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Last week I shared the first part of the statistics from our games . Today let's look at the second part: numbers about assets and audio. Plus a bunch of (hopefully) interesting contemplations and anecdotes about them. In fact, I had intended to also include stats about code today, but I typed so much text about all of this that I had to split it further. This series is now three blogposts instead of my originally intended two. Before I continue, let me abuse this moment for a short commercial break by (again) marketing our Kickstarter campaign for the Awesomenauts: Starstorm expansion ! Including PayPal pledges we have by now reached the first stretch goal (a new map) and are working towards the second stretch goal: Custom Games! Now, let's get to the actual numbers! Assets Levels 1 1 42 42 5 3 4 Skeletal animations 12 82 n/a n/a 0 n/a n/a Particles systems 2 10 43 43 2 526 751 Animation templates n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a ...

The part that I find most interesting and am most proud of in Snowball Earth (our cancelled game from 2008), is the melting effects. Every piece of the world is frozen and covered in snow, and by walking around with the heating turned on, the player can melt it all. In the prototype this had very few gameplay mechanics attached to it, but just seeing and hearing everything come to life is already so much fun that it could carry half the game on its own. Today, I would like to dissect this effect and give an overview of what went into it. (Spoiler: a lot of custom art by our artists Gijs, Ralph, Olivier and Martijn, and a lot of coding by me). The melting effects in Snowball Earth For those who haven't tried it yet: a couple of months ago (in this blogpost ) we released the entire prototype we made at the time, so you can download and play it yourself. Note that this is a Torrent file, so you will need something like BitTorrent to download the game. Here is the download link: Down...

Today's post is a guest post by Sonic Picnic , the team that did the incredibly awesome music and sound design for both Awesomenauts and Swords & Soldiers . Especially the Awesomenauts theme song is mindblowingly awesome and got our game a lot of love from gamers and the press. Sonic Picnic is a small team of audio designers who create audio for all kinds of media, not just games. For example, they also worked for television shows, documentaries, and the games Rocket Riot and Toki Tori . So, here is their Dev Diary for Awesomenauts. Enjoy! The intro sequence to Awesomenauts Music The development of the music for Awesomenauts started halfway through 2009, at a listening session with the whole Ronimo team, the four members of SonicPicnic, and a few beers. Based on the first sketches and early prototypes of the game, everyone brought along a couple of existing music tracks which they found particularly fitting to the theme and style of the game. Everyone at the table had a diffe...