Ronimo Games, the Dutch developer behind the indie hit Awesomenauts, filed for bankruptcy in August of last year. Today, four former team members – including the CEO – return with a new Rangatang studio.
Not only that, the four are already hard at work on Nubs, the Ronimo game never got a chance to finish.
Co-founder Olivier Thijssen narrates GamesIndustry.biz that Ronim's bankruptcy followed the unexpected cancellation of the publishing contract. The Awesomenauts studio had a “pretty colorful history” of narrow escapes, but this was one hurdle the team couldn't survive.
“There were a few moments where we went through the keyhole or just barely survived,” he explains. “There was one such moment right before Awesomenauts was released. The publisher actually went bankrupt two weeks before [the game] launched.
“But [Ronimo’s bankruptcy] there was a moment when the keyhole was too small. We had a publishing contract with a reputable publishing house, whose name I will not mention because the bankruptcy is still ongoing. But the game was shaping up very well, we were happy, the publisher was very happy – and then lightning struck. They informed us that they are closing the European branch of their organization. We had to look elsewhere for money to fund the rest of the game.”
The deal was canceled shortly before GDC 2023, when Ronimo's indie brawler Nubs was halfway through development and only half-funded. Thijssen and his team managed to secure around 40 meetings at the San Francisco conference and came close to signing a new publishing deal, one of which included a studio acquisition, but each fell through at the last minute.
Broader moves in the industry didn't help matters. Thijssen points to news from Embracer that followed shortly after, in which the group lost a crucial proprietary business and began a restructuring process that led to several studio closures, divestments and more than 1,000 layoffs. He says he saw it as an example of “doom and gloom on the horizon.”
“There was a lot of anxiety at the senior level on the investor side at that point and a lot of investors were looking forward and thinking, 'Wait a minute, if these other investors go down, there's going to be a lot of cheap stuff that we can buy in half a year,'” he says. “That made the whole market very reluctant to finance anything. We're still in that situation, but it was pretty terrible back then.
“So even though we had a very nice game in development, we had a super good field, an extremely talented team and a lot of amazing things, we weren't able to make it happen before our time ran out.” , the money just ran out and you have to pull the trigger.”
By the end, Ronimo Games had around 25 employees, all of whom faced an unenviable search for new roles in a market that had seen tens of thousands of professionals laid off in just two years. Two members of the team – Lead Programmer Maarten van den Heijkant and Lead Technology Programmer Machiel van Hooren – began discussing ideas for bringing the unfinished Nubs to life. They wanted Thijssen on board, but the CEO was focused on closing the studio and all the processes involved.
In September 2023, a month after filing for bankruptcy, Thijssen and two programmers made a bid for IP Nubs from their own savings in an attempt to see if they could complete the project. The following month, their bid was successful and “the train of ideas took off”.
Unfortunately, it wasn't a case of them simply picking up where they left off. Nubs was “a super complex, half-finished game with lots of wires sticking out everywhere” with up to 700 hours of work. The new team consisted of just three people – later four after they hired Ronimo artist Gijs Witkamp to maintain Nubs' quirky visual style – who had to figure out how to adapt the project.
“Even though we had a very nice game in development, we weren't able to finish it before our time ran out. At some point, the money just ran out and you have to pull the trigger.”
Olivier Thijssen, Rangatang
This was mainly about cutting out elements of the game that “we would never have been able to complete with a team of less than 25 or 30 people,” says Thijssen. For example, the cartoon brawler was originally designed as a giant top-down world for players to explore, while the Rangatang Nubs version is now split into smaller arenas with a greater focus on round-based competitions.
“We will only use the best aspects of the game and see how we can use them optimally,” explains Thijssen. “That was actually quite nice because you can make very big decisions quickly.
But this time, Nubs' fate is not only dependent on the Rangatang Quartet. The new studio has teamed up with another four-man studio, Belgian developer Glowfish Interactive, in a co-development deal to help bring the game to completion.
Narrated by co-founder and technical artist Emiel Da Paepe GamesIndustry.biz he first learned about Thijssen and his team during talks with a local venture capital firm about potential investments.
“I got a call saying, 'Hey, these guys are looking for extra bandwidth, [could you] let's see if there is any potential for collaboration?” he says. “So we did it in February [2024]we went to Holland, played a game, talked and hit it off pretty well. In many ways we have a very similar vision of what makes a game cool. And then it gradually evolved into the collaboration that we're continuing now.”
The essential experience that Glowfish brings is the years of collaboration with Unity, on which Nubs is now built. Previously, Ronimo had always used proprietary technology for its games, so there were complementary skill sets that allowed the two studios to help each other.
“We played it in their office and thought, 'OK, this is just good, solid fun,'” De Paepe continues. “Based on the insights we gained from our previous title Trifox – which was a single-player game but had a similar approach to very modular gameplay – we saw the potential to put a lot of that into this multiplayer game. It's about having a very simple core. which can easily be scaled and have a lot of interesting elements added to it, so it's accessible but very interesting at the same time.”
Ronim's version of Nubs also attempted to reach a much wider audience, while the new studio is more targeted; rather than creating something for many people urine Enjoy it, Rangatang hopes to appeal to fewer gamers who become more dedicated fans, drawing on the learnings from their previous hit.
Awesomenauts was a De Paepe title in particular. For De Paepe, it was also a chance to work with some of the people behind a game he greatly admired. He recalls Awesomenauts playing it often, praising its ability to distill what can be an intimidating genre, the MOBA, into something a wider range of people can play and enjoy. That's something he hopes to help Nubs do with this game's chosen genre.
“You have more serious brawlers, but we want to take that competitive edge and bring it in a more affordable, condensed package so that the more competitive player can enjoy it, but at the same time it's a nice entry point for people who would be like, 'Oh, that's scary to me. .”
“A lot of people look at League of Legends and think, 'What the hell is going on?' Awesomenauts was easier, easier to understand, but the competitive edge was still there. That's what we want to do with Nubs. You can feel the competitiveness in it, it's not just a party or a game you run once twice and then forget about. We want it to be part of what they do on a daily or weekly basis.”
Thijssen concludes, “Awesomenauts was a multiplayer game that was accessible and playable to a wide audience, but could be taken very seriously. Part of my personal belief is that even casual players, when they're in a competitive environment, want to be taken seriously.” and competition must be honest. You're fighting for something and the stakes are real, even if the setting is a bit more casual than other games.
“Right now we're leaning more into combat and chaos. It's very in your face, but to the players.” can deal with it. We noticed that with Awesomenauts, so that's one of the learnings we're trying to apply here.”