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One of the things I hated most while developing Swords & Soldiers for the Wii, was the safe frame. CRT televisions (you know, those old, big televisions that some people still have) don't show the entire screen: they simply leave out the screen's edges. I don't know exactly why this is traditionally done, but the amount of screen that is left out varies per television and can be pretty large on some of the worst TVs. Surprisingly, many modern LCD/LED/Plasma televisions are by default set to also leave out the edges. They just zoom in a bit. However, since there is no technical reason why this is, these televisions come with a setting to turn that irritating behaviour off. Now the good thing, is that there is a limit to how much of the edges a television actually cuts off. The area that you can be sure will be shown on every television, is called the safe frame or safe area . Since games need to be playable on any television, Xbox, Playstation and Wii all have requirem...

Last November my game Proun won a Dutch Game Award for Best Original Game Design. When I received the award, I grabbed the microphone and did a short speech, which Control Magazine then asked me to write that into a column. Which I did! The Dutch version is currently on their website and in the magazine, and here is the English translation. The Dutch games industry is doing really well. More developers than ever before! But still, if you look for truly special Dutch games, you will find painfully few. Testament to this is that at the last Dutch Game Awards, two student games and a hobby game were nominated for Best Original Game Design. Where are the companies? So many developers, so few people who create their own concepts. It's as if we have all become entrepeneurs, and left our passion and creativity at the door. I think this is because many Dutch developers are afraid to follow their heart. With all these talented people, there must be so many good ideas floating around! Yet ...

Last week I explained how our designers can create tons of upgrades for Awesomenauts using our Settings system. However, I didn't say a thing about how we actually made that work. We used some fun template and functor tricks there, so I figured it would be nice to show how it was built to work elegantly, without making our code a big mess of checks for upgrades. Warning: this blogpost contains hardcore programming awesomeness! If you are an artist or game designer and fear templatised meta-programming functors might disintegrate your brains and/or explode your head, then I advice skipping this specific blogpost and coming back next week! First lets have a look at how things would work without upgrades. Note that to keep things readable, I only show the essential bits of code, and I have greatly simplified all the code examples here. The function loadSettings() translates from a variable name to a string, so that we can actually load the variable from a text-file. Doing this for ...

In Awesomenauts , players can buy hundreds of different upgrades. There are around 150 unique ones, and most have two or three upgrade levels, so in total there are probably around 300 upgrades in the game. We wanted our designers to be able to create those themselves, without any work from the programming team for specific upgrades. At the same time, we also wanted the upgrade system to be super flexible, so that the upgrades would be very diverse, and not just all be cooldown reductions and damage increases. When we first started looking for a way to build this, I was really at a loss. How to add a flexible system for upgrades to our settings system ? It took some time, but coding intern Daan and I came up with a system that is easy to use and so flexible, that we ended up not just using it for upgrades, but also for temporary boosts and areas with modified mechanics, like low-gravity areas. The idea is that for every setting, our designers can create modified versions for when a cha...