Awesomenauts devs reclaim their unfinished game as new studio Rangatang

Ronimo Video games, the Dutch developer behind indie hit Awesomenauts, filed for bankruptcy in August last year. Right now, 4 former members of the staff – together with the CEO – return with a brand new studio, Rangatang.

Not solely that, the quartet is already laborious at work on Nubs, the sport Ronimo by no means acquired the possibility to complete.

Co-founder Olivier Thijssen tells GamesIndustry.biz that Ronimo’s chapter adopted the sudden cancellation of a publishing deal. The Awesomenauts studio had “fairly a vibrant historical past” of slim escapes, however this was one setback the staff could not survive.

“There have been a number of moments the place we went by means of a keyhole or simply about survived,” he explains. “Simply earlier than the discharge of Awesomenauts was one such second. The writer really went bankrupt two weeks earlier than [the game] launched.

“However [Ronimo’s bankruptcy] was a second the place the keyhole was just a bit bit too small. We had a publishing take care of a famend writer whose identify I shall not point out as a result of the chapter continues to be in progress. However the recreation was shaping up very nicely, we have been completely satisfied, the writer was very completely satisfied – after which lightning struck. They knowledgeable us that they have been shutting down a European department of their organisation. We needed to search for cash elsewhere to fund the remainder of the sport.”

The deal was scrapped shortly earlier than GDC 2023, when Ronimo’s indie brawler Nubs was mid-development and solely half funded. Thijssen and his staff managed to safe round 40 conferences on the San Francisco convention and got here near signing a brand new publishing deal, with one even involving the acquisition of the studio, however each fell by means of on the final second.

Wider strikes within the business did not assist issues. Thijssen factors to the information from Embracer that adopted shortly after, through which the group lost a crucial deal of its own and began a restructuring process that led to multiple studio closures, sales, and over 1,000 layoffs. He says he noticed it for example of the “doom and gloom on the horizon.”

“On the larger ranges on the buyers’ facet, there was plenty of angst at that second and plenty of buyers have been wanting ahead, considering ‘Wait a minute, if these different buyers are going to be falling over, there’s going to be plenty of low-cost stuff that we will purchase in half a 12 months’,” he says. “This made your complete market very reluctant to fund something. We’re nonetheless in that scenario now, however again then it was fairly horrible.

“So despite the fact that we had a really good recreation in growth, we had a brilliant good pitch, a particularly proficient staff, and plenty of superior stuff, we weren’t capable of make it occur earlier than our time was up. Sooner or later, the cash simply ran out and you must pull the set off.”

Ronimo Video games had round 25 staff by the top, all of whom confronted the unenviable seek for new roles in a market that had already seen tens of 1000’s of execs laid off in simply two years. Two members of the staff – lead programmer Maarten van den Heijkant and lead core tech programmer Machiel van Hooren – started discussing concepts for reviving the unfinished Nubs. They have been eager to have Thijssen on board for, however the CEO was centered on closing the studio and all of the processes concerned on this.

In September 2023, a month after submitting for chapter, Thijssen and the 2 programmers made a bid for the Nubs IP from their very own financial savings, eager to see if they might end the mission. The next month, their bid was profitable and “the thought practice started to roll.”

Sadly, this was not a case of merely choosing up the place they left off. Nubs was “a brilliant advanced half-finished recreation with plenty of wires protruding all over the place” with as much as 700 man hours poured into it. The brand new staff was simply three individuals – later 4 after hiring Ronimo artist Gijs Witkamp to keep up Nubs’ quirky visible fashion – who needed to work out the way to adapt the mission.

“Although we had a really good recreation in growth, we weren’t capable of make it earlier than our time was up. Sooner or later, the cash simply ran out and you must pull the set off”

Olivier Thijssen, Rangatang

This primarily got here right down to slicing components of the sport that “we’d by no means have the ability to full with a staff of lower than 25 or 30 individuals,” Thijssen says. For instance, the cartoony brawler was initially designed as an enormous top-down world that gamers might discover, whereas the Rangatang model of Nubs is now break up throughout smaller arenas with extra deal with rounds-based competitors.

“We’re solely going to make use of the very best features of the sport and see how we will leverage that optimally,” Thijssen explains. “That was really fairly good to do as a result of you’ll be able to shortly make very giant choices.”

Nevertheless, Nubs’ destiny this time just isn’t solely reliant on the Rangatang quartet. The brand new studio has teamed up with one other four-person studio, Belgium-based developer Glowfish Interactive, in a co-development deal to assist deliver the sport to completion.

Co-founder and technical artist Emiel Da Paepe tells GamesIndustry.biz he first discovered of Thijssen and his staff throughout talks with a neighborhood enterprise capital agency about potential investments.

“I acquired a name saying, ‘Hey, these guys are in search of additional bandwidth, [could you] see if there’s any potential for collaboration?'” he says. “So we did that in February [2024], we went over to the Netherlands, performed the sport, had a chat, and we hit it off fairly nicely. In plenty of features, now we have a really comparable imaginative and prescient on the subject of what makes a recreation cool. After which step by step that advanced into the collaboration that now we have occurring now.”

The essential expertise Glowfish brings to the desk is its years of working with Unity, on which Nubs is now being constructed. Ronimo had beforehand all the time used proprietary expertise for its video games, so there have been complementary skillsets that might permit the 2 studios to assist one another out.

“We performed it at their workplace and we have been like, ‘OK, that is simply good strong enjoyable’,” De Paepe continues. “Based mostly on learnings we had from our earlier title Trifox – which was a single participant recreation however had an identical strategy of very modular gameplay – we noticed the potential of injecting plenty of that into this multiplayer recreation. It is about having a quite simple core that’s simple to scale and including plenty of attention-grabbing components to it, retaining it accessible however very attention-grabbing on the identical time.”

Ronimo’s model of Nubs was additionally making an attempt to enchantment to a much wider viewers, whereas the brand new studio is being extra focused; somewhat than creating one thing plenty of individuals may take pleasure in, Rangatang hopes to achieve fewer gamers who develop into extra devoted followers, drawing on learnings from their earlier hit.

Awesomenauts was a title De Paepe specifically For De Paepe, it was additionally an opportunity to work with among the of us behind a recreation he admired tremendously. He recollects taking part in it Awesomenauts steadily and praised its capacity to distil what will be an intimidating style, the MOBA, into one thing a wider vary of individuals can play and luxuriate in. That is one thing he hopes to assist Nubs do with that recreation’s chosen style.

“You’ve gotten extra severe brawlers, however we need to take the aggressive fringe of that and produce it in a extra accessible, condensed bundle in order that the extra aggressive gamer can nonetheless take pleasure in it however on the identical time it is a good entry for those that can be like, ‘Oh, that appears scary to me.’

“Lots of people take a look at League of Legends and are like, ‘What the hell is happening?’ Awesomenauts was simpler, less complicated to grasp, however the aggressive edge was nonetheless there. That is what we need to do with Nubs as nicely. You possibly can really feel that competitiveness in it, it is not only a occasion brawl or a recreation that you just begin up a few times and then you definitely neglect about it. We would like it to be a part of what they do on a every day or weekly foundation.”

Thijssen concludes: “Awesomenauts was a multiplayer recreation that was accessible and playable by a broad viewers, however they might additionally take it very significantly. A part of my private perception is that even informal avid gamers, when in a aggressive setting, need to be taken significantly and the competitors must be sincere. You are preventing for one thing and there are actual stakes, even when the setting is a bit bit extra informal than different video games.

“Proper now, we’re extra leaning into fight and chaos. It’s extremely in your face however gamers can take care of that. That is what we observed with Awesomenauts, in order that’s one studying that we’re making an attempt to use right here.”