Nieuwegein, Utrecht, Netherlands
Creative director, entrepreneur, gamedev, cellist, composer, blogger. I'm an allround creator making games, music and art. I've founded the game studio Galaxy Grove where I am currently CEO and creative director over a team of a dozen people making management/building games. Our first game Station to Station released on Steam in October 2023, is 92% positive on Steam and an 8.0 on Metacritic. I've made Robo Maestro, Cello Fortress and Proun as a solo dev. Previously at Ronimo (the studio I co-founded) I was technical director on Awesomenauts, , Blightbound, Swords & Soldiers 1 & 2 and De Blob. As a composer I've made the album The Ageless Gate and the soundtrack for the game Proun. I frequently write about game dev, business and creative topics on my dev blog at www.joostvandongen.com.
Galaxy Grove makes high quality management and building games. -Released our first game Station to Station in October 2023. -Released Town to City into Early Access in September 2025 currently 97% positive! -Announced our new game Steam to Electric in April 2026 -Currently working on several new games.
As lead programmer, I guide our coding team. I also steer the development of our games, our multi-platform console engine (Xbox360/XboxOne/PS3/PS4/Wii/WiiU/PC/Mac/Linux) and our in-game tools. And of course I also do programming myself, especially on the graphics engine, tools and performance.
Teached the course in "Creation Skills" for the minor "It's all in the game" at the Hogeschool Utrecht. This is a minor for fourth year students.
Teacher for the Game Design & Development course "Game programming", and for the Interaction Design course "Integratie" (also about programming in C++).