Look into me eye...

Today we have a new update for you: the Axethrower unit of the Vikings and the Mindcontrol spell of the Aztecs. Both of these offer viable alternatives to brute forcing yourself through the enemy defenses.

Axethrowers are especially powerful in packs, and are also able to enter the defensive towers built by the Vikings, making them a powerful part of the Viking defenses. Mindcontrol, on the other hand, is a nasty trick which provides the Aztecs with the ability to take over any enemy unit they desire. So don't be surprised if  your own units turn out to be your worst enemies in a battle against the Aztecs.

Head to the factions page to check them out!

Come try and balance our game

We've played our game as much as humanly possible in an attempt to find those imbalances. The balance between the factions needs to be right at the first go, we wouldn't want to find out that the one of the factions really is to strong after the game has been released.

By now we feel the balance is pretty good. But we've also completely exhausted our ideas for tactics and strategies. So now we need some fresh faces to try and do things differently. We prefer people who already played the game before, because they can jump right in. But new testers are also still very welcome, since our campaign levels also needs a lot of tweaking based on the latest balance changes. 

We always recieve testers on saturdays, and for the coming weeks the schedule is as follows:

Saturday 7 Februari 11:00-14:00 (8 spots open)
Saturday 7 Februari 15:00-18:00 (5 spots open)
Saturday 14 Februari 11:00-14:00 (8 spots open)
Saturday 14 Februari 15:00-18:00 (8 spots open)

If you're interested, please fire off a mail towards testers@ronimo-games.com . We hope to see you here soon!

All jammed out

After a long week of hardcore game development, the thing we really needed was... Some more hardcore game development at the Global Gamejam! Well, not really, but this was an event which we really couldn't pass up on. After getting locked up in our old faculty building, we had to compete with 20 other teams made up out of other Dutch game developers and students. We ourselves were also paired with a great audio designer, the one thing we couldn't bring to the event ourselves.
The goal was to create a game in 48 hours. And it was a worldwide event! So everywhere teams were slaving away, trying to knock out a decent game in a weekend. Lots of hours of sleep were lost around the world. The results can be seen over here:

http://globalgamejam.org/

We created a little game called Insanity Grab Go! A crazy game where two players struggle for control of one character. It can be played on PC, but requires XNA 3.0. And two Xbox controllers if you want to play against eachother. But you can also check it out using your mouse, though that's singleplayer only. The game can be found here:

http://globalgamejam.org/games/insanity-grab-go


Special mention needs to the crazy soundtrack which suits the crazy action and theme prefectly. Try the widget here to hear it, and get a taste of the atmosphere.

Unfortunately, we didn't win. But we did receive an honourable mention! And the crowd seemed to like it, some maybe we'll use some of it's ideas in the future. What do you think?

De Blob gets a sequel!

They took our baby! And turned it into a really cool "man". Or a full disc based Wii title, depending on which way you look at it. We're talking about De Blob, as you might've guessed. As we said earlier, we're really happy how THQ's version turned out. But it's always hard to predict what the public might think of it.

But it turns out that you like it enough to warrant a sequel! It's more of a sleeper than a monster hit, but still. We're very glad that the game turned out to be a succes. 

The actual game is pretty close to what we feel we would've done, if we had a lot more resources and experience. So we still feel pretty closely tied to it, even though we hardly had any direct influence on the current version. It will still be a while before we will be able to tackle projects of that scale ourselves. But until then we're having very much fun gaining experience and developing smaller games like Swords & Soldiers!

Unit update!

I'm pleased to inform you all that our faction page has received yet another update!

Valhalla's heavenly light shines upon the stout, bearded warriors of the north while the Aztec empire commands bands of sneaky dartblowers to cripple their enemies with venomous darts!

To learn more about the Aztec dartblower and Viking heal, head over to the factions page! Skøll!

Game balance

Hello thar! This post got a bit longer than anticipated. Anyway, just print it out and read it infront of the fireplace accompanied by a fine wine and a good piece of french cheese;). Ehm... onto the subject:

Swords and Soldiers is getting closer to completion every day, one thing most worth mentioning is the campaign mode, which is almost done and shaping up to become really nice.

An ongoing process during the entire development of the game has been balancing the three factions. S&S will be a fun action-packed game, but underneath all that we also try to add a layer of strategic depth. We started out macro-balancing the game, defining the role of each unit and skill until all elements felt like they had a fitting role in the game. This was an iterative process that repeated itself every time something got added to the game. One of the rules of thumb we used during that process was that every combat unit had to be unique, and we have maintained this during the course of development.

Right now we are micro-balancing the game, which means that we are trying to make sure that there's a lot of variety in tactics and there are no dominant strategies or never used units/spells. Each faction needs to have interesting tactics available to it that are cool to use. We try to have every unit and skill having some feeling of being overpowered, yet be balanced and counterable when actually playing the game.

Balancing also means tweaking the flow of how games play out. For a while we had the problem that building workers, which collect the main resource: gold, was not a real choice. Every game people just built the maximum amount of 'em and they were always replaced instantly when they were killed. Consequently, players would always remain at their maximum gold-income and almost every game every upgrade got researched. The game was still fun to play but we felt that it needed more strategic diversity.

The solution to this problem was upping the cost required to produce a worker and upping the cost of all upgrades a bit. Suddenly players were forced to stop building workers if their opponents tried attack early in the game. It also became a viable tactic to invest in upgrades early on, while building fewer workers. The game got less predictable, and good strategic choices were more noticable. This is but one example of how tweaking a couple of values can influence the entire flow of the game.

The key in being a great S&S player lies in timing which skills and units to use when, choosing on which units to spend your gold, and using your spells to their maximum effect. We hope that people will want to get good at our game.and can't wait to get the game out there and have people duking it out against eachother in brutal multiplayer clashes!

A new year, a new blog-post!

First of all: happy new year everyone! May this year bring lots of blog updates. Oh wait, here's one already:

From the darkest tombs in the jungles come the Aztec necromancers, adept at raising the bones of fallen allies and enemies alike, while the Vikings have mastered the elements, calling upon mighty freezing snowstorms. The time of glorious battle, epic quests and giant vegetables is on the horizon!

Head over to the factions page to learn more about the viking snowstorm and aztec necromancer! Skøll!