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 Space Rescue (available on Steam, NSFW!). As you can see, all shapes are a combination of curves, straight lines and hard edges. Subdivision modelling is a great way of making these kinds of curves ..read more

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 what you want, and then the Maestro automatically generates music that fits that. Playing Robo Maestro requires no music knowledge at all: just have fun and hear what happens! Guide the Maestro and cr ..read more

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 books. Thus many creators get the same ideas. To get truly original ideas, you shouldn't look at the same things as everyone else.   What other things inspire you? Please share in the ..read more

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. Today I’d like to share why I’m leaving, and what I’ll be doing next. The reason I’m leaving is that I want the creative freedom to carry out my own ideas. I have tons of concepts for games, music and art ..read more

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 major streaming services (Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Tidal, Deezer, etc.). I've also made a deluxe CD edition in a limited pressing. Links to the different places where you can listen to the album can be ..read more

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 objects to characters convincingly. Today I’d like to explain the ideas behind our Skin Editor and how this impacted the work of our artists. As I showed in last week’s blogpost, the basic idea behind anima ..read more

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 it was too rough to use. I didn't think I'd manage to capture the same feel if I were to extensively practice the piece and record it again, so I abandoned this piece. Since then I've learned a lot ..read more

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 spritesheets we used in Awesomenauts and Swords & Soldiers 2 allow for none of those requirements, except for high quality animations. In today’s blogpost I’d like to explain the problems we faced, and what combination of tools we chose to solve them. This is the first half of a two-parter: next week I’ll discuss our skin edit ..read more

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 other? Today I’d like to dissect the approach we’ve used to solve this problem. Before I continue, note that this blogpost will spoil some story moments. However, I’ve made sure to only take examples ..read more

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 to implement depth fade. This is a commonly used technique for soft particles, but we use it on lots of objects, not just on particles. In today’s blogpost I’ll explain how depth fade rendering works ..read more