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( Note: Swords & Soldiers is currently on sale on Steam! 50% discount! ^_^ ) At Ronimo Games we always try to make innovative games, and in my opinion one of the biggest challenges when doing so is how to enable the game designers to do their work. Game designers work with things like game mechanics and control schemes, but you cannot know whether what you designed on paper is a good idea, until you played it and experimented with. It requires programming to create something playable, so unless a game designer is also a programmer, he cannot really do much on his own. For artists, this problem has pretty much been solved: graphics tools are so powerful that artists can create most things without need of a programmer (except maybe for polish and performance). For game design however, this is essentially an open problem. There are many methods to empower game designers, but none are ideal. To name a few: scripting lanuages, event based systems, tools like Gamemaker and Virtools, an...

a new strip of mine has just started running on vampire porn site vampyou! here's some art from it. why not come over and join the fun at vampyou?

Yesterday we resolved by far the lamest 'bug' I have ever encountered. We spent almost two whole days with the entire programming team (5 coders) trying to find it, and once we discovered what was happening, it felt so incredibly lame, that I figured it would be a nice story to share. So here's what happened! In the past half year we have seen a really rare bug occur about once per month in Awesomenauts on the Playstation 3: suddenly the game would freeze for anywhere between 10 to 100 seconds, and then continue normally as if nothing weird had happened. We always have a PC connected to collect logs from the game. However, the log printed nothing interesting and showed simply the framerate, which is printed once per second: 13:48:13 60fps 13:48:14 60fps 13:49:21 1fps 13:49:22 60fps From this we concluded that the issue must be in some part of code that does not log anything. That leaves 99% and with a codebase of at least 150,000 lines, that is a lot ! Since this issue was...

the first year of mine and john's 'ms. fortune' comic strip in 'mayfair' magazine has come to a close, but fear-not... it's continuing next year (and the first two of those are in the can.) here's my favourite episode from this year's batch...

the christmas episode of 'ms. fortune' is out now in the latest 'mayfair magazine'! here's a sneak- peak!

In his talk at Quakecon this year, legendary programmer John Carmack (Keen, Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, Rage) talked about code quality, and how even the very best programmers make lots of mistakes. So he says that every programmer should think about ways and methods that make mistakes happen less. This is something that I totally agree with, and this kind of thinking is the basis of the coding standard and methodology that we use at Ronimo Games . One of the nicer things that have crept into our coding standard over the years is a tiny little trick that keeps a lot of issues from happening. It is pretty obvious, but I know a lot of programmers who don't do something like this, so I figured it would be useful to mention this one today. :) Often when you are programming something, you quickly make some changes somewhere else to test one specific situation. For example, maybe you are testing the graphics of a weapon against a specific enemy. If that enemy dies all the time, you need t...