In our third ‘Meet the Members’ blogpost we talk to Joost van Dongen from Galaxy Grove. Let’s go!
Are you a member, and would you also like to be featured? Great! Send an email to marlies@dutchgamesassociation.nl and we’ll send you our questions.
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Please tell us a little bit about yourself, your company and your position in the company
I’m Joost van Dongen and I’m the founder and creative director of Galaxy Grove. Galaxy Grove is a relatively new studio and it’s located in Utrecht. We started in 2022 and released our first game Station to Station in October 2023. We’re currently 13 people and we specialise in management and building games. By that I mean entertainment games, not applied games. Right now we’re making more content for Station to Station, and we have plans for several new games.
People might know me better for my previous role: I was one of the founders of Ronimo Games. I co-founded that studio in 2007 together with 6 friends and I was technical director there. We made games like De Blob, Swords & Soldiers and of course our biggest hit Awesomenauts.
After 13 years I decided I wanted something different. I had had an amazing time with my colleagues at Ronimo, but I wanted full creative freedom and I wanted to make a different kind of games. The only way to achieve that was to embark on a new journey. So in 2021 I left Ronimo. I first spent 9 months learning new things and making Robo Maestro, and then I started work on Station to Station, which led to founding Galaxy Grove.
I’m also the writer of a dev blog called Joost’s Dev Blog. I haven’t been very active there, but over the years I wrote over a hundred in-depth articles on game development, art, design, music and business. You can find them at www.joostvandongen.com. I hope to find the time to get back to blogging at some point!
We would love to see (or hear) some of your work! Please show us some examples of your recent projects.
The most recent highlight for me is of course our new game Station to Station. It’s a relaxing minimalist railroad builder with voxel art. We released it on Steam in October and it was received really well. Station to Station is a real team effort: while I made the first prototype on my own, the team quickly grew to 8 people after that.
Another game I released earlier this year is Robo Maestro. Or well, ‘game’… Robo Maestro is a procedural music toy. It’s a music generator that I coded, and then I made a toy around that. It’s a very weird and unique thing and can be downloaded for free on Steam. I’ve heard from a few people that they used Robo Maestro to compose the music for game jam games, so that’s really cool.
How long have you been a DGA member and what is your main reason for joining? What can DGA do to help your company?
I’m not sure, I think I’ve been a member for around 5 years? My reason for joining is that I think that as an industry, the Dutch game companies should help each other. That includes representing the Dutch games industry towards the government and press, which is best done ‘officially’ as the Dutch Games Association. It also means organising things like a congres, an award show, a booth at Gamescom. DGA does a lot of great things that benefit us all, even if the direct benefit for any individual company might not always be as clear. So I support and love that.
By organising Dutch Game Day the DGA is already doing a huge thing for me. I think what would help me further is to extend this concept with in-depth talks in more fields, or a separate congres for that on another day. For example, I’d love to bring the coders on my team to Dutch Game Day, but right now they won’t find much coder stuff there.
What ambitions/plans do you have for your company?
In the long run, I want to grow Galaxy Grove to the point where we can compete with the top games in the management game genre. My dream is that our games will be as beloved as Frostpunk, Cities Skylines and Planet Coaster.
I also want to have multiple games in different phases of development so that we can take the time to innovate, and so that we can transition teams smoothly within the company after a game launches and production scales down on that game. So I hope that we can grow the company to be around 100 people, working on 4 or 5 different games at a time. And I hope each of these games will be interesting and have a strong atmosphere and graphics.
But hey, this is all super ambitious, let’s see how far we actually get!
Anything else you would like to share with us?
Thanks for the opportunity to let me introduce myself to the DGA community, and thanks for all the new things that DGA has been doing recently! The Dutch Game Days, the revived Dutch Game Awards, the lobby initiative, the open way of communicating: it’s all really cool!
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Thank you, Joost!
Are you a member, and would you also like to be featured? Great! Send an email to marlies@dutchgamesassociation.nl and we’ll send you our questions.