The Curious Engineer

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Joost's Dev Blog

joostdevblog.blogspot.com

Game developmentGraphicsMusic

’10’15’20’25
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235 from 29 Aug 2010 to 19 Dec 2024
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now and then
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personal blog
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2024 2

  1. A big step forward
  2. Tips for pitching to game publishers

2021 9

  1. Neat tricks for modelling the Robo Maestro robot
  2. Robo Maestro is coming to Steam!
  3. Where to get original ideas
  4. I’m leaving Ronimo, here’s why and what’s next
  5. The Ageless Gate is OUT NOW!
  6. Super flexible 2D animations through the Blightbound Skin Editor
  7. New song: The Remains of the Mountain
  8. Finding a suitable toolchain for animating Blightbound’s 2D characters
  9. Blightbound's approach to individual storytelling in a coop game

2020 15

  1. Softening polygon intersections in Blightbound
  2. Arcane Glamour LIVE NOW! Blightbound's biggest update yet!
  3. 5 years below minimum wage: the financial history of Ronimo
  4. Combining 2D and 3D in Blightbound's VFX
  5. Bending Blightbound's world to lower the horizon
  6. Screen Space Reflections in Blightbound
  7. The games that inspired me most
  8. Three nasty netcode bugs we fixed around Blightbound's launch
  9. Blightbound OUT NOW! Early Access on Steam!
  10. Blightbound gameplay revealed!
  11. 5 tips for reducing stress as a game company owner
  12. Then the Halls Were Empty... and I Turned It On!
  13. How we made particles twice as fast through cache optimisation
  14. New song: Approach of the Derelict Research Station
  15. Five important realisations about game balance

2019 6

  1. New song: A Century Flies By
  2. Beginner balance versus pro balance
  3. New Song: A Century Sails By
  4. The psychology of matchmaking
  5. New song: Hear Her Typewriter Humming
  6. An overview of many ways of doing a beta

2018 8

  1. Interior Mapping: rendering real rooms without geometry
  2. The Awesomenauts matchmaking algorithm
  3. New song: Tensor
  4. The challenge of finding enough playtesters
  5. Here's how I made my computer write music
  6. Entertaining players while waiting for matchmaking
  7. Sandrider
  8. The limitations of matchmaking without server logic

2017 14

  1. New song: Grom
  2. The Daysailer and the Night Cave
  3. Lament
  4. The Master Waits
  5. The Light Deep Down
  6. Never be ashamed of your process if the result is good
  7. Working with generic room-based matchmaking
  8. Taking live soundtrack improvisation to the next level
  9. The requirements of good matchmaking
  10. What we learned improvising a live game soundtrack
  11. The Ronimo coding style guide
  12. The Ronimo coding methodology
  13. The many meanings of the confusing word 'lag'
  14. Adding more depth to 2D levels using scissor rectangles

2016 5

  1. Analysing the new Awesomenauts matchmaker
  2. The big list of ways to create varied weapons
  3. Fixing texture distortion on deformed polygons
  4. A simple way to smooth angular trails
  5. Creating crisper special effects with trails

2015 22

  1. New Awesomenauts expansion announced: Overdrive!
  2. Texture formats for 2D games, part 4: Overview
  3. Texture formats for 2D games, part 3: DXT and PVRTC
  4. Texture formats for 2D games, part 2: Palettes
  5. Texture formats for 2D games, part 1
  6. The future of indie is amateur
  7. Designing matchmaking for non-gigantic communities
  8. Opinions needed: which art style for Cello Fortress?
  9. Cello Fortress micro vlog #1: Big Chord Attack
  10. 3D printing Captain August
  11. Why adding multiplayer makes game coding twice as much work
  12. Using key poses to prototype character animations
  13. Building your mental toolbox for solving coding problems
  14. Swords & Soldiers II introduction trailer
  15. Making gameplay stand out against rich backgrounds
  16. Why indies should care less about financial independence
  17. The level art tools for Swords & Soldiers II
  18. What many indies are doing wrong
  19. The downsides of gameplay variety
  20. Luck and success in the indie business
  21. A tool for analysing colour schemes
  22. What most young programmers need to learn

2014 34

  1. Proun+ out now on iOS!
  2. Why good matchmaking requires enormous player counts
  3. Using 2D daylight assets to create a night level
  4. Proun+ gets its first trailer!
  5. Area based depth of field blur
  6. Other developers on the ideal patching frequency
  7. Why patching too often is a bad idea / The magic of the Vault
  8. Relay servers
  9. Core network structures for games
  10. The importance of packet count
  11. A simple trick for fast high quality bokeh on lights in Cello Fortress
  12. Tips and tricks for a successful convention booth
  13. The gross imperfections of tuning in music
  14. Using throttling to reduce network errors
  15. Evolving level art from Swords & Soldiers 1 to 2
  16. Why composition is often better than inheritance
  17. Finding bugs through autotesting
  18. Solving path finding and AI movement in a 2D platformer
  19. The AI tools for Awesomenauts
  20. Proun cloning controversy: why indies should complain less about clones
  21. Why free to play games are inherently less fun
  22. How we solved the infamous sliding bug
  23. Guys With Guns: concept art for a cancelled Ronimo project, or: Being asked to pitch for a publisher's project
  24. Why Scrum is fundamentally broken (but we still use it)
  25. Revealing Swords & Soldiers II
  26. Coding structures that cause bugs
  27. The final series of Proun+ music sketches
  28. So much awesome news in the week Ronimo turns 7!
  29. Proun+ music sketches: which do you like?
  30. The Maarten Principle: a golden rule of planning
  31. Concept art can be raw: early designs for AI Station
  32. How chance in games is rarely just a roll of the dice
  33. The surprisingly many subtleties of designing crits
  34. Bitcrunching numbers for bandwidth optimisation

2013 24

  1. Camera mapping a comic: the Ward trailer
  2. First steps towards massive replays and spectators in Awesomenauts
  3. The statistics of our games, part 3: Code
  4. Extreme transformation of Nauts during development
  5. Visuals that make ideas much more awesome
  6. The statistics of our games, part 2: Assets and audio
  7. The statistics of our games, part 1: General, files and textures
  8. Eliminating ghost notes in Cello Fortress
  9. Awesomenauts in the Humble Bundle!
  10. Detecting notes from a live cello: the core technology of Cello Fortress
  11. How the cello controls the game in Cello Fortress
  12. Style exploration for Cello Fortress
  13. Making everything animatable
  14. From melee to ranged: the most difficult design decision in Awesomenauts
  15. Announcing Awesomenauts The Movie with a trailer!
  16. The evolution of Sheriff Lonestar
  17. Hardcore C++: why "this" sometimes doesn't equal "this"
  18. The character animation workflow for Awesomenauts
  19. Optimising special effects in Awesomenauts
  20. The craziest bugs, part 2
  21. The craziest bugs, part 1
  22. Why Cello Fortress is a twin stick shooter
  23. Cello Fortress trailer revealed!
  24. What would you like me to write about?

2012 43

  1. Dynamically melting snow
  2. Snowball Earth's melting effects
  3. Wacky marketing thingies
  4. The indie marketing plan
  5. Introducing the editors of the Ronitech
  6. Shining a light on how pitching to publishers works
  7. Drooling dogs and weird boys for Snowball Earth
  8. The history of Snowball Earth - now playable!
  9. Cancelled game Snowball Earth playable at Indigo
  10. Awesomenauts skins out now!
  11. Announcing Cello Fortress: a unique mix of live concert and game
  12. A name and a logo
  13. Shooting animations in Awesomenauts
  14. Making 2D characters aim in all directions
  15. Our experience with crowdsourcing translations
  16. The craziness that is joysticks on PC
  17. Awesomenauts out now on PC on Steam!
  18. Optimisation lessons learned (part 3)
  19. Awesomenauts is coming to Steam!
  20. Optimisation lessons learned (part 2)
  21. Optimisation lessons learned (part 1)
  22. A bad kind of competition
  23. How to really involve a larger team in the creative process
  24. The Epic Shoes Of Awesome Winning
  25. What Awesomenauts almost looked like
  26. The beautiful alternative Awesomenauts art styles
  27. Awesomenauts early concept art
  28. Programming with pasta
  29. The lasagne theory of game design
  30. How Awesomenauts' water effect was made
  31. A fun Bokeh experiment in Proun
  32. Depth of field blur: the Swiss army knife that improved even the framerate of Awesomenauts
  33. We've announced our next game: Day of the Awesomenauts: Monkey Throttle
  34. Awesomenauts release date announced!
  35. Question: how to synchronise between the game and render thread?
  36. How we made the Awesomenauts level art
  37. The weird cause of Swords & Soldiers network errors
  38. Awesomenauts audio dev diary
  39. Proun's sales statistics after removing the free version
  40. An easy solution to the safe frame problem
  41. Follow your heart, not your wallet!
  42. The code of Awesomenauts' upgrade system
  43. Building hundreds of upgrades for Awesomenauts

2011 34

  1. The skill design system in Awesomenauts
  2. The lamest bug we ever encountered
  3. Qqq
  4. Monster Truck VS Zombies - A cancelled Ronimo project
  5. Making an HD 2D game look good on an SD television
  6. How a lack of art influences prototyping results
  7. The Bouncy Stick Problem
  8. What no one told you about the videocard: lagging 1 frame behind
  9. Matisse, Malevich, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Mondriaan, van Dongen
  10. Proun sales data revealed: Proun is a big success! Pay What You Want is not!
  11. One million races played! Proun's gameplay statistics
  12. Proun patch v108 released!
  13. Overview of Proun user tracks
  14. Awesomenauts intro cinematic released
  15. Solid Motion
  16. Proun highscore system patched
  17. Meet the Awesomenauts: Sheriff Lonestar
  18. Games as expression / Proun as me
  19. Proun server back online!
  20. Can anyone help me find new hosting?
  21. Proun website temporary move
  22. Proun OUT NOW for PC! And: the long history of Proun
  23. Proun's game design
  24. Proun will be "Pay What You Want!" Here's why
  25. Awesomenauts trailer released!
  26. Awesomenauts announced!
  27. Why I made a graphics-only trailer of Proun
  28. Pause
  29. Meta-shapes emerging from perspective
  30. 10 Tips for the lonely programmer
  31. Resetting versus re-creating
  32. The role of the game designer
  33. The many faces of balance in an RTS
  34. AI in Swords & Soldiers (part 2)

2010 19

  1. AI in Swords & Soldiers (part 1)
  2. The endless possibilities of art styles
  3. Designing levels without tools
  4. All the settings
  5. The horror that is PC development
  6. Coloured light in Proun
  7. Lighting in Proun
  8. Sun rays
  9. Stereoscopic 3D
  10. Designing against motion sickness in Proun
  11. Dirty collision detection trickery in Proun
  12. Camera mapping tips and tricks
  13. Captain August got camera mapped!
  14. Camera mapping the Evil Pope
  15. Abstract art!
  16. Overbright colours, blur and faking it
  17. Depth of field blur in Proun
  18. Failed/fixed leashing in Proun
  19. Opening speech