Hey guys, we're going to move everything over to the our main Overgrowth group at: http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/games/overgrowth


Please join us there if you haven't already.

January 13th, 2009 by Jeff

Well, another week, another alpha!

If you’re just tuning in, we are doing something a little unusual with our development on our upcoming independent video game, Overgrowth. Every week, we release our latest build, however raw it may be, to fans in our secret preorder forum.

Overgrowth

We are continuing to polish the Overgrowth alpha for our first blessed build! So far, we have been releasing really raw development builds that of course have a lot of known bugs. However, each week we close more and more bugs and the alpha is starting to shape up. In a couple of weeks we hope to have a solid build that runs on most people’s computers.

Here’s a run down of what’s new this week. First of all, our alpha has about doubled in size. Now it is almost 500 megabytes, most of which consists of high resolution textures. Aubrey added a ridiculous amount of new art in the past few days. We are going to show it off in a post pretty soon, I promise. We have already started demoing it in this thread in the SPF ( http://forums.wolfire.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=4417 ), but unfortunately it is too hot for the blog right now.

Also, Phillip has closed a bunch of map editor bugs. Even though we are trying to clean up the code for our upcoming blessed build, Phillip is a beast and managed to fix all of the known bugs in the map editor. Therefore, Phillip managed to slip in a few new features. Namely snapping and grouping. Thanks for all of the feedback in yesterday’s map editor post!
I didn't post the map editor news because they were too big, if you want to read them please go to:

http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/01/map-editor/
From David, this week, we have much faster shadows, a bunch of bug fixes, object shadows, and the hot lens flare. Thanks for wishing him well last week, David is feeling much better!

As always, see you guys on the forum and in IRC.

January 11th, 2009 by David
I just started working on lens flares; I need to see the sun’s location so I can test shadows! I am testing a new technique for dynamic lens flares based on the anatomy of the human eye, inspired by a paper by Tobias Ritschel.

The basic idea is to simulate the glare as a human eye would see it, instead of how a camera would see it. This means the glare has to be animated: the movements of the iris in response to bright light cause the diffraction streaks to change in subtle ways. Simulating an eye rather than a camera also results in a more grainy texture and a rainbow-colored lenticular halo, instead of the geometric internal reflections you normally see in camera flares.

To see the picture please go to:
http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/01/lens-flares/

By Jeff on January 4th, 2009

Free LugaruA few weeks ago, we tried something new. We gave Lugaru away 100% for free in a holiday promotion. It was only covered by a few big sites, the largest two being the awesome TIGSource and IndieGames Blog. Initially we were disappointed by the lack of coverage but this quickly disappeared as it was passed around the internet like crazy in a big game of telephone. I definitely saw many posts about the following games:

Free Lugaro
Free LAGARA
FREE ARUGULA
Free Rugalu

And, my favorite, Free Lugaria!

The Results
We distributed free Lugaru to over 10,000 people! Additionally, we partnered with our friends at MacHeist and were given the opportunity to be part of their Mac Giving Tree, which doubled that number to about 20,000 (we were the secret referral app). It’s insane because we were tracking our own free Lugaru results gradually organically spreading throughout the world on Google Analytics, and then BAM, MacHeist has the power to outperform us in one fell swoop. All the more reason to support Mac OS X.

Free Game = More Sales
What’s most interesting is that while Lugaru was free, sales were up! Yes… by making Lugaru free, we sold more copies than we usually do. Additionally, another forward thinking indie, Pocketwatch Games, had a similar promotion and experienced strikingly similar results with his Venture Arctic holiday giveaway.

This has huge implications for indie game developers.

Indienomics
It’s much more complicated than this, but for the very small indies, this promotion makes a lot of sense. So few people know about your games, that the influx of new people is enough to boost your meager sales. Basically, it takes a very, very small amount of those 20,000 people to feel incredibly generous and buy a copy of Lugaru to shatter our extremely modest trickle of regular Lugaru sales. I am not sure what the long term implications are of this find, but in the short term, I suspect we are going to be seeing a ton of “Free (insert indie game here) !” pop up really soon and we will all be happy.

In addition to this bizarre economic realization, we accomplished our #1 goal: make people aware of Overgrowth. Not a lot of people know this, but Lugaru was created 100% by David Rosen when he was in high school as a hobbyist project. The goal was to show Lugaru to as many people as possible and then explain to them how much awesomer Overgrowth is going to be. Hopefully a lot of the new guys stick around and follow our progress on this blog!

By Aubrey on January 2nd, 2009

One challenge I have as the artist on Overgrowth is working with David so that each area can help tell the story of the game. As a gamer, I don’t like having to sit through drawn-out cinematics when I could be playing. To help avoid that, I am working hard so that the visuals of each level tell you what is going on there. Some parts of the story are still best told in cut-scenes or with dialog, or even with ambient audio. When designing a level I can plan that out too.

The setup for the level in this concept is that Turner is trying to get some information from a specific pack of dog warriors.

The dog soldiers have decided to stage a last stand against a superior force. They have chosen this location because it is easily defended, and thus has been the site of numerous previous battles. The rocky crag is covered with the graves of those dog warriors who fought and died in the past — these graves are monuments to their bravery in combat.

To see the pictures please go to:

http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/01/overgrowth-level-concepts/