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The gameplay of my live performance game Cello Fortress is nearly finished, but the graphics are still basic blocks with some crude textures. Recently I've been working on figuring out what style I want for the game, and I've ended up with two possible styles that I like: one dubbed "Surreal Architecture" and the other "Rough Polygons". Since I have a hard time choosing, I figured I'd just ask here. Which style should I use for Cello Fortress? I've also added the pros and cons of each style as I see them. Several are just my personal taste so let me know in the comments if you disagree. "Surreal Architecture" style The basic idea of this style is that you travel through a world of surreal architecture. The surrealism is of the subtle sort: on first sight it might look like normal classical architecture, but if you stop and think for a second you realise this cannot be: buildings are too big and repetitive, it makes no sense to have a city ...

When creating a new game character it's crucial to get a feel for his in-game poses and movement as quickly as possible. During the visual design of a character you shouldn't just wonder how he looks, but also how he moves. If a character looks cool while standing still but bad while in motion, you have a problem. Not only is this a key part of a character's personality and look, it also helps discover problems early on. Maybe that big weapon is obstructing the dynamic actions your hero needs to do? This is why our artists first draw key animation poses and throw those into the game as quickly as possible. During early development of a new character for Awesomenauts we playtest with just those key poses, without any animation. Less than 10 frames represent the entire movement set of the character. One frame for a jump, one for a fall, a couple for a walk, one for each attack, for sliding to a halt and for idling, and that's roughly it. It's surprising how smooth an...

Good game graphics are not just about being pretty. Equally important is that they communicate well. The richer and more detailed a visual style becomes, the more difficult it is to communicate gameplay clearly. With the amount of detail and variation we wanted in Swords & Soldiers II it was a challenge to make the units, spells and other gameplay objects pop out against the colourful backgrounds. Today I would like to show the tricks our artists used to make this work. The reason this is important is that otherwise it would not be clear which objects are interactive and which are not. For example, is a tree a wall that I cannot pass through, or just a backdrop that has no effect on the gameplay? Ideally these kinds of things are immediately and intuitively clear to the player, without requiring any explanation. Our new game Swords & Soldiers II launches on Wii U on May 21st. The easiest way to achieve visual clarity is to not have any backgrounds or effects. Just a flat-colou...

I have previously discussed pitching your games to publishers , but that was from a very specific perspective: if you already have plans for a game and are trying to make a publisher interested in that. Once a studio has gained some credibility the opposite can also happen: sometimes a publisher is looking for a developer for a game they want made, and they ask a bunch of game studios to pitch for that project. Around four years ago (early in development of Awesomenauts ) this happened to us twice, in both cases with well-known publishers looking for a fresh and different take on a famous franchise they owned. Today I would like to show the concept art our artists made for one of those, and explain how these kinds of pitches work. Note that things like this are almost always under NDA, so I cannot mention the name of the publisher or the franchise involved. An NDA ("Non-Disclosure Agreement") is a common type of contract used in the games industry in which two parties agree t...

When people think of concept art, they usually think of the super slick artworks that AAA games release as part of their marketing. However, making such perfected art takes a lot of time and is very inefficient when the goal is to explore many concepts. Today I would like to show the concept art that our artists made for the map AI Station 404 in Awesomenauts , as it is an excellent example of how rough real concept art can be. click for high resolution A couple of months ago I was at a presentation at the Control Conference where concept artist James Daly showed their concept art for one of the Transformers games. Every image looked mindblowingly awesome (have for some examples a look at this , this and this ), but in a sense this is also weird: it seemed like concept artists only make superbly detailed and shaded paintings. Presentations like that give the impression that that is how concept art works, but in practice making such high quality art is highly inefficient. The goal of ...

Game development is an iterative process. That means we are constantly changing things around. This might be because we experience that certain ideas don't work, or work differently than expected, or just because we get new ideas that are more awesome. This is especially true for characters in Awesomenauts , so today I would like to show a couple of examples of how enormously some Nauts changed in the period from their first conception to their final in-game appearance. The first one I would like to show is Ayla. She started out as an electricity character called Glint. Ronimo artist Olivier made these awesome concept sketches for him: Glint's power is that he can move through enemies and damage them while doing so. That is basically exactly what Ayla's Rage mode does, and thus Glint slowly evolved into the Ayla we know today. Glint's other skill didn't make it into Ayla, as often happens: elements from ideas are combined and morphed until they work, have synergy a...

A couple of days ago we announced that if our Kickstarter campaign would reach $290,000, we would add a fourth character to the Starstorm expansion for Awesomenauts . Today I would like to talk about the kind of art that came with that announcement. We posted these concept sketches, by Ronimo artist Olivier : This looks fun, and it is also a nice example of the kind of sketching that works really well to communicate ideas. This kind of concept art does a lot more than just show something: it makes others enthusiastic about the ideas. In a company like Ronimo, where all team members are involved in the core concepts, convincing others that your ideas are good is almost as important as having good ideas in the first place. Several of the devs at Ronimo are masters at this, so today I would like to show you some examples of how art can be used to communicate ideas. (I am really bad at this myself, by the way: my concept sketches for Proun are completely incomprehensible for anyone but...