weird if the word on Reddit and Discord ends at a single nation's border. Still, I imagine this approach might work in some cases, especially for single player games.

So, that's it! These are all the relevant ways I know of doing a beta in today's market. Did I miss any? Let me know below in the comments so that I may add them! Which approach do you prefer?

The challenge of finding enough playtesters

I recently watched Jan Willem Nijman's great talk on The Art of Screenshake and noticed an interesting YouTube comment to that video by someone named SquidCaps. SquidCaps mentions that for an unknown developer, it's really hard to find playtesters who actually test regularly. I agree that this gets a lot easier the more well-known you are, but I think it might also help to try a different approach to playtesting. So I figured it would be interesting to discuss how we approach playtesting at Ronimo and how to find playtesters.

Let's start by having a look at SquidCaps' comment. It's quite long so I've selected only the parts that I'm going to reply to:

Heh, "let people play your game and iterate".. quite a bit easier to say when you have plenty of gametesters already in the office.. For solo, unknown developer, having just ONE game tester that suffers 10 minutes per week is too much.. What you need is full game, with menus, high scores save games etc, basically a beta before you get any testers and then you get plenty of them.. When it's still in alpha and the biggest, most revolutionary stuff is happening, then you are alone. Something that developers who are already successful almost always forget; you get plenty of free resources at one point. [...] The truth is that your mates play for a while but without actual team behind you, you can't support them enough, interest dies down and soon, you see that no one downloaded latest build.. [...] I've been on half a dozen playtesting groups with hundreds of members and they all fail.. The sad truth is that no one cares until you are almost done. big teams have people who they employ that can do playtesting and can even afford to pay for playtesting.. [...]"

Playtesting versus QA

Before actually getting into SquidCaps' comment, I'd like to start with making a clear distinction between playtesting and QA (Quality Assurance, not to be confused with Q&A which means Questions & Answers). QA is all about finding bugs, while playtesting is all about making the game more fun, more understandable and finding the right difficulty curve and balance.

QA is usually an extremely boring and repetitive task. For example, in our game Awesomenauts we've had cases where we hired people to systematically test whether all upgrades in the game function correctly. Awesomenauts has around 1200 different upgrades, so you can imagine that systematically testing them all is not a fun job. Another example of something that's done in QA, is trying to walk into walls to see whether collision is correct everywhere. This usually involves running into all walls in a game and is an incredibly monotonous thing to do. Since QA is so little fun, it's usually not done by volunteers or friends, but instead by professional testers who get paid to do this. Often QA is outsourced to specialised companies in low-wages countries. An alternative is of course that the devs do such testing themselves.

The goal of playtesting on the other hand is to figure out whether the game is fun to play, whether players understand how to play the game and whether the difficulty and balance are right. This is a completely different way of approaching testing. Someone who systematically goes through all 1200 upgrades in Awesomenauts is never going to have fun, so QA's way of testing is not going to tell you anything about how fun individual upgrades are to play with. To find out whether something is fun, you need to let testers play in a more natural, unforced way. You can then just observe how they play and ask them afterwards which things they liked and which they didn't.



Now that we have a clear distinction between QA and playtesting, let's get back to SquidCaps' comment. SquidCaps talks about getting people to play new versions of the game every week. For most purposes of playtesting I think you shouldn't just let the same people play every week. Of course it's helpful, since you can ask them questions like "Is the game more fun now than it was last week?", but you won't get a wide diversity of opinions from a small group. Also, these playtesters play with a preconceived notion of the game based on previous playtests, so their opinions will not represent what fresh players will experience.

For these reasons for Swords & Soldiers 2, spread out during development we invited around 120 people into our office so that we could observe them playing. Every few weeks half a dozen people would come in on a Saturday, play for a few hours and share their opinions. We made sure these were different people every time, so that we would get fresh, unbiased opinions.

For figuring out whether the mechanics and tutorial are clear you also need fresh players every time. Anyone who has already played the game can't truly judge whether the tutorial explains it well, since they already know how it works beforehand. Same for difficulty: after practice you get better, so you can't judge anymore whether it's playable for someone who's new to the game. This is also why the devs themselves are horrible playtesters: they know exactly how the game is intended and are usually really good at it, so they can't judge difficulty and clarity.



When to playtest

This is where I totally agree with SquidCaps: playtesting should start early on: "When it's still in alpha and the biggest, most revolutionary stuff is happening." I regularly encounter developers who think you need complete and bug-free gameplay to do your first playtesting, but there's no reason to wait that long. As soon as you've got something playable, you can let others play it.

Sure, in an early stage you probably need to sit next to the tester to explain a lot of stuff, but you can still learn a ton about which parts of the game are fun and which are not. It might even happen that the playtesters don't enjoy the core but really enjoy some other aspects of the game and this might lead you to change the direction of the game altogether. Or maybe they share some great ideas that you didn't think of yet. If you're wondering "Should I wait for the game to be more complete before testing?", the answer is almost always "Nope, just test anyway and see what you can learn!"

Finding playtesters

This is SquidCaps' main point: it's really difficult to find playtesters if you're not successful. I'd like to add to this that it's even difficult to find playtesters when you are successful: at Ronimo we've sold millions of copies of our games, but finding playtesters is still sometimes hard and takes time.

I think the best playtesting happens in person. That way you can see what the other person is doing and ask questions or help out if needed, especially when testing an early version of a game that doesn't contain a tutorial yet and might be full of bugs. That's why SquidCaps' approach of sharing builds online and joining playtesting groups is not something we'd consider until very late in development. We usually only share builds online for players to test in case of betas, like we do with Awesomenauts updates.

Instead, we mostly search in our local communities. For example, I occasionally talk at game dev schools here in the Netherlands. Whenever I do that, I end my talk with asking people to sign up for playtesting. Usually around 20% of the students in the audience do so, so we now have a significant number of email addresses of potential playtesters we can invite. Unfortunately in practice few of them actually respond, but it's still enough to get dozens of playtesters for a game, usually spread out over a bunch of Saturday afternoons.

When our mailing list runs dry, we look further. We've asked around at local game development schools, where students are often eager to visit a real game dev company and play a secret, unannounced game. We've also asked on social media, hoping enough gamers from the Netherlands follow us to actually get some visitors.

In total these usually get us enough playtesters. However, you can go further than that when needed. Here are some examples:

• I know a game company where the devs took an iPad version of their game, went to Gamescom and let people who were standing in line for some big triple-A game play their game. Queuing people don't have anything better to do so it's rather easy to get them to play for as much as fifteen minutes or more.
• Similarly, you can go to a random public space with a laptop and just ask people to play. If you're a student this could be the hall of your own school, or it could be a station, or anywhere really. This requires getting over some awkwardness when approaching strangers, but really, this is very doable.
• If you've got some budget you can also get a booth at a game event like Gamescom or PAX. Booths are not just nice for marketing but also for playtesting. Lots of different people will play your game and you'll get the most honest feedback in the world: the moment they don't like it anymore, they'll just walk away. Painful, but very useful information.
• You can organise local playtesting events together with other devs. Here in the Netherlands Adriaan de Jongh organises PlayDev.Club, which is simply a gathering of local devs who play early versions of each other's games and share feedback. If there's nothing like that in your community, you can organise something like that yourself, as long as you're in an area that has enough game devs.

None of these approaches will easily get us people who play our game for a huge number of hours. However, if our game isn't that fun yet then maybe that shouldn't be our focus and the focus should be on making that first hour super awesome. Once the core game is a lot of fun, it becomes easier to find playtesters who are willing to come back and invest more hours to get to the advanced tactics and pro skills.

While all of these ideas are easier if you're a more well-known developer and are better connected, with enough effort an unknown dev can also find playtesters in such ways. Before we released our first game Swords & Soldiers we also managed to find playtesters, despite being an unknown studio at the time. Finding playtesters takes initiative, creativity and effort, but in most cases it's doable even for those of us who aren't well-known.

These were some of the things we do at Ronimo and that I've heard from other developers. How do you find playtesters? What are your challenges and have you got any clever tricks?

Texture formats for 2D games, part 4: Overview

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 matter to specific games, but if things like memory bandwidth are an issue then you are probably making an extremely complex game and hopefully know more about it than I do anyway.

Let me give an example of mixing formats to achieve a specific combination of desired properties. For the original version of Swords & Soldiers 1 on the Nintendo Wii we wanted to minimize size on disk and size in video memory. In video memory we used palette textures, but on disk we also ZIPped those. ZIP cannot be used by the videocard but it makes textures a lot smaller. The downside of this is that unZIPping costs additional loading time when starting the game. However, I didn't care much about loading times because the Wii was quite fast compared to the amount of disk space available for downloadable games, so loading times were going to be fine anyway.

Here's the big overview this blogpost is all about. It compares DXT, ETC, PVRTC, palettes and several more basic formats. Creating these was a lot of work so you'd better click them for a good look! ;)

Click for full resolution

Click for full resolution

If there are any mistakes in the descriptions please let me know in the comments so that I may correct them!

An interesting note here is that Android devices differ so much that texture format support varies from phone to phone. Apparently the solution is to either only use ETC1 and uncompressed formats (since those are supported on all Android devices), or to create different versions of the game using different texture formats per type of phone.

It's important to realise that not everything is always what it seems. The benefit of saving your exact texture format on disk (through DDS or TGA instead of something like JPEG) is that you can load the texture right into video memory. You might think this means fast loading times, but this is not always the case: if reading from disk is slow (for example when reading from a DVD) then this might turn out to be a bottleneck. If your processor is fast and your disk is slow then using ZIP or JPEG might actually give you faster loading times, despite the additional processing needed. Note that in the case of Swords & Soldiers 1 this was not the case: the Wii had a small but very fast hard disk.

One final consideration I'd like to mention is framerate. In most cases texture formats don't really influence framerate: the performance bottlenecks are usually fillrate, polygon count, post processing or something on the CPU. As long as all the textures being used all fit into video memory simultaneously they won't influence performance much. As soon as you grow out of video memory however, you're in trouble. On console your game might crash or show broken graphics due to this. On PC you're less likely to see anything so obvious: PC drivers can start swapping textures between video memory and normal RAM. This is devastating to performance but you might not notice this if you're working on a fast development PC. Be sure to keep a close watch on your texture budgets, even if everything seems to still work fine on your own PC!

Texture formats can also influence fillrate. When reading the texture it might get cache misses, slowing down the GPU. I won't go into too much detail here, but the thing to keep in mind is that making your textures much higher resolution than how they're shown in-game might reduce the framerate. If you zoom in and out a lot then mipmapping is a good solution to solve this. It also helps a lot to use a texture format with few bits per pixel, like DXT1.

Some hardware (including some of the current gen consoles) also support tiled textures. Normally a “tiling texture” refers to a texture that can be repeated, but that shouldn't be confused with tiled texture formats: tiled textures in this case refer to a certain memory layout of the texture that reduces cache misses. I won't go into detail on that here either, but if you're running into performance problems due to slow texture reads it might be worthwhile to check whether your specific platform supports tiled texture formats.

Each game and platform has its own requirements and I hope this series of posts has helped you understand the various options for handling textures. Finally, for those who don't have time to seriously look into this and just want some quick and dirty advice: if you're on PC or console DXT1 is usually the best option, or DXT5 if you need alpha.

See also:
-Texture formats for 2D games, part 1
-Texture formats for 2D games, part 2: Palettes
-Texture formats for 2D games, part 3: DXT and PVRTC

PS. We're looking for interns for the coming period! We have openings in the fields of C++ coding and 2D art! Check here for more info: internships at Ronimo. Note that a basic understanding of the Dutch language is a requirement.

Texture formats for 2D games, part 3: DXT and PVRTC

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 win, so where's the catch?

The downside is that DXT can bring serious quality loss due to how it compresses textures. The quality impact of this compression heavily depends on the type of art: some textures will look really bad but in most cases it will look fine as long as you don't zoom in on the compression. Zooming in that far is not common in 2D games so DXT is very usable despite the quality loss.



The most basic type of DXT is DXT1. Here's how it works:



This means that if a single 4x4 block contains few different colours, there won't be any significant compression artefacts. Having more colours inside the block is also fine if those colours are near the others. For example, if the block stores red and yellow then it can also store orange well since that is in between. Heavy artefacts occur if the block contains more really different colours. For example, if a 4x4 block contains red, green and black, then one of those will be lost and replaced by one of the others (whichever is nearest to reduce the artefacts).



This sounds absolutely horrible, but the fun part is that we are only talking about tiny 4x4 blocks here. In practice few blocks contain many different colours, and even if they do the next block will be able to choose different colours, so artefacts usually remain small. In practice in 2D games DXT artefacts will mostly appear in spots where three coloured areas touch each other, and around thin outlines. Have a good look at the image below to get an idea of which situations result in serious artefacts and which are fine.



As you can see above, if your art contains lots of thin outlines it will be damaged severely by DXT1. However, fixing this by going from DXT1 to 24bit RGB makes your textures 6 times bigger. Auch! Luckily there is an awesome compromise: if you store your DXT texture at a slightly higher resolution it will look a lot better and still be smaller than RGB. Upscaling makes the outlines (or other small details) thicker, greatly reducing the artefacts. If you make your texture 41% wider and higher it becomes twice as big, which is still 3 times smaller than RGB. As a huge bonus you also get sharper textures, so this probably looks way better than the lower resolution RGB texture would have. We've used this trick in Awesomenauts on all the characters: they're stored a bit higher than required for a 1920x1080 screen to reduce artefacts.





The format I've explained so far is DXT1, while DXT5 is what you'll want to use most. Colour is stored in the exact same way in DXT1 and DXT5. The difference is that DXT1 only has 1 bit alpha, while DXT5 can also store partially transparent pixels. DXT5 stores alpha in the same way as colour, so it stores two alpha values per block. Per pixel it stores an interpolation value for the alpha. So in total DXT5 stores two colours and two alpha values per block, and for each pixel one interpolation value for the colour and one for the alpha. This makes DXT5 exactly twice as big as DXT1 and results in high quality alpha/transparency.

There's also DXT3, but in practice I've so far never found it useful. DXT3 does not store two alpha values to interpolate between: instead it just uses 4 bits per pixel to directly store alpha per pixel. Since it's only 4 bits this means DXT3's smallest alpha step is 16. In other words: DXT3 is really bad at doing subtle alpha gradients, but really good at doing strong alpha contrasts (like object outlines). Since DXT5 is already good enough at doing strong alpha contrasts I've so far never used DXT3 in an actual game.

DXT1 can also store alpha, but only 1 bit alpha, so only on/off. A clever yet simple trick is used for this. Remember that each 4x4 block stores two colours. If the first colour is brighter than the second colour, then a block can store four different colours: the two main colours and two interpolated colours. This is how I explained it above. If however the first colour is darker than the second colour, then the block can store only three different colours. The fourth colour is used for fully transparent pixels. This results in slightly less colour quality around edges in the texture. Unfortunately it's only 1 bit alpha, so any anti-aliasing on object edges is lost.



There is another type of quality loss happening with DXT compression that I haven't mentioned yet. Colours are stored with 16 bits instead of the full 24 bits. This means that on top of the compression artefacts already mentioned we also get less colour depth. For most textures this is not a problem, but for subtle gradients it is. For this reason in Awesomenauts and Swords & Soldiers II we don't store pure gradients using DXT. We use simple 24 bit TGA instead. This is much bigger, but gradients are usually very thin, so storing a bunch of 256x1 textures with less compression is no problem.



Since DXT is used by so many games there are plenty of tools and plugins to work with it. For example, Nvidia has released a free Photoshop plugin for handling DDS files. When using this for 2D games, be sure to turn off mipmaps to save some more texture space (unless you actually need those mipmaps of course). Image browsing tool XnView supports DXT right away and I've heard there's even a plugin for Windows to see thumbnails of DXT files directly in Windows Explorer.

A fun aside here is that we've tried writing our own DXT compression tool to achieve DXT with less visual artefacts specifically for 2D games. We indeed managed to slightly reduce compression artefacts, but at the cost of more flickering in animations, so we ended up not using our own DXT compression tool. Maybe I'll get around to writing about that some day, let me know if you're specifically interested in this.

An important note on DXT is that iOS doesn't support the DXT format. Instead it has PVRTC. I haven't made any iOS games myself (Proun+ and Swords & Soldiers 1 were ported to iOS by respectively Engine Software and Two Tribes) so I don't personally have any experience with PVRTC). The rough concepts are pretty similar though. The big difference is that PVRTC doesn't have the little 4x4 block artefacts that DXT produces. Instead, PVRTC's compression artefacts come in the form of a slight blurriness.

One trick to improve quality with PVRTC is the same as with DXT: saving at a slightly higher resolution than what you really need will massively reduce the compression artefacts. Aaron Oostdijk from Gamistry (creators of the mobile hits Gold Diggers and Munch Time) mentions it also helps a lot to first smear the RGB colours our across the transparent areas. “A tool called Solidify B does this very nicely. And sometimes a light dither after that will improve results even more.” Note that I didn't use those tricks when compressing the image below.



On iOS you get the additional requirements that textures need to be square (same width and height) and power-of-two (16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, etc.). In many cases these two extra requirements demand a huge waste of texture space, unless you work around them through clever usage of texture atlases. On PC and console these requirements have been abolished around a decade ago, making efficient texture usage much easier there.

DXT results in serious compression artefacts but it provides such powerful compression that it is by far the best option for the vast majority of games. Next week I'll wrap up this series on texture formats by giving a big overview of all the formats discussed. See you then!

See also:
-Texture formats for 2D games, part 1
-Texture formats for 2D games, part 2: Palettes
-Texture formats for 2D games, part 4: Overview

Texture formats for 2D games, part 1

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 normal maps, roughness maps and reflection maps and mostly don't need high dynamic range (HDR) textures, so I won't be discussing the requirements of such special kinds of textures.

The first thing to realise is that transparency is extremely important in 2D games. While in a 3D game the shape of an object is generally determined by its polygons, the shape in a 2D game usually comes from transparency in the texture. In many 2D games the art is put on the screen by just having a simple rectangle with an image with transparency on it. Transparency is generally stored in the alpha channel, so the quality of the alpha channel is an important factor in 2D games.



The most basic and highest quality texture format is a simple RGBA32 with 8 bits per colour channel. In total each pixel then uses 4 bytes, or 3 bytes if there is no alpha channel. These can be stored in various file formats, like TGA and BMP, but in the end in the videocard it's all the same. At Ronimo we use TGA for these. This image format is lossless: whatever your original image was, you get exactly that in the game. Note that compressed TGA isn't supported by videocards, so when using TGA you will need to use its uncompressed 32 bit or 24 bit format (depending on whether you have alpha).



The big downside of this format is that it's huge. A 1024x1024 texture with alpha is already 4mb this way. Awesomenauts characters have a texture of nearly 4096x4096, containing all their animation frames. With simple RGBA, this would amount to a whopping 64mb of texture space for just a single character texture! This results in a simple conclusion: we need something smaller for the vast majority of our art. Even when you have several gigabytes of texture space available, full RGBA32 will fill it up really quickly. At Ronimo we only use TGA for images that are small and would lose too much quality when compressed. In practice this means we only use TGA for gradients.



One approach to reducing texture size is to use vector art and render that directly. This means you hardly need to use any textures at all since most colour and shape are defined by polygons instead of by a texture. It also means that artists need to use special vector tools like Illustrator and Flash. This is extremely limiting: more painterly styles are practically impossible this way. It also uses way more performance because in-game animation isn't simply swapping an image frame any more. Rendering vector art in real-time is a relatively complex and performance-heavy task.

Since vector tools are so limiting and since rendering vectors is a lot of work to program and much slower than textures, we don't use vector art in-game at all at Ronimo. We sometimes use vector tools when specific images are most easily made that way, but by the time they get to the game we always save the result as simple textures. Depending on your art style vectors might be a great option though!



A common suggestion from artists when discussing texture formats is to use JPG or PNG. These formats are excellent at achieving small image size with little visible loss. However, they aren't suitable for real-time games: videocards don't support these texture formats at all. That means that a texture that is stored on disk as JPG or PNG needs to be converted to something else to go into video memory, often growing the texture to the size of an uncompressed TGA. An important goal in choosing a texture format is to reduce the usage of video memory (usually to be able to store even more art there). Since JPG and PNG cannot be stored in video memory, they don't help there at all.



This doesn't mean these formats are entirely useless. In a game where the size on disk is most important you can use JPG for all the textures and then simply put them in the much larger RGB24 format in video memory. A game that famously did something like this is Rage (one of my favourite games of the past years). Rage needs to constantly stream in new textures, so the speed of reading from disk was a problem. To solve this they stored the files in a JPG-like format on disk, loaded that into memory, and then converted it in real-time to DXT to be used by the game. Such hardcore streaming tech is generally not necessary for 2D games though.

Videocards can only handle a very limited set of texture types. The three main approaches to reducing texture size without simply reducing their resolution are to use less bit-depth, to use palettes or to use the DXT format. Note that specific types of hardware might offer additional formats, so it can really pay off to look into the details of whatever platform you are developing for. Palettes and DXT will be separate blog posts, so let's look into reducing bit-depth now.

Using less bit-depth is the simplest approach to texture compression. For example, you can use a 16 bit format. Instead of using 8 bits per channel for RGB, you might use 5 bits for red, 6 for green and 5 for blue. Such an R5G6B5 format is 33% smaller than uncompressed 24bit RGB. It also means less colour depth, so especially gradients will look visibly worse. The difference is quite small though so for most textures this loss in quality is hardly noticeable and totally acceptable. The reason green is 6 bits while red and blue are 5 bits is that 16 doesn't divide by 3 equally. Human eyes are better at seeing in the green spectrum, so the extra bit is put in the channel where it matters most.



If you need alpha there's often something like R5G5B5A1 available, which also uses only 16 bits per pixel, but at slightly greater compression costs. This specific format has only 1 bit for alpha, so pixels are either fully transparent or fully opaque. This not only means that partially transparent pixels aren't possible, but also that anti-aliasing on the image's edges is entirely lost. In 2D games anti-aliasing is usually part of the original art and stored in the texture. Losing this can be pretty bad for image quality, so I generally wouldn't advice using formats with only 1 bit for alpha. There are also other combinations, like R4G4B4A4, giving better alpha but significantly worse colours. If you hate your own game you can even use R2G3B3.



Videocards support many different combinations of bitrates per channel so it's useful to have a look and figure out what works for your purpose. Specifically interesting is L8A8: this is a greyscale texture (L for “luminance”) with high quality alpha. This is 50% smaller than full R8G8B8A8. If the original image is already greyscale this format doesn't result in any quality loss. If you happen to be making a game with many monochrome textures, this might be a relevant option. If you don't need alpha you can half the size again by using L8.

In our own games none of the formats discussed so far are used extensively. We use a little bit of R8G8B8A8 through TGA files for gradients, and L8A8 for fonts. The vast majority of our textures is DXT5, which I will discuss in part 3 of this short series. Next week I will first look into the format we used for Swords & Soldiers 1 on Nintendo Wii: palette textures. This format is often overlooked and usually quite a hassle to use, but for certain art styles it delivers an excellent combination of small textures with little quality loss, as I'll show next week.

See also:
-Texture formats for 2D games, part 2: Palettes
-Texture formats for 2D games, part 3: DXT and PVRTC
-Texture formats for 2D games, part 4: Overview

Swords & Soldiers II introduction trailer

Our awesome introduction trailer for Swords & Soldiers II just went live! Koen made a really nice trailer for our new game, with help from Ralph and Gijs. Swords & Soldiers II is launching on Wii U next week (on Thursday 21 May), exciting times! :D

Making gameplay stand out against rich backgrounds

Good game graphics are not just about being pretty. Equally important is that they communicate well. The richer and more detailed a visual style becomes, the more difficult it is to communicate gameplay clearly. With the amount of detail and variation we wanted in Swords & Soldiers II it was a challenge to make the units, spells and other gameplay objects pop out against the colourful backgrounds. Today I would like to show the tricks our artists used to make this work.

The reason this is important is that otherwise it would not be clear which objects are interactive and which are not. For example, is a tree a wall that I cannot pass through, or just a backdrop that has no effect on the gameplay? Ideally these kinds of things are immediately and intuitively clear to the player, without requiring any explanation.

Our new game Swords & Soldiers II launches on Wii U on May 21st.

The easiest way to achieve visual clarity is to not have any backgrounds or effects. Just a flat-coloured background with the gameplay objects. This looks horrible of course, so we want to add more art to the game. In general, the more you add to the world, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish gameplay objects from graphical fluff. In truly rich visual styles achieving clarity is a challenging balancing act. Objects should look like they belong in the world but at the same time pop out. The creators of a game can even choose to let go of visual clarity if they value visual beauty more.

At Ronimo gameplay always come first, especially when creating highly tactical games like Swords & Soldiers II and Awesomenauts. This means our artists had to employ a lot of clever tricks to combine the lush visual style with gameplay readability.

Our art director Gijs Hermans is responsible for maintaining a consistent style throughout the game. For this blogpost I interviewed Gijs about the tricks used in Swords & Soldiers II. Our level artist Ralph Rademakers showed me some additional tricks. Below I will be showing the clever techniques they used to make the gameplay stand out.

To make characters, spells and towers stand out against background objects they are drawn in a different style: with outlines and cell shading. The backgrounds are more painterly, lacking outlines and with more brushy and subtle lighting.

In many Disney classics, like Jungle Book (top), animated objects are in a different style than non-animated objects. Our artists love this combination so they even combined the animated and non-animated styles within the Viking base for its different parts. Note the difference in outlines and shading between the animated caterpillar and the ship itself.

(Click for high resolution) The first version of the Viking base was more in the style of the backgrounds. To make it stand out more the final design was pulled more towards the gameplay style.

Early in development characters had hardly any shading (top), making their shapes less readable. Their final designs (bottom) have deeper shading and more saturated colours.

(Click for high resolution) Our artists tried a lot of different shading and outline styles for gameplay objects. This image shows a series of early experiments with the goldmine. All the way to the right is the final design. Be sure to click this image for full resolution, since this scale does not show the differences well.

Background graphics are less saturated. Our level artist Ralph even used such atmospheric perspective on objects very close: the house here is directly behind the playground and thus too close for 'real' atmospheric perspective. Ralph desaturated it anyway to make gameplay stand out more.

Sheep are sometimes gameplay objects and sometimes background objects. To make this clearer they are blended a bit towards a single colour when they are in the background or foreground.

Background brightness is often changed to make gameplay stand out more. In both of these images the background is brighter near the gameplay layer, adding contrast. Higher up in the screen no gameplay happens, so there 'normal' colours are used in the background.

Gradients are not the only way to make the playground stand out: here the bushes directly behind the playground don't have snow, turning them into a green border between the snowy playground and the snowy trees. It would be weird if only these objects lacked snow, so snow is also removed from other objects like the rooftop in the background on the left.

Corpses have gameplay functionality but having lots of them really clutters the view. We therefore desaturate corpses to make soldiers walking in front of them stand out more.

Depth of field blur on the background not only adds depth but also makes the foreground pop. We use this trick in both Swords & Soldiers II and Awesomenauts to make gameplay more readable.

The level art tools for Swords & Soldiers II

For our new game Swords & Soldiers II (coming to Wii U on May 21st!) we wanted to create detailed and varied levels. Because of the number of maps and their large size we needed art tools that provide a lot of automation to be able to populate them quickly. At the same time we wanted to allow customisation and control over the details to create unique, designed places. Today I would like to show the tools that Ronimo programmer Machiel van Hooren developed for our artists. Check especially the awesome demo video at the end!

Our starting point was the level editing tools we made for Awesomenauts. Those are very flexible and not tied to a single game, so we could pretty much use all of them directly in Swords & Soldiers II. However, the shape of the levels in Swords & Soldiers II is very different: the Awesomenauts tools are built around rectangular boxes, not curving landscapes. Nevertheless they provided a really strong beginning. I made a short video montage about the Awesomenauts tools for a blogpost a couple of years ago, here it is again for those who hadn't seen it before:


The first thing we needed to add for Swords & soldiers II was curving terrain. The core gameplay takes place on a single line with little slopes and hills. So we made a new feature with which our artists place TerrainNodes in the level, and then the engine automatically generates a smooth terrain that goes through those TerrainNodes.

To calculate a smooth line through those points we use standard bezier splines. We also tried using slightly simpler Hermite splines, but we didn't like the look of those. Bezier splines usually come with additional control points for more control over the curvature. To simplify things we calculate the control points automatically based on the previous and next TerrainNode. This gives slightly less control, but that turned out to be fine for our artists and it makes the tools simpler and faster to use.



The next step is terrain layers. We wanted to add as much depth to our 2D art as possible. Having more terrain layers in the foreground and background is a good way to accomplish this.

The most obvious method is to just allow our artists to create more terrain layers by hand at different parallax depths. However, efficiency was also a goal, so we wanted to avoid creating all those layers by hand. Therefore we made it so that the parallax layers are copies of the main terrain. To be able to create some diversity we added settings for things like random noise, different textures and colour modifications. Not only is it faster to create levels with these copied terrain layers, it also means that if the main terrain is edited (and it often is), then the background and foreground layers automatically change with it. This makes iteration and modification much quicker.



The big limitation this creates is that the hills in the background are the same as those on the playground. Sometimes our artists wanted to break free from this pattern. We could have tried making the terrain tools more flexible to accommodate for this, but often the big background objects aren't hills, but an inn, or a wall, or something else. The solution was simple: the artists just placed a big texture of a hill in the background and that's it.



Plants, small vegetation and other props are all tied to the landscape. To help place those quickly we created ObjectDroppers. An ObjectDropper attaches one or more objects to a terrain layer, allowing an artist to drop a bunch of bushes or flowers on the landscape quickly. Props are dropped using a random seed and the artist can try different seeds to look for one that he likes. With a bunch of prop types a level can have its basic setting in place really quickly, after which the artist can focus on adding the unique flavours. Since the dropped props are tied to the landscape, modifying the terrain also automatically modifies the props, making tweaking the terrain that much faster.



Our level artist Ralph Rademakers even used ObjectDroppers to place bigger objects like trees. By working efficiently with these tools Ralph was able to dress up the simpler levels in just a few days per level, using the textures drawn bij Adam Daroszewski and Gijs Hermans.

The other main tools used for the level art are things we inherited from Awesomenauts: placing textures and animations in levels and recolouring them. You can find some good examples of the power of in-engine recolouring in this blogpost: Using 2D daylight assets to create a night level.

Now that I have discussed the tools, let's have a look at them in action in this little video:


I think the main lesson that can be learned from the Swords & Soldiers II level art tools, is that it's sometimes a good idea to limit control to make the workflow faster. The ObjectDroppers create a lot of objects at once, giving much less control than placing them by hand, but also being much, much faster. Similarly, the background and foreground terrain layers being copies of the main layer is limiting, but also very efficient. Where required our artists had enough other tools to break through the limitations by hand, resulting in a good balance between automation and old fashioned handwork.

Using 2D daylight assets to create a night level

Changing the lighting in hand-drawn art is a challenge. While in 3D games you can simply modify the light, there is no such thing when using 2D assets. In our new game Swords & Soldiers II all the level assets have their lighting drawn in. Of course you can ask the artist the redraw the image with different lighting, but that costs a lot of additional time and texture memory. We managed to re-use our daylight textures to create convincing nighttime levels, so today I would like to explain the tricks used to achieve that goal.

Today's post is all about the artistry of Ronimo artist Ralph Rademakers. He uses images drawn by Adam Daroszewski* and Gijs Hermans to decorate the levels in Swords & Soldiers II. Ralph keeps surprising me with the unexpected tricks he manages to pull off with our internal tools.

*By the way, note that Adam works as a freelancer these days. He drew most of the level props in this post and you can see some more of his amazing work here.

There is basically a whole series of tricks that Ralph uses to turn day into night. I'll let the images do most of the talking today:







Even in the night a form of atmospheric perspective can be used: in the video below the smoke in the foreground is much brighter than the smoke in the background to suggest additional depth. When I built the recolouring shaders and tools I never expected them to be used on almost every object in the levels. Also, note how the stars have been made using particles to make them blink and appear in random places for a more lively look.





As a starting point Ralph usually chooses one colour multiplier for all objects in the level. He tweaks the colour per object to make it look exactly right. In the end few objects use the same colour multiplier, but they all started from the same point.





It surprises me how often these gradients are reused. From fog to lights to lens-flares and even just for hiding objects that should not be visible from certain viewpoints. The big downside of this approach is that it results in a lot of overdraw, which is also the main performance bottleneck in Awesomenauts. Good thing modern videocards are so insanely fast...





The lights in the bar below blink to make the scene more dynamic. However, blinking lights attract the eye too much while the focus should be on the gameplay. Therefore the blinking is not between on and off, but between the more subtle slightly-bright and extra-bright. Also note how the blinking lights illuminate the barmaid's arm.



This bar is also a great example of Ralph adding tons of little animating details, like the drunk guy on the roof. Many of those details will likely not be seen by most players, but the total effect of having such a detailed world is very strong, even for players who don't look at it specifically.



As a programmer when thinking about lighting in 2D games I immediately start considering technical solutions. I would look at things like normal maps (very possible in 2D) or automatic rim lighting. However, more creative, art-driven solutions often work much better, especially when creating a visual style with such a painterly look as in Swords & Soldiers II. The simple yet clever techniques Ralph used to create this nighttime level are a great example of this.