Whale men mostly live in the ocean… Mostly.

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Wolfire is a tiny indie video game developer but we want to be known internationally! If you are fluent in another language, or have ideas on how to publicize us in return for a free copy of OG and/or a cool tshirt, check out the Wolfire Overt Ops!

We are working hard to make Overgrowth run smoothly for everyone, so we have a fallback rendering pipeline that uses no shaders at all! It doesn’t look as nice as our high-end rendering mode, but it should work for almost anyone.

Shaders on left, shader-free on right

I just added atmospheric haze to the engine! It is pretty subtle, so I made this comparison picture. It is notable for two reasons. First, it is radial fog, so it does not distort when you move the camera like fog often does in games. Second, it gets its color from a blurred version of the sky behind it, so it automatically blends well with the sky even if it has uneven color (like a sunset).

Hey guys.  We recently made a Facebook page for Overgrowth with a bunch of new concept art, some videos, and music!

Here’s the deal:  Once we get 500 fans on the page, ready or not, John is going to grab the latest build, call it Alpha 1, and we’re going to start alpha testing in SPF!

I just made Overgrowth dynamically update textures and shaders whenever you edit them outside of the program, so you can instantly see the changes in-game! This has no negative effect on performance because it only checks for changes when you switch to another application and back, and even then it only reloads files that have been modified.

I also updated our videos to play in HD while embedded here in the blog!

Announcing a new race in Overgrowth: cats!  Click for a larger version.

Update from Mikko:

Let me introduce you to the new version of Overgrowth theme music. Although I thought the first version of the theme song was quite good already, we thought it needed some updates. The new version has more powerful orchestration and it describes the nature of the game better this way I think. Instead of describing all the changes it had and splitting it into atoms, just listen and enjoy it.

When I started work on this sword, I decided I wanted something that looked original but still functional. After experimenting I came up with this shape. The extended handle on the back of the blade is so that a hand can be moved up for extra leverage when pressing the sword after a strike, or if the blade gets stuck.

The model is only using 238 triangles. We have a bigger budget for each weapon, but it is a good idea to cut out any polygons that don’t help define the shape.

We are testing out the use of object space normal maps on Overgrowth. These maps provide all the details that show up in the lighting. Object space maps have a few advantages over tangent space maps, like being able to fix them in Photoshop if they have errors.

Sword

Sword Normals

Sword Wireframe

Check out the video in HD here!

I made the blood react to the underlying surface details: you can still make out the shape of the bricks and mortar even when they are completely covered in blood. I also completely revamped the lighting to accurately reflect the sun and sky, but that is a different blog post!