Joost van Dongen's Blog
Joost van Dongen is lead programmer and co-founder at Ronimo Games, the Dutch indie studio behind the 2D MOBA Awesomenauts and the side-scrolling strategy games Swords & Soldiers 1 and 2. When still a student Joost was part of the team that made the original version of De Blob. In his spare time Joost created the abstract racing game Proun and the live music performance game Cello Fortress. He also composes music and plays cello. Joost has been writing blogposts at his official dev blog www.joostvandongen.com for years.
Expert Blogs
It took us 2 years to make any money from Ronimo at all, 4 years to earn (almost) minimum wage and 6 years to receive a more decent monthly salary from our own company. During that period we were near bankruptcy twice. Here's why it took so long!
Analysing the tricks used to make Blightbound's VFX work in a 3D world while maintainig a 2D aesthetic.
With some shader trickery, perspective can be manipulated to achieve unrealistic, but more interesting compositions. This post shows how in Blightbound we kept the horizon on screen by subtly bending the world.
SSR is a fun technique for creating detailed, dynamic reflections in games. This post shows how I implemented SSR into Blightbound and how it works. It also goes into the tricks I used to make it have good performance, have fewer artefacts and look good.
The 10 games that changed my view on the medium and inspired me most.
Netcode bugs can be very hard to find, but they can also be quite intriguing once you've figured them out. This post discusses 3 of the more interesting bugs I've seen in the past few years, explaining some important netcode principles along the way.
Joost van Dongen's Comments
Comment In:
[Blog - 08/11/2020 - 10:54]
Heh, yeah, would have been ...
Heh, yeah, would have been intriguing if the bug was caused by the notoriety after all We did have one case where a specific boss always caused a disconnect, before launch. Turned out music triggers caused this, lol. The reason was that when receiving a music trigger to start the ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 03/04/2020 - 10:29]
Thanks for sharing r n ...
Thanks for sharing r n r nThe sources I 've seen all say that a cache line is 64 bytes, not 64k. Or is a CPU scanline something different
Comment In:
[Blog - 02/05/2020 - 10:15]
Interesting note on PvP balance ...
Interesting note on PvP balance versus PvE balance r n r nThe problem of skills being fun to use but not fun to be on the receiving end of is actually one we 've struggled with a lot during development of Awesomenauts. A year or so before launch we had ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 01/08/2019 - 10:10]
Previously we used our own ...
Previously we used our own forum for this and it worked great. We have a beta subforum where players can give feedback. However, my impression is that recently most gamers have moved to platforms like Reddit and Discord and a forum seems a bit outdated. I personally greatly prefer a ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 09/25/2018 - 11:35]
The room changing is actually ...
The room changing is actually a problem that doesn 't happen in my version of interior mapping, as is described in the post. In my version the rooms are in object space or in world space, if you want and then it 's the same room from every angle. I ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 09/18/2018 - 10:21]
That 's very true: players ...
That 's very true: players often overestimate themselves and they often use matchmaking and balance as scapegoats. I 've even had a case where a teammate was flaming me all match for being a n00b, while that player was dying all the time and was by far the worst player ...
