Sunlight

I've finished recording a new composition! It's a cello trio inspired by minimal music (Philip Glass and such). Sheet music can be found at music.joostvandongen.com . This contains the version for cello trio and also an arrangement for violin, viola and cello. This composition started out as something I was improvising while warming up for a Cello Fortress performance in Dublin last year. I had a lot of fun playing repetitive parts with varying rhythms and afterwards I heard from some people who were sitting nearby that it sounded really tense. Good music provokes some kind of emotion so I figured I should turn that little improvisation into a real song. Recording this one was a challenge since it needs to be so rhythmic and precise to work. It took me a lot of practice and editing but in the end I'm happy with the result. :) I also had fun making an image for this one: I combined a photo of my own cello with a photo of machinery I found online. Unfortunately I couldn'...

I recently watched Jan Willem Nijman's great talk on The Art of Screenshake and noticed an interesting YouTube comment to that video by someone named SquidCaps. SquidCaps mentions that for an unknown developer, it's really hard to find playtesters who actually test regularly. I agree that this gets a lot easier the more well-known you are, but I think it might also help to try a different approach to playtesting. So I figured it would be interesting to discuss how we approach playtesting at Ronimo and how to find playtesters. Let's start by having a look at SquidCaps' comment. It's quite long so I've selected only the parts that I'm going to reply to: Heh, "let people play your game and iterate".. quite a bit easier to say when you have plenty of gametesters already in the office.. For solo, unknown developer, having just ONE game tester that suffers 10 minutes per week is too much.. What you need is full game, with menus, high scores save games ...

One of my current hobby projects is creating a procedural music system: a computer program that composes and performs music all by itself. It's still a work-in-progress in its early stages, but some recent improvements have gotten it to produce quite interesting music already, so I figured it's about time I share some of my thoughts around how it works. Let's start with a little video that lets you hear the amount of variation it can currently do: Note that this video contains a selection of the nicer pieces, so it isn't all this good. Most of the other music it currently produces is a bit more boring, or too similar to these fragments. The program is a work-in-progress and it should improve a lot as I spend more time on it. I started programming this for a rather odd reason: I wanted to practice improvising on my cello over complex chord schemes and figured a program that automatically produces those would do the trick. As usual with this kind of thing, it got out of h...

In a game where high quality matchmaking is important (like competitive team-based games), waiting times to find suitable opponents are often unavoidable. Today I'd like to discuss the problems we had in Awesomenauts with our initial approach to this and how we made waiting a bit less boring later on. Until the launch of the Galactron update in 2016, this is how it worked in Awesomenauts: when you started searching you got into a matchroom right away. You selected your character, and then you had to wait in the loading screen until the match was full with 6 players. This could take several minutes and there was no interaction possible whatsoever: just a loading screen that says the match isn't full yet. To show progress we did have six tickboxes that showed how many players had joined and whether they had already selected their characters, but that was it. A static screen with no interaction possible is probably the most boring type of waiting imaginable. Compare this to curre...

Here's my newest composition: Sandrider! It's a cello trio that revolves around fast arpeggios. At a whopping 5 minutes this one was a LOT of work to record and edit to get it to sound just right. But it was worth it: I'm really happy with the result. :) Sheet music can be found at music.joostvandongen.com , including arrangements for violin, viola and cello, plus solo versions for if you don't happen to have a cello trio around. This track was inspired by the way Ernst Reijseger plays in his beautiful song Strabismo Di Venere (from the album Colla Voche). He plays really fast arpeggios there by sweeping over the four strings. I experimented with this way of playing quite a bit and discovered that it also works really well when you play a bit louder than what Reijseger does in Strabismo Di Venere. I played around with this technique in the live improvisations that djembe player Rene Derks and I did to the game Journey. I liked the sound of that so much that I decided t...

I've previously explained how Steam, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo all offer similar generic matchmaking systems based on rooms . These systems are great for quickly getting things going and are fine for most smallish games. However, if matchmaking is very important for your game and the requirements for matchmaking become more complex, these generic systems turn out to be pretty limiting. Today I'd like to discuss how we tried several approaches to get the best out of such generic systems in our game Awesomenauts and how the problems we encountered ultimately led us to develop our own matchmaking servers altogether. Keep in mind that whether these problems are truly important depends on the game. If your game is a bit more casual, or has fewer players per match, or less focus on online multiplayer, or allows late-join, then the requirements for matchmaking become a lot less stringent. Depending on how demanding the matchmaking for your game is, none of these problems might be ...

Here's my newest song: "Grom"! It's a loud cello trio! I deliberately make the strings rattle a bit to get a more aggressive sound, which was a fun thing to fool around with. This is actually an older composition: I wrote this one in 2012 to play together with the other cellists of the Kunstorkest, which I was a member of at the time. Since at the Kunstorkest we were supposed to play subtly and rarely truly loudly, I wanted to write something that's super loud and unsubtle, just for the fun of doing something different. At the time I never actually recorded it though, so I did that now and here it is! :) Sheet music for this one can be found at music.joostvandongen.com . I've also made arrangements for violin and viola, which can also be found there. PS. Until I took that photo I never realised how evil a cello's bridge can look...