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.

Matisse, Malevich, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Mondriaan, van Dongen

Please ignore that horribly pretentious title, I just couldn't withstand this chance to put my name in that list... ;)

Last week the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam had an art game evening, so they put some games in their galleries. The Stedelijk Museum is the biggest modern art museum in The Netherlands and they decided to put Proun in the middle of their throne room, the one with their most important pieces. So there was my Proun, between Matisse, Malevich, Warhol, Lichtenstein and Mondriaan! Awesome! Especially Mondriaan's paintings were an important inspiration for Proun, so it is great to see my game next to six real Mondriaans!



The photo was taken by Richard Boeser, by the way. He is the creator of Ibb & Obb. Ibb & Obb was also there and it is a fantastic game. It hasn't been released yet, but I got a chance to play it and this is one of the most fun coop games I have ever played. Nice! So here is a little bit of marketing for his awesome game, which I believe should come somewhere early 2012. Be sure to turn the sound on to hear the music as well!


Ibb & Obb, by Sparpweed and Codeglue.

Games as expression / Proun as me

What goal does a game developer have when he makes a game? This is a very interesting question, and one that cannot be asked often enough. I think the most common answers can be summarised as one of these two:

• To make as much money as possible
• To give the player the best game possible

(Note that in this blogpost, I am ignoring serious games, advergames and political games, which are games with different goals than these two. These are interesting topics in their own rights, but I don't want to talk about them today.)

Obviously, there are lots of subtleties to my two types of game development goals. Making money is not just about how much copies you sell at what prices, or how many in-game items you sell. It is also about how much making the game cost in the first place.

"Giving the player the best game" can also be interpreted in many ways. The most obvious interpretation is trying to get the highest review scores, but it can also mean other things. Niche games can be really good for a limited audience, and at the same time also really bad for everyone else. And I have been told that in Japan, game development is very much about fan-service: if gamers love a game, then making lots of sequels and derivative games is a service to the fans. In the western world we sometimes frown upon this and judge that they are abusing the franchise with quick games to make as much money as possible, while it may really be very good fan service. This is a very different view on what is the best thing to do for the gamer.

Of course, most developers try to aim for both goals: make a good game that also makes lots of money. This is also our strategy at Ronimo Games: we try to make awesome games, but we are also a company, so we also need to earn enough money to make a living. We believe that these goals can coincide really well, though: good games have a better chance at selling well.

Money and quality don't always have to agree, though: free to play games often base their design choices exclusively on item sales statistics. Surprisingly, there are a lot of things that make the game less fun, but increase revenue. I will get back to that in a later blogpost, though, because that is a big topic all by itself, and I am getting to the point of this blogpost now, which is that there is more than money and quality:

Games can also be made as self expression.

This is the case with Proun, and without doubt with some other games. Proun was made because there were ideas in my head that wanted to come out. They wanted to be a game. I wanted them to be a game. Design choices in Proun were not made to make it the best game for the player, or to make as much money as possible. Proun was made because I love the experimental art from the early 20th century, and I wanted to express this love in a game. Proun was made because I was fascinated by having a world where there is no up or down, and everything rotates.

The music in Proun is what it is, because I felt it was what had to be there. Lots of people told me they thought the graphics and gameplay should go with techno, but that is not how it felt to me. It felt like something in the direction of the speed of Rockabilly and the cheerfulness of Dixieland. So that is what is in the game.

The best example of the impact that designing a game from my own expression has, can be found in the lack of numbers on the opponents to show their rankings. Players often complained to me that they wanted to see how the computer players were ranked, so I experimented with adding numbers on top of the balls. This really worked: I asked some 15 people to test the game and they all preferred to see this like this. However, I personally hate these numbers: they clutter the minimalist graphics and make the eyes focus on the wrong things. So I turned them off. Despite 100% of the playtesters liking them, I turned them off. Because I didn't like them. I would never have made that choice if the goal was to make the best game for the player. Yet I did.



Don't get me wrong, though: I do care whether players like Proun or not. It makes me very happy and proud that Proun is getting such positive feedback as it is. I am human enough to be influenced by how other people think about my work. The point of this blogpost is just that that was not the main goal in making Proun.

I think making games from your own expression is an interesting starting point to do something different. Many of the greatest artists in history worked like this. For example, Van Gogh expressed himself through his paintings. He sold only one painting during his life, but he is now considered one of the greatest painters ever to have lived, and he is one of the founding fathers of all 20th century art. Van Gogh is known today for how his (distorted) personality shines through in every aspect of his paintings. I think the Van Gogh of games has probably not appeared yet, and I think when he does, he will change our perception of what games are. I think it is time more game developers start treating games as expression, and in the process they will broaden our minds.


(Image from an interview with me on Indiepubgames.com.)

The endless possibilities of art styles

Last Wednesday I did a five-minute presentation at Ignite Amsterdam 4. Since I care a lot about the point I was making there, I have created an online version of it. Enjoy!

Eufloria

Proun

Zonderling by Marissa Delbressine

If you yourself are experimenting with unique styles, then please post a link below, since I would love to see them! ^-^

Ow, by the way, while sitting behind my computer I heard/hurt rumours that today is Christmas, so:

(Awesome image by Elsje Bakker)

Abstract art!

Many games seem to share the same set of movies and comics as their main source of inspiration, but for Proun I went an uncommon (for games) and very different route: my starting point was the abstract art from the first half of the 20th century. As long is the Fauvists play dead, I suppose this is pretty much my favourite art period.

When I had the core gameplay up and running, I was looking for an art style for it and quickly came across Mondriaan:



However, although awesome, this doesn't really fit Proun: characteristic to style is that there are no diagonal lines or curves. Making playable levels for Proun like this would be almost impossible.

So I looked a bit further and stumbled into Kandinsky. His work went through a couple of phases, from his early figurative art, to very expressive abstract art, to the more geometric abstracts of his later years. The expressive stuff is definitely my favourite, so after discarding Mondriaan, I decided to try something like this:



I started experimenting with shaders to achieve this art style, but at the time (wow, four years ago already!) I didn't have the slightest clue how to achieve this. The best image I have of those experiments shows what abominations I was creating (of course, the background grid was not intended to remain that way):



Today I have some ideas for how to tackle such a style, but at the time I lacked the skill, so I jumped into something a lot simpler in terms of shapes and colours:



Still Kandinsky, but later in his life. To me, this period in Kandinsky's work misses the intensity of earlier work, but replaces this with an incredible liveliness, and through the jumble of shapes comes a beautiful balance and unity in composition and colour. Kandinsky always surprises me with that such an amount of hues and shapes can somehow form something coherent.

What interests me most here is that while translating such paintings to a 3D game, I ended up somewhere pretty different. Even though Kandinsky's influence is clearly visible in Proun, I think my game has a new and unique vibe that is totally it's own. In this image the similarities may be at their most visible, but it is still very different:



Funny thing is that the discarded Mondriaan kept floating in my mind unconsciously. Only after finishing the second track did I realize that some parts of it were very similar to De Stijl, the group that Mondriaan and Rietveld were members of:



(Woohoo, a good reason to put my name next to such great artists! How insanely pretentious!)