Whenever I play a game, I look for design lessons that I can learn and apply to my own games. Recently, I decided to show these lessons in the form of a video tour of games that make interesting design decisions. The first one is about World of Goo by 2Dboy. Please forgive the stiff narration; I am still getting used to talking to myself

Be sure to watch this in HD!

Design Tour - World of Goo from David Rosen on Vimeo.

Just got a response from Kyle Gabler from 2Dboy!

“Wow thanks David! I laughed out loud at some of the very small, and embarrassingly correct, details you managed to pick up on. I remember the day we got the balls stretching and squishing along the velocity vector - an entirely cosmetic feature - but it instantly made the game more fun and tactile. Also, you noticed we used blurred foreground and background textures as a sneaky way to have higher image compression ratios. That’s completely right, which is funny, since that was a case of a technical limitation that actually caused the game to look better with more depth.

Very perceptive, thumbs up!”

Be sure to subscribe to the blog so you don’t miss our upcoming design tours! The next one (Knytt Stories), is already up here.

Yes, you read that right! Thanks to TrialPay, you can get a copy of Overgrowth for free simply by signing up for a free trial for another company like Netflix or by completing an offer for much less than the $29.95 Overgrowth costs.

We have been testing this out in IRC to make sure everything works. Well, the experiment was a success and we’d like to thank the eight people who have used it so far to preorder Overgrowth! This includes myself, much to TrialPay’s dismay ;). I’ve asked our volunteers to pop into the comments and testify that this is legit, even though it sounds a little too good to be true.

The way it works is that based on your geographic location, TrialPay will generate a number of offers for you to choose from, ranging from signing up for a trial of Netflix.com to sending someone flowers. Once you sign up for the offer, Netflix or whoever you signed up with will cover the cost of your Overgrowth Preorder and you will instantly get access to SPF and everything else just like a regular Wolfire customer.

To get started, head over to our preorder page and enter your email address and, of course, forum username to get Secret Preorder Forum access. Go ahead and give it a try!

In preparation for the t-shirts we need to give out for the Lugaru video contest, we are bringing back the Wolfire Cafepress T-Shirt Store! We set the prices as low as we can on Cafepress. People will compliment you on your FireFox t-shirt but make sure to tell them it’s Wolfire!

To honor this occasion, I asked some classmates of mine to model them for us! Phillip took the pictures and they turned out pretty well! We posted an album on the Overgrowth Facebook Page. Make sure to join the page, and you can view the pictures here: View Album.

There are some rumors that some more pictures are going to be released later… So be sure to become a Facebook Fan so you don’t miss them!

Hey guys! Just a note to let you know that the last video entries will be accepted on midnight, Dec 3rd (PST) which is about a week away!

All you have to do is record a video and upload it to WeGame.com using WeGame’s free client or using other software like Fraps or Snapz Pro. The winner - the person who gets the most “Likes” on their video will win a $50 gift certificate to the Wolfire Tshirt store and a copy of Overgrowth, however, there will be many runner up and subjective prizes, so don’t worry about not getting tons of “Likes”! Just enter your video and see what happens.

Also, in the meantime, please check out some of the existing videos and click the “Like” button for as many of them as you like! You can do that here:
http://www.wegame.com/videos/browse/games/lugaru/

While working on the initial procedural movement animation, I took breaks every now and then to record videos of each stage. I started out just blocking out the movement controls and then added layers of complexity. The final animation in Overgrowth is going to look much better than the last scene in this video!

Overgrowth Procedural Animation Process from David Rosen on Vimeo.

Aubrey just created an amazing Joshua tree model! My plant rendering shaders are not good enough yet to do it justice, but I think this is a nice screenshot all the same.

Direct light and shadows from the sun are only half of the lighting system in Overgrowth. The other half is indirect light from the rest of the sky. To make the indirect light look realistic, we also have to calculate indirect light shadows! I thought this looked cool, so here is a screenshot of the indirect shadows on the desert terrain, with drastically increased contrast.

Hey guys, we are going to be trying something new: weekly alphas! No exceptions.

Every week, we are going to release a new build to SPF. Whether it’s ready or not. We feel that this open development is a great way to smooth out compatibility issues early on, get feedback to make the game as good as possible, and let fans build mods and other content before the game is even publicly available!

Sure, some of the builds are going to be rough, but that’s expected in an alpha. We are going to release “blessed” builds every once in a while that are particularly polished and noteworthy, so that the hardcore fans can play the cutting edge, while everyone else can wait for blessed releases.

Oh yeah, this is starting immediately:

The build has been posted in the secret preorder forum!

As always, see you guys on the forums and in IRC.
-Jeff

The shadow rendering is now much more optimized, and has no limit on resolution! Here is a screenshot of the same terrain as before at a higher detail level. Since all of the lighting is pre-computed in the texture, the increase in quality has no affect on the framerate!

I just got terrain self-shadowing working! I also started optimizing rendering by automatically baking all of the sky and sun lighting into a single texture, so the real-time shader can be drastically simplified. The texture in this screenshot is low-resolution just to test out the technique, I will have some high-res shots soon.