This December marks a big step for both Galaxy Grove and me personally; a step that I have been working towards for a long time. When I left my previous studio Ronimo in 2021 it was to found a new studio, where I would be creative director and CEO. I had lofty goals for my new studio Galaxy Grove: Make great games Stay within budget and meet deadlines Specialise in one genre (management games)…
As you might have heard, at Galaxy Grove we've recently signed a publishing deal for our next game. Hurray! In today's tough game financing market, that's quite an achievement and really something big to celebrate. At the same time, a lot of studios are really struggling getting financing. So I've received a bunch of questions from people who asked for tips. Heck, even an absolute industry legend,…
Today I'd like to share some fun, slightly unconventional techniques I used to make the Robo Maestro robot in Blender. I wanted shapes that are both smoothly curved and tight industrial. Hard surface modelling! I think it turned out well, so let's have a look at how it was made! The concept art I was going by is this rough sketch by Robin Keijzer, creator of the awesome point and click adventure…
Play with music like never before! Robo Maestro is the 'game' I'm currently working on and it's a procedural music toy. Guide an endless stream of new music or make detailed tweaks in Editor Mode. Create songs, be inspired and share your creations. Robo Maestro is coming to Steam, add it to your wishlist here ! Robo Maestro is a revolutionary new way of creating and experiencing music. You tell it…
Lots of games and game concepts are very similar, very derivative. Partially that's because people make more of what's successful, which is sound business. But partially it's also because of a lack of inspiration, or taking inspiration from the wrong sources. This is because most game creators get their inspiration from the same sources: other games, action comics, action movies and sci-fi/fantasy…
After 14 years at Ronimo , I’m leaving the company I co-founded. I’l keep making games, but starting this months it’s on my own (and in the future maybe I’ll start a new studio). This news makes me both very sad and very enthusiastic. Sad that I won’t be working with my amazing friends at Ronimo anymore; enthusiastic that I will have total creative freedom to make exactly what I want to make.…
On Friday I released my album The Ageless Gate ! It's my atmospheric debut album with instrumental music and lots of cello. Together, the 13 songs tell a tale that spans three centuries, starting with a mysterious artefact and culminating in a gate to another world. The story is told by short text pieces in between the songs, voiced by voice actor Chris Einspahr. The album is available on all the…
Last week I discussed how we used After Effects and Duik as our animation tools for Blightbound , achieving crisp animations at high framerates with small filesizes and nice tools for our animators. The real strength of this workflow however comes from our Skin Editor. This makes it possible to reuse animations, quickly tweak the looks of characters, swap gear, add special effects and attach…
Here's my newest song! It's an atmospheric piece, more ambiance than real song. I think the atmosphere is pretty strong on this one, I hope you like it! Visit music.joostvandongen.com for an MP3 download of this song. This song is actually an improvisation I recorded back in 2014. It's four layers of cello and one layer of... a pan's metal lid! Because why not. Back in 2014 I liked the result, but…
For Blightbound our technical ambitions for the 2D animation system were quite lofty: we wanted high quality animation, screen-filling bosses, crisp character art, high framerate and swappable gear. This required a complete rework of our animation pipeline, since the sprite sheets we used in Awesomenauts and Swords & Soldiers 2 allow for none of those requirements, except for high quality…
An interesting design challenge during development of Blightbound was how to combine personal storytelling with coop gameplay. In Blightbound three players play together, but they might be at different spots in the stories of their respective characters. How to make room for storytelling without spoiling stories for other players who might not be there yet, and without making players wait for each…
Our new game Blightbound features many types of foggy effects: mist, dust, smoke and more. Such effects are often made with planes and particles, allowing us to draw fog and effect textures by hand and giving us maximum artistic control. However, one issue with this is that the place where fog planes intersect with geometry creates a hard edge, which looks very fake and outdated. My solution was…
Today we've launched our biggest update for Blightbound on Steam yet! I'm really proud of what we've achieved with this one, since it not only adds a lot of cool stuff, but also makes big improvements to existing things in the game. Menus have been overhauled, the tutorial has been improved and many minor issues have been fixed. Also, some features that limited players and didn't really achieve…
Starting your own game company is fun and exciting, but it’s also challenging. It takes courage and skill, but above all: patience and perseverance. Some become successful quickly, but in many cases it takes years to achieve financial success and actually make a decent living out of your own game company. It might take long to make your first product or get your first deal, and that first…
An important focus during development of Blightbound is that we we wanted to achieve a 2D look but have 3D movement and a 3D camera. A particular challenge are special effects: we had tons of experience with 2D special effects , but now the special effects also needed to communicate depth. For example, how far does that area-of-effect damage reach exactly? In this blogpost I will show a number of…
In 3D games perspective is often treated as a given; a law of nature. But it doesn’t have to be that way: with some shader trickery or clever modelling, perspective can be manipulated to achieve certain compositions that may not be realistic, but look more interesting and are still convincing to the player. One such example is how we kept the horizon on screen in our new game Blightbound by subtly…
An important focus during development of our new game Blightbound (currently in Early Access on Steam ) is that we want to combine 2D character animation with high quality 3D rendering. Things like lighting, normal maps, depth of field blur , soft particles, fog and real-time shadows are used to make it all gel together and feel different from standard 2D graphics. One such effect I implemented…
A few years ago I was asked by a videogame magazine what games inspired me most. I had a lot of fun compiling a short list for them. Today I've updated that list. These aren't necessarily my favourite games (although they're close): Doom II isn't on this list for example. I'm going to focus not on why I had fun with a game, but why it inspired me, how it taught me something new. They all have some…
In the weeks before and after the Early Access launch of our new game Blightbound we've been fixing a lot of bugs, including 3 very stubborn netcode bugs. They weren't any fun while we were looking for them for days, but now that we've found and fixed these they're actually quite intriguing. So today I'd like to share 3 of the more interesting bugs I've seen in the past few years. While these bugs…
Last Wednesday our new game Blightbound launched on Steam in Early Access! This is a super exciting moment as this is our first new IP to release in 8 years. We've been developing Blightbound for nearly 3 years now and it's really special to finally have the game live and see the community play it! Here's our launch trailer: We have big plans for this game in Early Access. As the roadmap shows we…
Yesterday during the PC Gaming Show the gameplay for our new game Blightbound was revealed! We've been working on this game for nearly 3 years now, so it's really cool to finally show it to the world. Blightbound is a multiplayer dungeon crawler that tasks three heroes to venture down from their mountain refuge to face the abominations of the Blight - a mysterious and corrupting fog that enshrouds…
Being a company owner can be a stressful occupation. Your decisions can make the company successful or run it into the ground. There's plenty one can worry about: the game market is constantly changing, so what's the best strategy to follow? How to handle when a co-owner wants something different than you? Mistakes can cost you both your livelihood and your dreams: after all, most people who start…
I've finished a new song! It's an instrumental that tells a little story. This composition is the centrepiece for my album: here the gate that it's all about is opened for the first time, into who-knows-where. After this the real drama starts: the next song is about how the entire facility needs to be destroyed in order to stop creatures from flooding in! The first 2 minutes of this song actually…
Cache optimisation is one of the most hardcore, low-level topics in game programming. It's also a topic that I haven't been very successful with myself: I tried optimising for cache efficiency a few times but never managed to achieve a measurable improvement in those specific cases. That's why I was quite intrigued when our colleague Jeroen D. Stout (famous as the developer of the experimental…
Here's my newest song: Approach Of The Derelict Research Station ! This one is not just my newest song, but also one of the oldest: it's an evolution of a song that I wrote some tens years ago, then called Space War X9 . Two years ago, when I decided that the songs I was writing at that time should form an album together, I wondered what else should be on it. I've always been quite fond of Space…