Today we have released a new trailer of Awesomenauts, showing Sheriff Lonestar in action! He was genetically engineered by cows, but escaped and enslaved them all. Now his most powerful weapon is a holographic bull!
(Yes, it did make perfect sense to us when we came up with this back story... ;) )
Fellow Ronimo Ralph did a great montage for this trailer, and Sheriff Lonestar's theme song is again some awesome music by Sonic Picnic!
Tuesday, 26 July 2011
Saturday, 2 July 2011
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:
(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.)
- 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.)
Monday, 27 June 2011
Proun server back online!
Well, that's it, basically! I found a new host and now the Proun server is back online. This one is a lot more expensive and a lot more scalable, so I can only hope it is going to survive the large amounts of traffic Proun is getting! I know too little about hosting to really be sure, but people who do know stuff advised this one to me.
Right now just over one score per second is being submitted to the highscore server, so lets see what happens if that increases!
Right now just over one score per second is being submitted to the highscore server, so lets see what happens if that increases!
Can anyone help me find new hosting?
I just learned that during the weekend, 1.2 million HTTP requests were performed towards the Proun website. That explains why it went down...
So the hosting company pulled down the site and refuses to host it anymore: they are aimed at small sites and don't offer deals for this kind of traffic. However, I am not a hosting expert, so I am not sure where to get hosting instead. So if any of you happen to know a lot about where to get good web hosting for this kind of traffic, then it would be awesome if you could email me to find a solution for this! My email is joost -at- ronimo-games.com.
As for specifics: I think most of the 1.2 million HTTP requests were for the highscore system, so that means lots of PHP and MySQL code being executed on the server as well.
So this is also a status update for people waiting for Proun's highscore system and official site to get back online. I am working on it, but this is more difficult than I was hoping for... :(
Here is the temporary website for Proun again: www2.hku.nl/~joost1/Proun. You can buy and play the game just fine, but you won't have online highscores for the moment. Working to get that back!
For players getting freezers in the highscore screen: check the solution here.
And to give you something to look at in the meanwhile: the first user tracks have already popped up on the Proun forum. It's incredibly cool! Just take a look at this picture from Archipelago by JohnArr.
So the hosting company pulled down the site and refuses to host it anymore: they are aimed at small sites and don't offer deals for this kind of traffic. However, I am not a hosting expert, so I am not sure where to get hosting instead. So if any of you happen to know a lot about where to get good web hosting for this kind of traffic, then it would be awesome if you could email me to find a solution for this! My email is joost -at- ronimo-games.com.
As for specifics: I think most of the 1.2 million HTTP requests were for the highscore system, so that means lots of PHP and MySQL code being executed on the server as well.
So this is also a status update for people waiting for Proun's highscore system and official site to get back online. I am working on it, but this is more difficult than I was hoping for... :(
Here is the temporary website for Proun again: www2.hku.nl/~joost1/Proun. You can buy and play the game just fine, but you won't have online highscores for the moment. Working to get that back!
For players getting freezers in the highscore screen: check the solution here.
And to give you something to look at in the meanwhile: the first user tracks have already popped up on the Proun forum. It's incredibly cool! Just take a look at this picture from Archipelago by JohnArr.
Sunday, 26 June 2011
Proun website temporary move
My webhoster has disabled the Proun website, because it was generating too much traffic. I put an alternate server online, which can be found here:
temporary Proun website
However, it will be a few days until the highscores get back online!
Argh, I had no idea what "too much" was going to be, but apparently it has already been reached. :(
temporary Proun website
However, it will be a few days until the highscores get back online!
Argh, I had no idea what "too much" was going to be, but apparently it has already been reached. :(
Friday, 24 June 2011
Proun OUT NOW for PC! And: the long history of Proun
Yes! After six years of development, Proun has finally been released for PC! I hope you like it! Proun is sold as Pay What You Want, which means that you can set your own price. You can choose to pay nothing at all, or you can pay some amount of money. You can even choose to first get it for free, and then pay afterwards if you like it! As a little extra incentive, you get a short and colourful bonus track if you pay at least $2! To celebrate Proun's launch, here is a new trailer:
So, six years of development, how did that even happen? It's not like Proun is the size of a game like Love, so six years may seem a bit long. In short, there are two reasons:
-I created Proun in my spare time;
-there were long intervals during those six years when I didn't work on Proun at all.
Since Proun pretty much evolved around my life and many projects during the past six years, I feel it makes an interesting story to tell how it came to be. :)
The very beginning of Proun happened on the grave of the most failed project I ever did. In November 2004, during our second year at the HKU (Utrecht School of the Arts), our class was split into two groups of thirteen students each. We were to create a race game. Being young and stupid, both groups tried to create really big 3D racing games with unique mechanics. We were way too ambitious and both groups failed horribly. Half the models that were made for our game Speedcore were made with broken bone sets and could not even be put in the game... Speedcore was playable though, it just totally sucked!
Afterwards, my friend Huub van Summeren told me that he had proposed a really simple project to his group, and that that was rejected as not interesting enough. Oh the irony... He told me it was a racing game in which you rotate around a cable to avoid obstacles. Simple and fun. I really liked how the entire world could rotate around the player, so since Huub was not planning on doing something with it, I started developing it myself. Of course, this is the concept that later became Proun! So, thanks Huub, for the great idea! :)
Being an art academy, the HKU leaves a lot of room for students to do their own projects and get grades for those. So in May 2005, I started working on Proun, then called CableRacer. I was still a student and had to learn a lot about the Ogre engine and generating meshes and bezier curves and such, and I decided to build my own exporters and plugins for 3D Studio MAX. Yet I still got the game up and running in a couple of weeks. It looked terrible and some of the math was pretty broken, but it was already a lot of fun to play. Proun has a really simple concept, but everyone I playtested it on enjoyed it almost immediately!
After the Summer of 2005 I stopped working on CableRacer for almost a full year. First I went to Germany to do an internship at the now defunct Collision Studios, where I created 3D normal mapped models for the shooter Red Ocean. A funny coincidence here is that the publisher of Red Ocean was DTP, which is currently also the publisher of our own Awesomenauts!
At the time I didn't know whether I wanted to be a programmer or a 3D artist. I am really happy that I did my internship as a 3D artist, though: I have been a full-time programmer on everything but Proun since then and I would never have experienced what it is to be an artist if I hadn't done that at the time. And in case you are wondering: I had a lot of fun doing 3D art and programming and in the end only became a programmer because we didn't have any other programmers for Ronimo Games, and already had enough artists.
When I came back from my internship, the school project De Blob started right away. Since I already had a good core code base for Proun, development for De Blob started with stripping Proun and working from its foundations. This way we got the 3D physics gameplay of De Blob running in a couple of days and could continue from there. I didn't work on Proun during this period, but when De Blob was finished, I immediately went back to Proun and added all the improvements I had made for De Blob to Proun as well.
So now we get to Summer 2006. The biggest topic to me at that point was Proun's graphics. I first wanted to go for Mondriaan's Victory Boogie Woogie, but Mondriaan's work is so incredibly straight, that I didn't see how to get that to work with the curves of Proun.
So instead I went for my new love: Kandinsky. The expressionist abstract works of Kandinsky are my favourite paintings in general and I wanted something similar for Proun. However, I wasn't that good at shader writing yet and had no idea how to get this to work. Just have a look at the horrible picture below to give you an idea...
While looking through a book about Kandinsky, trying to think of a way to do 3D graphics in that style, my eye fell on Kandinsky's later geometric abstract works. These are beautiful as well, and here I immediately knew how to implement this! I had already been doing lighting of 3D scenes for many years at that point (I started playing around with 3D Studio MAX when I was 13!), so I immediately started experimenting with shapes, colours, and above all: lighting.
Now just when Proun's graphics and gameplay were finally coming together, I got so busy with various other projects, that I had to stop working on it for three full years. The first project was another school project, this time an assignment for Guerrilla. This became a crowd control game set in the Killzone universe, and just like De Blob before it, it was build on the tools and core code of Proun.
After this project, we started Ronimo Games and started working on our first official Ronimo game, which was again build upon Proun's foundations. This project was called Snowball Earth and in the end got cancelled because we couldn't find financing for it. We intend to release the prototype at some point, but for now I cannot say too much about that. Anyway, keeping to tradition, this project was built on Proun's foundations as well.
Of course, after that we started working on Swords & Soldiers, which became our first console game at Ronimo, and went on to win awards and get tons of really good reviews!
Anyway, so Proun is a spare time project, why didn't I work on it next to Ronimo at that time? Well: I was also studying Game & Media Technology at Utrecht University and finishing my Master's Thesis for that was my spare time occupation at that point. I spent my weekends writing and researching for that during two years.
So when that was finally finished in June 2009, I spent three weeks gaming all day during my long Summer vacation. And then I got bored and made a 3D baroque church dome. Euhm, a what? Somehow, once in a while I just have to make a 3D model with lots of ornamented pillars. No, don't ask why, I don't know either!
At some point I got stuck on the baroque dome, due to a computer that was too slow and a lack of skill with truly realistic lighting and materials, and decided to give Proun a try once again. After three full years, I hardly knew in what state I left the game, but I quickly got up and running with it. I had learned a lot at Ronimo during the past three years, so I went about development a lot quicker now, and released a trailer a couple of months later.
Around this time I read an article in a newspaper about an exhibition at the Van Abbe Museum that featured a number of El Lissitzky's works called Proun. I had been looking for a proper name for CableRacer for ages and somehow this fictive word that El Lissitzky had made up perfectly fit my game. El Lissitzky made dozens of works called Proun and calling my game like that as well felt like a nice homage to the abstract pioneers of the early 20th century.
At this point I thought the game was almost finished, and I had the luck of finding someone who was willing to help out with the music and sound of Proun. I had initially planned to do everything myself, but I couldn't get my songs to sound as good as I wanted, and I hated making sound effects. So it was a small miracle to me when Matthijs (from Control Magazine) introduced me to Arno Landsbergen. Arno had made an album called Dirty Rock. That album not only sounds great, but also reminded me of early David Bowie, who happens to be one of my heroes! So I rejoiced when Arno got on board! Arno improved and produced my compositions, and created all the sound effects for Proun.
Little did I know at that point that I was going to spend two more years creating more tracks and polishing everything to make it a complete game... But I have to say, if I look at the end result, I feel very proud that I actually finished it, and I hope you will like it! During those six years I grew a lot, both as a person and as a game developer, and I think this shows in the final result! ^_^
Congratulations on reading through this enormous wall of text. Now head over to the Proun website and download that game!
So, six years of development, how did that even happen? It's not like Proun is the size of a game like Love, so six years may seem a bit long. In short, there are two reasons:
-I created Proun in my spare time;
-there were long intervals during those six years when I didn't work on Proun at all.
Since Proun pretty much evolved around my life and many projects during the past six years, I feel it makes an interesting story to tell how it came to be. :)
The very beginning of Proun happened on the grave of the most failed project I ever did. In November 2004, during our second year at the HKU (Utrecht School of the Arts), our class was split into two groups of thirteen students each. We were to create a race game. Being young and stupid, both groups tried to create really big 3D racing games with unique mechanics. We were way too ambitious and both groups failed horribly. Half the models that were made for our game Speedcore were made with broken bone sets and could not even be put in the game... Speedcore was playable though, it just totally sucked!
Afterwards, my friend Huub van Summeren told me that he had proposed a really simple project to his group, and that that was rejected as not interesting enough. Oh the irony... He told me it was a racing game in which you rotate around a cable to avoid obstacles. Simple and fun. I really liked how the entire world could rotate around the player, so since Huub was not planning on doing something with it, I started developing it myself. Of course, this is the concept that later became Proun! So, thanks Huub, for the great idea! :)
Being an art academy, the HKU leaves a lot of room for students to do their own projects and get grades for those. So in May 2005, I started working on Proun, then called CableRacer. I was still a student and had to learn a lot about the Ogre engine and generating meshes and bezier curves and such, and I decided to build my own exporters and plugins for 3D Studio MAX. Yet I still got the game up and running in a couple of weeks. It looked terrible and some of the math was pretty broken, but it was already a lot of fun to play. Proun has a really simple concept, but everyone I playtested it on enjoyed it almost immediately!
After the Summer of 2005 I stopped working on CableRacer for almost a full year. First I went to Germany to do an internship at the now defunct Collision Studios, where I created 3D normal mapped models for the shooter Red Ocean. A funny coincidence here is that the publisher of Red Ocean was DTP, which is currently also the publisher of our own Awesomenauts!
At the time I didn't know whether I wanted to be a programmer or a 3D artist. I am really happy that I did my internship as a 3D artist, though: I have been a full-time programmer on everything but Proun since then and I would never have experienced what it is to be an artist if I hadn't done that at the time. And in case you are wondering: I had a lot of fun doing 3D art and programming and in the end only became a programmer because we didn't have any other programmers for Ronimo Games, and already had enough artists.
When I came back from my internship, the school project De Blob started right away. Since I already had a good core code base for Proun, development for De Blob started with stripping Proun and working from its foundations. This way we got the 3D physics gameplay of De Blob running in a couple of days and could continue from there. I didn't work on Proun during this period, but when De Blob was finished, I immediately went back to Proun and added all the improvements I had made for De Blob to Proun as well.
So now we get to Summer 2006. The biggest topic to me at that point was Proun's graphics. I first wanted to go for Mondriaan's Victory Boogie Woogie, but Mondriaan's work is so incredibly straight, that I didn't see how to get that to work with the curves of Proun.
So instead I went for my new love: Kandinsky. The expressionist abstract works of Kandinsky are my favourite paintings in general and I wanted something similar for Proun. However, I wasn't that good at shader writing yet and had no idea how to get this to work. Just have a look at the horrible picture below to give you an idea...
While looking through a book about Kandinsky, trying to think of a way to do 3D graphics in that style, my eye fell on Kandinsky's later geometric abstract works. These are beautiful as well, and here I immediately knew how to implement this! I had already been doing lighting of 3D scenes for many years at that point (I started playing around with 3D Studio MAX when I was 13!), so I immediately started experimenting with shapes, colours, and above all: lighting.
Now just when Proun's graphics and gameplay were finally coming together, I got so busy with various other projects, that I had to stop working on it for three full years. The first project was another school project, this time an assignment for Guerrilla. This became a crowd control game set in the Killzone universe, and just like De Blob before it, it was build on the tools and core code of Proun.
After this project, we started Ronimo Games and started working on our first official Ronimo game, which was again build upon Proun's foundations. This project was called Snowball Earth and in the end got cancelled because we couldn't find financing for it. We intend to release the prototype at some point, but for now I cannot say too much about that. Anyway, keeping to tradition, this project was built on Proun's foundations as well.
Of course, after that we started working on Swords & Soldiers, which became our first console game at Ronimo, and went on to win awards and get tons of really good reviews!
Anyway, so Proun is a spare time project, why didn't I work on it next to Ronimo at that time? Well: I was also studying Game & Media Technology at Utrecht University and finishing my Master's Thesis for that was my spare time occupation at that point. I spent my weekends writing and researching for that during two years.
So when that was finally finished in June 2009, I spent three weeks gaming all day during my long Summer vacation. And then I got bored and made a 3D baroque church dome. Euhm, a what? Somehow, once in a while I just have to make a 3D model with lots of ornamented pillars. No, don't ask why, I don't know either!
At some point I got stuck on the baroque dome, due to a computer that was too slow and a lack of skill with truly realistic lighting and materials, and decided to give Proun a try once again. After three full years, I hardly knew in what state I left the game, but I quickly got up and running with it. I had learned a lot at Ronimo during the past three years, so I went about development a lot quicker now, and released a trailer a couple of months later.
Around this time I read an article in a newspaper about an exhibition at the Van Abbe Museum that featured a number of El Lissitzky's works called Proun. I had been looking for a proper name for CableRacer for ages and somehow this fictive word that El Lissitzky had made up perfectly fit my game. El Lissitzky made dozens of works called Proun and calling my game like that as well felt like a nice homage to the abstract pioneers of the early 20th century.
At this point I thought the game was almost finished, and I had the luck of finding someone who was willing to help out with the music and sound of Proun. I had initially planned to do everything myself, but I couldn't get my songs to sound as good as I wanted, and I hated making sound effects. So it was a small miracle to me when Matthijs (from Control Magazine) introduced me to Arno Landsbergen. Arno had made an album called Dirty Rock. That album not only sounds great, but also reminded me of early David Bowie, who happens to be one of my heroes! So I rejoiced when Arno got on board! Arno improved and produced my compositions, and created all the sound effects for Proun.
Little did I know at that point that I was going to spend two more years creating more tracks and polishing everything to make it a complete game... But I have to say, if I look at the end result, I feel very proud that I actually finished it, and I hope you will like it! During those six years I grew a lot, both as a person and as a game developer, and I think this shows in the final result! ^_^
Congratulations on reading through this enormous wall of text. Now head over to the Proun website and download that game!
Sunday, 19 June 2011
Proun's game design
On this blog I have talked a lot about the graphics of Proun, but so far I have hardly discussed the gameplay. Last week's trailer got lots of reactions and some of them were wondering whether the gameplay is deep enough to remain fun. (Actually, it's the internet, so things were worded a bit more extreme... ;) ) So let's have a look at how I designed Proun's gameplay, and why.
The core concept guiding Proun's design is simplicity. The more things that need explaining to the user, the worse the design. So I basically went by the well-known design philosophy easy to learn, hard to master. I don't think all games always have to have a very simple core, but I do think focussing on the basics and making those as good as possible is a good start for almost any game.
Since I had these really minimalistic abstract graphics for Proun, I felt the gameplay should also be minimalistic. Something than needs a dozen buttons to play would definitely not fit the rest of the package. So Proun, I pretty much went the same way: easy to learn, hard to master. I wanted this to be a pure racing experience that is focussed on having fun by improving your racing skills. The core is really simple: press left and right to evade obstacles to go as fast as possible. So this is very much twitch gameplay in which you try to improve your racing skills and remember the track.
This kind of twitch gameplay is often most fun when you can quickly try again and again and again, each time hoping to do a little bit better. Two games have been released in the past year that expertly show how to do this well: Super Crate Box by Vlambeer (who happen to be my neighbours), and of course Super Meat Boy. Proun's tracks are a bit longer than the average life/death cycle of these two games, but they do have a somewhat similarly fast experience based on lots of retries to do a little bit better.
A nice benefit of going with a core that is easy to learn, is that Proun is not just suitable for hardcore twitch gamers, but also for people who hardly game at all. Just like De Blob before it, this makes Proun an excellent game for festivals and museums. Festival visitors don't do tutorials, and they walk on really quickly, so they need to be able to enjoy themselves immediately. Proun is also excellent for small children: my 4 year old nephew enjoys Proun too! :)
The Championship Mode is a nice introduction to get to know the game, and a good way to keep you practising to unlock higher speeds and a bonus track. A good reward structure is really important for any game and though Proun is intended to be a small downloadable experience, I still felt I needed some interesting unlockables: higher speeds and an extra track.
However, Proun really shines when played in Ghost mode. Racing directly against your own previous times exaggerates the competition with yourself and makes it fun to keep trying to get a better time. That is why I made it possible to race against not just the ghosts of your best time, but against the ghosts of all your previous times. The more you have played a track, the more fun this becomes.
In the very first version of Proun, there was a definite best time for each track: keep accelerating throughout the entire track and don't hit anything to score a perfect time. This sucks. Once you have achieved this once, there is nothing left to do. You cannot do any better. So I introduced several mechanics to shake this up and make sure it is always possible to improve your skills.
The simplest solution to this is having difficulty settings. The higher the speed, the higher the difficulty. On the highest difficulty ("Speed of Light"), you can go four times as fast as on the easiest mode. This make it nearly impossible to achieve a perfect run. I played my own game a million times and I haven't been able to race through any of the tracks without ever letting go of accelerate and without crashing. So here is a nice challenge for anyone getting the game next week: try to win the Speed of Light Championship. The opponents on that difficulty are my own best times and they don't cheat, so if you can beat them on each track, then you know you are more pro than I am! :)
Much more interesting than just increasing the speed, though, is the slowdown that I added when you rotate around the cable. The less you rotate, the faster you go. This means you can improve your time by steering closer past obstacles (which is also more risky), and that you can look for the ideal route through a track. So now there is also a serious challenge in trying to find the way to race through a track with as little rotating as possible.
This core mechanic is already a lot of fun, but it does not really contain that much choice. You always know what you have to do, you just need to do it at the right time. To add an extra layer, I have added chargeable boosts. If you keep accelerating for 12 seconds without hitting any obstacles, you get a boost that you can use any moment you like. When used, a boost will make you go extremely fast for 2 seconds.
Of course, boosts are a very common concept in racing games, and in Proun they added just that little bit of strategy to take it to the next level. Deciding when to use the boost is a fun mini-game, since crashing into obstacles costs more time than the boost won. On the lowest two difficulties there are plenty of places to use the boost, but once you get to Supersonic speed, it takes some courage to use a boost at all. But if you have the skill to not crash, you go blazingly fast. Boosts are a small touch, but they really add a lot to the gameplay and tension.
In total, Proun's gameplay is very much a less-is-more affair. If you enjoy trying to get the best possible time, Proun will really shine and keep you going for a long time, especially if a modding community comes into being and starts releasing cool levels (which I can only hope, of course, though the first modder tracks have already been made). If you are not this hardcore, I think Proun will still be fun for a couple of hours, due to the different speeds, the award structure, the splitscreen multiplayer, and of course the pretty imagery to look at while racing.
As I said in a previous post, I don't think all game have to be long and I hope that Proun is a small but awesome gem to some. :)
PS. You may have wondered how a paused blog can get so many posts recently. Initially I wasn't planning on pausing this blog for four full months, but finishing Proun took longer than I expected back in February. Well, anyway: Proun is coming next Friday and my blog is hereby officially unpaused! So welcome back! ^_^
The core concept guiding Proun's design is simplicity. The more things that need explaining to the user, the worse the design. So I basically went by the well-known design philosophy easy to learn, hard to master. I don't think all games always have to have a very simple core, but I do think focussing on the basics and making those as good as possible is a good start for almost any game.
Since I had these really minimalistic abstract graphics for Proun, I felt the gameplay should also be minimalistic. Something than needs a dozen buttons to play would definitely not fit the rest of the package. So Proun, I pretty much went the same way: easy to learn, hard to master. I wanted this to be a pure racing experience that is focussed on having fun by improving your racing skills. The core is really simple: press left and right to evade obstacles to go as fast as possible. So this is very much twitch gameplay in which you try to improve your racing skills and remember the track.
This kind of twitch gameplay is often most fun when you can quickly try again and again and again, each time hoping to do a little bit better. Two games have been released in the past year that expertly show how to do this well: Super Crate Box by Vlambeer (who happen to be my neighbours), and of course Super Meat Boy. Proun's tracks are a bit longer than the average life/death cycle of these two games, but they do have a somewhat similarly fast experience based on lots of retries to do a little bit better.
A nice benefit of going with a core that is easy to learn, is that Proun is not just suitable for hardcore twitch gamers, but also for people who hardly game at all. Just like De Blob before it, this makes Proun an excellent game for festivals and museums. Festival visitors don't do tutorials, and they walk on really quickly, so they need to be able to enjoy themselves immediately. Proun is also excellent for small children: my 4 year old nephew enjoys Proun too! :)
The Championship Mode is a nice introduction to get to know the game, and a good way to keep you practising to unlock higher speeds and a bonus track. A good reward structure is really important for any game and though Proun is intended to be a small downloadable experience, I still felt I needed some interesting unlockables: higher speeds and an extra track.
However, Proun really shines when played in Ghost mode. Racing directly against your own previous times exaggerates the competition with yourself and makes it fun to keep trying to get a better time. That is why I made it possible to race against not just the ghosts of your best time, but against the ghosts of all your previous times. The more you have played a track, the more fun this becomes.
In the very first version of Proun, there was a definite best time for each track: keep accelerating throughout the entire track and don't hit anything to score a perfect time. This sucks. Once you have achieved this once, there is nothing left to do. You cannot do any better. So I introduced several mechanics to shake this up and make sure it is always possible to improve your skills.
The simplest solution to this is having difficulty settings. The higher the speed, the higher the difficulty. On the highest difficulty ("Speed of Light"), you can go four times as fast as on the easiest mode. This make it nearly impossible to achieve a perfect run. I played my own game a million times and I haven't been able to race through any of the tracks without ever letting go of accelerate and without crashing. So here is a nice challenge for anyone getting the game next week: try to win the Speed of Light Championship. The opponents on that difficulty are my own best times and they don't cheat, so if you can beat them on each track, then you know you are more pro than I am! :)
Much more interesting than just increasing the speed, though, is the slowdown that I added when you rotate around the cable. The less you rotate, the faster you go. This means you can improve your time by steering closer past obstacles (which is also more risky), and that you can look for the ideal route through a track. So now there is also a serious challenge in trying to find the way to race through a track with as little rotating as possible.
This core mechanic is already a lot of fun, but it does not really contain that much choice. You always know what you have to do, you just need to do it at the right time. To add an extra layer, I have added chargeable boosts. If you keep accelerating for 12 seconds without hitting any obstacles, you get a boost that you can use any moment you like. When used, a boost will make you go extremely fast for 2 seconds.
Of course, boosts are a very common concept in racing games, and in Proun they added just that little bit of strategy to take it to the next level. Deciding when to use the boost is a fun mini-game, since crashing into obstacles costs more time than the boost won. On the lowest two difficulties there are plenty of places to use the boost, but once you get to Supersonic speed, it takes some courage to use a boost at all. But if you have the skill to not crash, you go blazingly fast. Boosts are a small touch, but they really add a lot to the gameplay and tension.
In total, Proun's gameplay is very much a less-is-more affair. If you enjoy trying to get the best possible time, Proun will really shine and keep you going for a long time, especially if a modding community comes into being and starts releasing cool levels (which I can only hope, of course, though the first modder tracks have already been made). If you are not this hardcore, I think Proun will still be fun for a couple of hours, due to the different speeds, the award structure, the splitscreen multiplayer, and of course the pretty imagery to look at while racing.
As I said in a previous post, I don't think all game have to be long and I hope that Proun is a small but awesome gem to some. :)
PS. You may have wondered how a paused blog can get so many posts recently. Initially I wasn't planning on pausing this blog for four full months, but finishing Proun took longer than I expected back in February. Well, anyway: Proun is coming next Friday and my blog is hereby officially unpaused! So welcome back! ^_^
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