wow. I would pay to have that first characrer as a playable Awesomenauts. Of course the visuals would have to change a little to match Awesomenauts.

What's different and new is good!
That purple potential would have been amazing. But it looks more like NinjaNauts and, unfortunately, I suppose it would turn away some of the younger audience, which would have been good!
But, unfortunately it's like spinning a loaded chamber, we would have never known.
Also, that wolf looks like one badass creep.

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But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
tabdoesn'tworkthis'lldofine -Robert Frost

Looks fantastic, but I see the problem for this type of game though.
It could be great for other genres.

Awww, i want a Big wulfen to fight with

B, C, and J could all work and fit within the Awesomenauts world as other planets they could fight on. They could also introduce environmental traps, similar to the Sand Worm.

B reminds me of Mustafar from Revenge of the Sith, and lava flows that damage/kill you could be a good dynamic for baiting/stunning people near them.

For C, there looks to be an acid pit and the platform to the right could be a conveyor belt. (I envision it as some form of factory.) Put a neutral switch on the map that changes the direction of the conveyor belt, and it could get really fun trying to drop players in.

J reminds me of a Sonic the Hedgehog level, which isn't a bad thing.

While I love the original "purple" concepts as well, I don't see why some of the concepts couldn't be adapted to be in line with the current Awesomenauts. A multi-tiered jungle level could be Leon's "homeworld" or something.

Hopefully we will see more maps, and planet-bound environments as DLC. Could also be great for introducing new characters from those planets.

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Xbox LIVE

New development blogpost! This time about the creative process we use at Ronimo to decide on an art style (which is pretty complex to do well with 16 people on the team!).

How to really involve a larger team in the creative process

Nice blogpost, I only have one question.
In development processes where it doesn't go like this, it's usually the leads that choose everything?

Depends per company and game, of course, and I am not sure what is common in big companies.

I think a common situation right now in big teams is that there is a Game Director, and directly beneath him are a couple of leads for different things (for example Lead Art, Lead Level Art, Lead Animation, Lead Engine Tech, Lead Game Programming, Lead Level Design and Lead Game Design). The Director and the Leads together make the important decisions, together with the Producer (who is in charge of plannings and such).

I think another common process is that a small pre-production team is formed from senior developers (less than 10 people in total), and they set out all the big lines of the game. The rest of the team is not added until these decisions have been made.

Thanks, I also suspect it is something like that.
I like your way better, but I can understand that it doesn't work that well in companies with over 100 people.

New blogpost about development! This one is a lot more technical, though, but if you are interested in programming, then I hope this is a good read!

Optimisation lessons learned (part 1)