Robo Maestro is coming to Steam!

Play with music like never before! Robo Maestro is the 'game' I'm currently working on and it's a procedural music toy. Guide an endless stream of new music or make detailed tweaks in Editor Mode. Create songs, be inspired and share your creations. Robo Maestro is coming to Steam, add it to your wishlist here!

Robo Maestro is a revolutionary new way of creating and experiencing music. You tell it what you want, and then the Maestro automatically generates music that fits that. Playing Robo Maestro requires no music knowledge at all: just have fun and hear what happens! Guide the Maestro and create awesome music together with it!

Arcane Glamour LIVE NOW! Blightbound's biggest update yet!

Today we've launched our biggest update for Blightbound on Steam yet! I'm really proud of what we've achieved with this one, since it not only adds a lot of cool stuff, but also makes big improvements to existing things in the game. Menus have been overhauled, the tutorial has been improved and many minor issues have been fixed. Also, some features that limited players and didn't really achieve their goals have been removed: blight, notoriety and limitations on character select.

Our previous major update is less than two months away and I think it's pretty impressive how much we've cranked out in that time. Now for the most important thing: I hope our players will like the new changes and improvements!

The new character in this update, Roland of Stendhall, also comes with a short story about how he joined the refuge. I had a lot of fun reading how vain Roderick Leeuwenhart depicts him. You can read the story (as well as the other ones) here: I, Roland of Stendhall. I'm especially font of Roderick's invention of the word magesplain: "The geologist saw all sorts of difficulties in this plan and was keen to magesplain them to me."

You can find the full list of changes in the patch notes.

Blightbound OUT NOW! Early Access on Steam!

Last Wednesday our new game Blightbound launched on Steam in Early Access! This is a super exciting moment as this is our first new IP to release in 8 years. We've been developing Blightbound for nearly 3 years now and it's really special to finally have the game live and see the community play it! Here's our launch trailer:



We have big plans for this game in Early Access. As the roadmap shows we have a ton of things in development to improve and expand the game. Since this is an Early Access release, there are plenty of fixes and improvements to be made to the game and the first two hotfixes have already released.

Through many years of expanding Awesomenauts we've gained a lot of experience running a live game and responding to the community and we plan on applying all of those lessons here. Robin and I did a talk on Games As A Service a few years back at Steam Dev Days and it's fun to be able to get back to that.

For example, during the first period of Awesomenauts live-ops we didn't really brand our patches and didn't distinguish between fixes and content drops. Here we're doing that right away: hotfixes happen in between and don't contain new content, while major updates get a name and branding and a strong dosis of new stuff to keep players interested and bring players back who had seen it all already. Updates will even come with their own accompanying short stories, written by Roderick Leeuwenhart. The launch story, named "Forging Ahead", is already live on our website and more will follow in the coming period.

Now that the game is out there, I'm also able to write more about it. In the coming period I hope to find the time to talk about how things were built, since there are tons of interesting topics to discuss! We've even already encountered our first set of blog-worthy networking bugs, so I think I'll start there in my next blogpost.

Blightbound gameplay revealed!

Yesterday during the PC Gaming Show the gameplay for our new game Blightbound was revealed! We've been working on this game for nearly 3 years now, so it's really cool to finally show it to the world.



Blightbound is a multiplayer dungeon crawler that tasks three heroes to venture down from their mountain refuge to face the abominations of the Blight - a mysterious and corrupting fog that enshrouds the land.

I've personally been having a lot of fun with the tech for the characters. Since Awesomenauts characters are sprites they can't be big and they can't be really high framerate: that would just use too much texture memory. We wanted to fix these problems for Blightbound so I've implemented a new system that does allow us to do screen-filling bosses at high framerate. I've also implemented tech for doing real-time lighting on 2D characters with real volume and depth, instead of just lighting them as flat cut-outs as would be the obvious way to light 2D elements in a 3D world.

And that's just a few of the things I've personally worked on. Ronimo is currently 29 people so there are tons of interesting things the rest of the team has been making for Blightbound! This is by far the biggest game we've made so far and I'm really happy with how it's all turning out.

Last month we also released a story trailer:



There's a lot of interesting development stuff so I hope I can find the time to write a series of blogposts on specific aspects of Blightbound development in the future.

Taking live soundtrack improvisation to the next level

I've previously written about how Rene Derks and I did a live musical improvisation to someone playing Journey and Ori And The Blind Forest. This was a pretty unique experiment already, but recently we kicked it up a notch with an even bolder performance: instead of knowing what was coming, we let players choose whatever game they wanted to play and we had to improvise live music to that. Since this was an experiment not all of it worked well, but I think it was a success: a bunch of games turned out pretty awesome and we learned a lot. Today I'd like to explain how we approached each game and why some of them worked, and others turned out not to be a great fit for this format. I've included a couple of short videos from the performance, check 'm out!

The basic idea for these performances is that we mix live improvisation with gameplay. Instead of playing the original game's soundtrack we come up with new music on the spot and try to respond to whatever is happening in the game. The result is a truly adaptive soundtrack, by the magic of spontaneous improvisation. As always with improvisation, some of it sounds bad, a lot sounds okay, and some moments are pure magic that can only be experienced there and then.



For the previous performances we had chosen specific parts of the games Journey and Ori that would have a nice emotional arc to add music to, and we thought beforehand about the kinds of emotions and melodies we wanted to do for the various sections of those games. While that makes for better music, it's also limiting: we can't do a whole lot of games that way and experimentation on the spot is somewhat limited. So when we got a chance to try this again at Abunai in August 2017 we chose a different approach: we went in deliberately unprepared. We had a Switch and a laptop with some 40 Steam games installed and let players choose whatever they wanted to play. We improvised to whatever they did.


Beforehand we thought that if 25% of our performance was awesome, 25% was okay and 50% sucked, we would consider it a successful experiment. We may have done a little bit better than that, but not much: some games indeed didn't work, and for some games we only figured out what kind of musical approach worked after a few minutes of struggling.

Another change we made compared to the previous performance is that we played in a small hall in a corridor. During our previous performance at Animecon was had a big stage. That's great if a performance is a big success, but it creates a lot of distance to the audience and you need a lot of audience to make it work. At Animecon on average we had maybe 20 viewers, which made the hall look like a big empty failure. So at Abunai we requested something much simpler: a spot that people walk past on their way to other events at the con, and some couches. This reduces the distance to the audience and makes it easy for people to watch for a few minutes and then walk on. In total we reached way more people this way, and it was much more fun to do. There was even room for musically fooling around with the audience a bit.



The first player of the afternoon chose Limbo and this was also the most successful game for us. During the afternoon we could easily see whether we were doing well by checking whether passersby stayed to watch and listen. They did for Limbo.

The reason Limbo is so great for this kind of musical improvisation is that it has a slow pace with a strong emotional arc. First a player walks for something like 20 seconds, which is a nice duration to set a mood musically. Then he approaches a trap. We know the game so we can start increasing the tension by playing something eerie. Then the player interacts with the trap and might even die a couple of times, which are great opportunities for doing something special musically. In this case I played 2 high shrieking notes at every death, combined with a few hard hits on the djembe by Rene. By doing the same thing at every death the whole performance gets glued together.

Limbo is slow enough that Rene even saw room to play something similar to sound effects on his djembe. For example, he played taps that mimic footsteps, drum rolls during slides and a deep bass when the player lands after a slightly deeper drop.



The second game that was chosen was Ikaruga, an insane bullet hell shooter. This was very difficult for us to react to: the screen is filled with bullets practically all the time so there's isn't really any kind of arc that we could latch onto. We ended up just playing a fast beat and only really reacting during boss fights. It worked somewhat, but the whole idea of the music reacting to the game was kind of lost here and cello+djembe isn't the best possible combo for a fast beat.



The worst of the day and the only complete failure was Tekken 7. A player brought a laptop to show his skills at beating the final boss on the hardest difficulty. He was incredibly good at the game so that was impressive to see, but making music to this was practically impossible. The action was too fast to follow and the camera constantly jumped around to emphasise specific scenes. For a short bit we tried to play sound effects on the punches, but the game is so fast that we totally failed at seeing them coming.

Figuring out what to do with the next two games was really interesting. Spelunky is a game with a rather constant state during gameplay: every five seconds you kill an enemy, grab some loot and do some platforming. Individual events are too fast to react to and the flow of events is pretty much constant. However, Rene noticed that during each level the player is always going down. I tried following this progress by starting each cave on the highest string of my cello and then dropping to the next string as the player drops. While this idea is nice, I feel it was too subtle to be picked up by the audience. In hindsight it might have been better to react to how much health the player had left. Spelunky is a rogue-like game so the tension of being low on health is really high.



During The Binding Of Isaac we found a better trick. For each floor Rene chose a base rhythm that he expanded as the floor progressed, building towards the boss fight. During empty rooms he went back to the floor's basic rhythm. While Rene kept playing this beat on his djembe, I stopped playing altogether. Whenever the player cleared a room, I played a short melody; the same one for each room. I had another melody for opening a chest. And then as the player reaches the final boss of a floor, I started actually playing and driving up the tension. I think this worked really well and it shows a very different approach compared to what we did during the other games.

Next up was Broforce, in 3 player coop. Sjeez, that game is chaotic! Each level is just 40 seconds of constant gunfire and explosions. I had no idea where to look or what to respond to. This was almost as bad as Tekken 7. Ugh.

So I shivered when the next choice was Ultimate Chicken Horse: another super chaotic multiplayer game. However, here we found a fitting approach. A match of Ultimate Chicken Horse is a series of short rounds, where each round starts with everyone modifying the level a bit, and then everyone playing it. Each phase lasts around 15 seconds. Reacting musically to the actual events is impossible in this chaotic game, but instead we simply did something special for the phases. During the building phases I did some goofy plucking on my cello, deliberately playing melodies that sound a bit childish and dumb. And then during the action phase I played a faster, more aggressive variation with the bow. Rene made this contrast even stronger by not playing at all during the building phase and playing a really fast djembe rhythm during the action phase. I think this captured the back and forth of the gameplay phases quite well, and was a good fit for the wacky art of Ultimate Chicken Horse.



We ended with two slower single player games: Zelda and ABZÛ. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a great fit for improvising music. Most things the player does take long enough that you can react to them. Walk for half a minute, fight for half a minute, look at your loot for a bit, climb a hill, swim some water, another battle. Each of these steps takes long enough that you can really react to them without turning the music into a chaotic mess that goes all over the place.

ABZÛ is an even slower game. Like Journey it's a gorgeous game that's mostly about looking and experiencing, with very little challenge in the gameplay. The serene under water gameplay is a great fit for setting a mood through music, but I think our instruments weren't the best fit here. Djembe and cello are interesting for many things, but underwater moods are difficult with this setup. Also, after playing for around 2.5 hours the sound got a bit stale for us.


Nevertheless, during the final round of ABZÛ another interesting thing happened. The player had overlooked that he needed to free a little robot before a door could be opened. Instead, he repeatedly pressed a button on the door, hoping it would open. I played two simple notes each time to accentuate that it didn't work, and since the player kept trying, I kept playing those same two boring notes. This went on for way too long and the audience started laughing at how stupid that sounded. This was one of the nicest and most direct bits of audience interaction we had. It also taught me an important lesson: sometimes it's okay if it sounds bad musically if the interaction is fun or interesting in some other way.

Finally, after the performance we had dinner at Rene's parents. They happen to own a piano and Rene also plays that, so we started jamming some more, despite having played so long during the day already. This sounded quite wonderful and it taught me the biggest change we should do if we do this kind of performance again: we need a more diverse set of instruments. I can only play the cello, but since Rene plays both keyboards and percussion we should just bring both to diversify the sounds and moods we can play. Or maybe we should even get a third musician next time!


In the end I think this was a really interesting experiment. The quality of the music varied from really awesome to really bad and that's okay: the whole point of improvisation is that you don't know what's going to happen and the moments where it's awesome are true magic, happening right there and only then. The key lesson we learned is that different games require vastly different musical approaches and the trick is to find whatever arcs the game has going and respond to those through music.

What we learned improvising a live game soundtrack

Recently I've done a couple of music performances that were quite different from any live game music performance I've ever seen. We let someone play the games Journey and Ori And The Blind Forest live on stage and we improvised a completely new soundtrack on the spot, reacting to whatever the player was doing. This was a unique experiment for us and we learned a lot about what works and what doesn't, so today I'd like to share our approach and experiences.



Usually when game music is performed live the original soundtrack is replicated by musicians on stage. We however completely ignored whatever the original soundtrack had sounded like and improvised based on what we saw. The resulting music is different with each performance and sounds nothing like the original soundtrack. The fun of improvisation is that it's entirely in the moment. You don't know what's going to happen and it will never happen in the exact same way again. A truly live experience! Sometimes we might make mistakes, but sometimes we might also improvise the most intensely awesome music. Doing this in response to a game that's being played live is really exciting! Here's a video compilation of our performance at Animecon in the Hague last month:

Some people might know my game Cello Fortress. While there are similarities between Cello Fortress and our live game soundtracks, they really are very different. In Cello Fortress I control the game by playing cello. The cello is a game controller and the game is designed around this unique input device. On the other hand, the live game soundtracks in this blogpost are for existing games: the music doesn't control the game at all. We just respond musically to whatever happens on the screen. This is a bit less extreme than Cello Fortress, but as far as I know it also hadn't been done before and it's a different, interesting approach.

Before I continue, a short word about who 'we' are. The original idea for this performance came from Bram Michielsen and Zuraida Buter, who asked us to improvise live music to Journey at the Screenshake festival in Antwerp in 2015. After that we did a couple more performances and added Ori And The Blind Forest to the mix. I did these performances together with Rene Derks, who played djembe, keyboards and pads. Rene is a lecturer in game design and production at the NHTV in Breda and previously worked on Loco Roco 2 and Gatling Gears. I myself played cello and in my daily life I'm lead programmer at Ronimo Games, mostly known for our games Awesomenauts, Swords & Soldiers and the original version of the student game De Blob. We're not professional musicians but music is a rather serious hobby for both of us.

Improvising interesting music is difficult, and doing so together with other musicians even more so: whatever you're playing needs to not just sound good on its own, but also sound good with what the other musicians are playing. This means you can't just suddenly change the rhythm or mode unless you have a lot of experience improvising together. The specific combination of djembe and cello helps a lot here. It's only two instruments and they both carry a very clear responsibility: the djembe is in charge of rhythm and the cello is in charge of melody.

That gives me total freedom to change the mode or chord without needing to worry that this will sound bad with the other instrument. This kind of freedom is extra important here because we need to respond not just to each other and the audience, but also to the game. It also leaves room for great accidentals: a fast djembe rhythm can work great with slow cello notes and vice versa, so as long as we change intensity at the same moment it's okay if we don't always agree on whether we're increasing or decreasing the intensity.

When preparing for our first gig we started by choosing specific parts of each game, looking for areas with enough of an arc to make them interesting musically. The part of Journey we chose starts relaxed in the desert, then goes down into a darker valley with machinery, then has a very fast descent and finally goes through a dark, scary area that ends in a climax as the player flees from flying monsters. This gives us plenty of room for variation and for having an emotional arc in the music.



The next step was to figure out the general mood we wanted in each area and to come up with some ideas for the kinds of things we could do there musically. We looked up some longplay videos of Journey and improvised over those. We didn't actually write any music but we did end up with a good idea of what kind of things would work were. We also decided where Rene would play djembe and where he would use atmospheric synthesizer pads. In some cases we defined rather specific musical ideas, but in most it was just general directions. For example, in the haunted caves in Journey we didn't have more than this idea: "the caves get low dark dissonant cello and the djembe keeps silent in the beginning and joins after a while."



We wanted to make it very clear to the audience that we were truly responding to the game and not just playing pre-composed music, so we looked for some player actions we could respond to. Journey turns out to be great for this: jumps can take as long as 10 seconds so they are long enough that we can respond to them musically. During a big jump I might for example play an upward flurry on cello, hold a long sliding note during the fall and then get back into the rhythm as the player lands on the ground. Musically it feels slightly childish to play an upwards line as the player jumps upward, but audiences responded very well to this. We could clearly hear in their responses that these were the moments where they truly 'got' it.

To tie it all together musically and to have some kind of theme that the audience can recognise and remember we choose a couple of events for which I wrote small melodies. This is very much like in Zelda, where a short melody plays whenever you open a chest. In Journey we chose the finishing of each level as the key moments and in Ori And The Blind Forest the opening of doors. I quite liked the melody I came up with for Journey so I've also reused it as an attack melody in Cello Fortress.


This kind of performance isn't just about the music, but also about the person who sits on stage playing the game. Figuring out what's best here was a challenge. On the one hand the most pure expression of the concept would be to have a random player from the audience play the game without any preparation. However, this is risky since the player might not know the game and get stuck or need to retry an area a dozen times. That's going to be really boring to watch. On the other hand a prepped player feels like faking it. So we ended up making sure we had a player who knew the basics of the game, but who hadn't played with us before so that we both didn't know what was going to happen exactly.

This worked well in general but during one performance it backfired. The player got stuck in a dark cave in Journey and walked around aimlessly for minutes. It's difficult to improvise anything good for that and I saw some people from the audience leave during that section. I think next time it might be better to look for a player who knows the game better and accept that the player might rush through some sections. That's probably more fun than watching someone be stuck, trying to figure out what the jump button is or looking in every nook and cranny to find every last item...



While Journey is a slow game in which we could respond to individual actions by the player, Ori And The Blind Forest is way too fast for this kind of approach. For example, combat often takes only 2 seconds. We tried switching to combat music every time an enemy was encountered, but the music alternating so much just didn't sound good. Music needs to flow. So instead we decided to respond to individual events very little and mostly just have different types of music per area. The player can quickly go from place to place but generally stays in an area for at least 30 seconds so it's okay if the music changes whenever you go in or out of an area.



In Ori We also took a more melodic and less improvisational approach: Rene played keyboards here and we defined most of the chords and arpeggios beforehand. This works, but it felt a bit too forced to our liking. Our goal with this project was to truly improvise and after doing a couple of performances especially Ori felt a bit stale.

Doing these performances was really exciting and we've learned a lot about what works and what doesn't. Our next experiment with this idea is going to have a different structure. At the Abunai convention we want to try a smaller, more cosy setting where we don't decide beforehand which games are going to be played. Instead we're just going to bring a list of suitable games and let the audience decide whatever they want to play and we'll improvise to that. If someone happens to be carrying their own Switch they could even hook that up and play their own games! This means we can't prepare beforehand, which will probably result in less polished music, but at the same time it will be much more spontaneous so I expect more fun, weird things will happen. I also hope that not being on a stage will make the interaction between the audience, the players and us more direct. I'm really looking forward to trying out this new experience!

New Awesomenauts expansion announced: Overdrive!

This Monday we've announced a new expansion for Awesomenauts: Overdrive! Lots of cool things under way, like 4 new characters, graphics improvements, new matchmaking and the Starstorm map! Most of that content will be added in free updates to the base game, while 3 of the characters will be sold as a premium DLC. That DLC is coming in March and can already be pre-ordered on the new Overdrive website (pre-ordering grants a free skin for Professor Yoolip). Here's a cool trailer to show what's cooking:

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

Proun+ out now on iOS!

On 27 November Proun+ launched on iOS! The first reviews are extremely positive, both from the press and from users. We also got a big feature in the European App Store, so it seems like Apple itself also likes the game. :) Here are some quotes from the reviews and the launch trailer:

"A bright, searingly good twitch racer that takes the fundaments of the genre and builds something staggeringly entertaining on top of them."
9/10
PocketGamer.co.uk

"Previously a successful indie release on the PC, it deserves your attention and patience. [...] Throw in a funky jazz based soundtrack and Proun+ has a lot going for it."
4/5 stars
148Apps.com

"this self-styled “journey through modern art” exudes an endearing weirdness that sets it apart and nestles it in your brain. Like that off-beat game you used to play, that you’re convinced only you can remember, which you can’t possibly forget."
4.5/5 stars
Gamezebo.com



Proun+ is available in the App Store for iPhone and iPad for $3.99 here.

Proun+ gets its first trailer!

We have released the first trailer for Proun+, the biggerbetter Proun that is coming to 3DS, iOS and Android! Proun+ is being made together with Engine Software and will have six new tracks and a completely new soundtrack: more songs and all the songs have now been recorded by real musicians for a much better sound. In this trailer you can hear the new version of one of the old songs and see one of the awesome new levels in action, plus footage from some of the original tracks. I am really hyped for the return of Proun, so I hope you like it!

Revealing Swords & Soldiers II

We recently announced that we our new game is Swords & Soldiers II. We didn't actually show any real gameplay yet, so today brings an exciting moment: here's what it looks like! It’s beards, mead, sheep, demons, axes, wenches and barbecues! Hope you like it!

Camera mapping a comic: the Ward trailer

It has been a while since I dabbled in the awesome fun of camera mapping. Recently I bumped into a good reason to get back to that invigorating topic: the comic Ward was released. Marissa Delbressine was working on a trailer for her comic and she thought having a camera mapping of Ward's cover would be an awesome addition. Marissa threw me a pretty smile to which I couldn't say 'no', so I went to work on it. (Marissa happens to be my girlfriend, so I guess without the pretty smile I couldn't have said 'no' either... ;) )

Here is a compilation of the shots I made of the cover of Ward, plus shots of the meshes used to make this scene:



Marissa used a couple of these shots in the complete Ward trailer, which you can see below. Note that most of this trailer is not camera mapped: I was personally only involved in the shots at 0:43 and 1:12. All the 2D art and the rest of this trailer were made by Marissa and co. I think the result is great: making a trailer for something as static as a comic is difficult and I think Marissa did a great job of bringing it to life. It helps if you know Dutch and can read the text, though... Anyway, here is the complete trailer:



It has been several years since I last wrote about camera mapping on this blog, so let's do a quick recap of what this technique is. The idea is to project a 2D image onto a 3D model, so that you can do 3D camera movements through this 2D image. To do so, you have to first split the image into layers, and then create simple, rough 3D models to represent the objects in the image. Here is how this was done for Ward:


The process of creating the camera mapping of Ward. I only did the 3D parts: colours were done by Shanna Paulissen and splitting into layers and extending them by Iris Adriaansz.

Those who make 2D animations will likely recognise most of this: camera mapping is a more advanced version of a technique that is often used by 2D animators; they also split the scene in layers to create a 3D effect. The difference between this simple layers approach and full camera mapping is that with camera mapping the 3D models aren't just planes: they are real 3D objects that roughly mimick the shape of the 2D objects. This makes the 3D camera movements much more convincing, since the scene is not just a collection of cardboard planes anymore.

The main reason I think camera mapping is such an exciting technique, is that it allows for 3D graphics to achieve unique 2D looks. 3D graphics can look like many things, but there are very few 2D styles that normal 3D graphics can do well. The roughness of a brush or a pencil stroke is something that only really works in 2D, and camera mapping makes it possible to get that look in 3D.

Another benefit of camera mapping is that it only requires very simple 3D models. The details are all in the drawing, so you don't need to model everything and can get away with crude approximations of the real 3D models. Most work in camera mapping is in dividing the scene into proper layers in Photoshop. If the artist already works in layers, this can be a relatively simple thing to do.

The big downside of camera mapping is that objects have no backside, so the camera cannot rotate all around them. In the case of games this makes camera mapping mostly useful for games with limited camera movement, like 2.5D platformers, or games with a perspective like Diablo. In fact, the awesome Diablo III uses quite a bit of camera mapping, but disappointingly refuses to use the technique to create a truly unique art style.



Since it has been so long since I wrote about camera mapping, here are the camera mappings I did a couple of years ago:

• Camera mapping the Evil Pope
• Captain August got camera mapped!
• Camera mapping tips and tricks

I hope to come back to camera mapping some day to create some real-time game environments with it. I already have one quite far finished, but instead of finishing it I always end up spending my spare time on Cello Fortress and writing blogposts, so I don't know when I will actually get to that.

Let's end this blogpost with some blatant marketing for Ward, which is an awesome comic and it currently available in stores in the Netherlands. Marissa drew some amazingly detailed and beautiful art for it, so check it out! Ward is only available in Dutch, and is sold in specialised comic stores and at Bol.com and in the Eppo Webstore.

Awesomenauts in the Humble Bundle!

Yesterday the Humble Indie Bundle 8 launched, including Awesomenauts! For $1 or more, you get Steam keys to the games in the bundle, and Awesomenauts even comes with an exclusive chicken skin for Clunk: Cluck.

Really happy with the line-up this time. The other games in the bundle include some of my personal favourites from the past years: Little Inferno, Capsized and Dear Esther. Especially Dear Esther absolutely blew my mind when I played it, showing me a completely different kind of 'game' experience, and a story that really intrigued me deeply.

How the cello controls the game in Cello Fortress

The most unique aspect of Cello Fortress is how a cellist does a live performance in front of an audience, while at the same time controlling a game. This is completely different from other music games, in which the musician usually plays on a fake plastic instrument, and even if he plays a real instrument, he does nothing but imitate an existing song. In most such other music games, there is hardly any real gameplay: just points based on how well you played the song.

Cello Fortress is a completely different affair: here the cellist is controlling a real game, with real choice and interaction. Depending on what his opponents do, the cellist plays different notes. The cellist can even do things like baiting the opponents with a certain attack and then switching to another.

So how does that work? What does the cellist need to do to trigger the various attacks? Check this trailer to see (and hear!) how it works:


Live video footage in the trailer shot by Zoomin.tv Games at the Indie Games Concert.

Here is an overview of the attacks as explained in the trailer:

• Slow high notes: long range guns
• Slow chords: homing missiles
• Fast high notes: machine guns*
• Fast chords: double machine guns*
• Dissonant chords: flamethrowers
• Slow low notes: create mines
• Fast low notes: mines move towards the player
• Special melody 1: obliterate left half of screen
• Special melody 2: obliterate right half of screen

*Playing even faster notes increases the speed of the machine guns.

The key thing to realise, is that the first seven of these attacks allow the cellist to play many different styles, melodies and rhythms, and still achieve that attack. The number of possibilities with "slow high notes" is literally infinite. This is a crucial aspect to the game, since it allows the cellist to improvise in many different ways, keeping each match of Cello Fortress fresh and varied. Having so much freedom also allows an experienced cellist to play fluently from one attack to the other.

There is real gameplay and choice in this. For example, something I often do when playing the cello in Cello Fortress, is play something slow to dare players to get close to my cannons. As soon as they do, I switch to fast chords to damage them from short range.

The special melodies are each 8 notes and have been defined beforehand. The fun in these is that the attack is announced when the 4th note is played, but the damage is not actually done until the 8th note is played. Players who pay close attention can hear the attack coming after only two notes, and thus flee before it even happens.

I can play the melody faster or slower to make the attack happen earlier or later. From a gameplay perspective, one would assume I always attack as quickly as possible, but my goal is actually not purely to win: I want to entertain the players and the audience. So I sometimes deliberately let them live to give them a more fun experience. This can be seen around 1:33 in the trailer: I make the final note very long to allow that player to escape. Just like in a film, the best moments are not when the hero dies, but when he narrowly escapes.



These controls were specifically chosen because they combine music and control in a natural way. Achieving this was more difficult than it may seem. In my very first prototype, the cello simply shot one bullet for every note, and the direction of the bullet depended on the pitch of the note. This turned out to play horribly: whenever the players moved from the left to the right, the cellist had to play a scale from low to high. When they moved back, the notes also had to go back from high to low. This made it completely impossible to play anything that sounded like good music.

Another thing I tweaked a lot is the mapping of which pattern triggers which attack. The current controls work quite well on an emotional level: the attack is linked to the feeling of the music. Slow, low notes often sound quite tense and sad on a cello (especially with the specific types of melodies I personally usually play), and alternating between slow and fast notes creates an awesomely menacing atmosphere. This can be seen in the trailer from around 1:00. Creating tension this way works incredibly well: I performed with Cello Fortress in front of an audience of several hundred people at the Indie Games Concert, and the noises from the audience made it clear that they experienced the tension very strongly.

A note I should make on this trailer, is that in the real game, there is a slight delay between the music the cello plays and the moment the guns react to it. This is because analysing music in real-time takes a bit of time. To make the trailer more understandable, I have moved the sound a bit to make the music fit the gameplay exactly.

While I am already performing with it, I am also still working on Cello Fortress to improve it. So what is next? My focus for the coming period is first creating real graphics, and after that I want to add a couple more attacks for the cellist. In the meanwhile, I hope more events, venues and exhibits will contact me to perform with Cello Fortress! Check www.cellofortress.com for tour dates and contact info!

Announcing Awesomenauts The Movie with a trailer!

We have just released this press release, figured I should share this awesome piece of news with you!

Today Ronimo Games announces that their massively successful platforming MOBA Awesomenauts is coming to Hollywood! Awesomenauts The Movie will be directed by the award-winning director G.G. Abrams. The announcement is celebrated with a teaser trailer:



Awesomenauts The Movie will be released in full 3D and will reach theaters around the globe this Fall. Joost van Dongen, co-founder of Ronimo Games, says "This movie is a dream come true. Plans for an Awesomenauts movie have been in development since we started working on the game, and now that the game has reached such huge success, we have finally been able to break into Hollywood and get the production of the movie started!"

Actors have not officially been announced yet, but rumours currently suggest several famous Hollywood actors might have enlisted to play the roles of Froggy G, Clunk and Sheriff Lonestar.

About Awesomenauts:
The downloadable game Awesomenauts is a unique combination of an action platformer and the MOBA genre (games similar to League of Legends and DotA). Awesomenauts was released on PS3, Xbox 360 and Steam in Summer 2012 and features lovingly crafted 2D graphics. It also happens to come with one of the best theme songs in the history of gaming.

About Ronimo Games:
Ronimo Games is the Dutch indie studio responsible for the downloadable hits Awesomenauts (Steam, PS3, Xbox360) and Swords & Soldiers (Wii, PS3, Steam, iOS, Android), which both won numerous awards.

Cello Fortress trailer revealed!

A couple of months ago I revealed my new project Cello Fortress. Now it is finally time for a proper trailer! Cello Fortress is a unique combination of a live cello concert and a game, and is intended to be played at events (festivals and such). This trailer shows how the game works, and shows a bit of the interaction between the players and the cellist.

Cello Fortress is pretty weird and unique, so I guess so far only those who actually played it, really understood what Cello Fortress is about. Hopefully this trailer will clear it up for others as well!


(Video footage recorded by Dyzlo Film at Indigo.)

In essence, Cello Fortress is a twin stick shooter. Four players cooperate using Xbox controllers to destroy as many cannons as possible. However, the cannons are not controlled by the computer, but by a live cellist! He improvises live music on his cello, and tries to do that in such a way that the game not only does what he wants, but also that the music actually sounds good. In a sense, this is the ultimate in adaptive music!

The current version of Cello Fortress is still in beta and far from finished. The graphics are just some quick prototyping models thrown together, and all kinds of things still need tweaking and improving. Cello Fortress is already touring, though, and has so far played at several events in the Netherlands.



Cello Fortress is a complex project in several ways: playing cello so that it sounds good and controls the game is a big challenge and requires an experienced cellist and a lot of practice. Analysing what the cello plays is also technically very complex and has, as far as I know, never been done before in a computer game. I expect I can write a couple of interesting blogposts about sound analysis now...

Cello Fortress may be a music game, but it is nothing like existing music games like Guitar Hero. In Cello Fortress the instrument is a real cello, and real music is played. The cellist is also not scored for playing 'right' or 'wrong' notes. Instead, he controls a shooting game by improvising.

Because the music is so central to the game, I wanted to make sure that the trailer would sound like an actual match of Cello Fortress. In real matches, the music is completely improvised (nothing is composed beforehand), so I decided to also improvise the music for this trailer. I ended up recording over twenty improvisations, and I used the one that I liked most. (The timpani were added digitally afterwards to add a little bit of flavour for the trailer.)

I hope that this trailer will not just get attention in the world of games, but also in the world of music. Cello Fortress could be a revolution in music acts! This makes me quite nervous, though: musicians are bound to hear any mistakes in my playing. Cello is an incredibly difficult instrument to play well. Although it has been a hobby of mine for over twenty years, I can still only hope my playing sounds acceptable to trained ears...



Since this music was improvised specifically for this trailer, it is not entirely the 'real thing'. Luckily, someone recently posted some footage of a match with audible sound (all other video recordings I have contain more audience noises than cello music). The video and sound quality are not super, but nevertheless this gives a good idea of what a Cello Fortress match sounds like:


(Filmed live at the Playful Arts Festival.)

Cello Fortress is a really weird and unique game, but for me it makes a lot of sense: playing cello has been a hobby of mine for ages, and I am a professional game developer. I like to make weird, unique things. How could these ingredients not combine into a game? Coming up with the actual concept for Cello Fortress was more difficult though: cello and computer can be combined in many different ways and it took me years to come up with something that is fun for the audience to play and watch, controllable by a cellist, and allows for beautiful music.

Cello Fortress is a project that I do entirely in my spare time. Nevertheless, I am going to steadily keep improving Cello Fortress, and I hope I can play with it at some exciting events and festivals!

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!)

Awesomenauts skins out now!

Indeed! We have just released DLC skins for Awesomenauts on Steam! There is an awesome alternative look for every character, as you can see in the new trailer:



This comes together with patch 1.5, which along with skins also contains numerous balance fixes, and some big improvements to the matchmaker to make sure you play more against players of the same skill level.

Awesomenauts out now on PC on Steam!

Yes! Awesomenauts is out now on PC on Steam! I'm really happy with how it turned out, so I hope you will like it as well! You can get it here!

Awesomenauts is coming to Steam!

Yesterday we have announced that Awesomenauts is coming to Steam! Woohoo! We have been working on it for quite a while already, so it will release really soon. There will even be a closed beta, which will start within a week. Exciting times! I am kind of surprised that I managed to write those optimisation blogposts in the past weeks at all, because we have been crunching like crazy to iron out all the bugs. In particular we spent a lot of time on getting the controls just right for PC, and personally I feel it plays great, so I hope the players in the beta will agree! Here's a trailer showing Coco and Derpl on PC: