It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction. Inspired by the presidential campaigns, John and I decided to do something similar. Simple: we asked our community for help via Overt Ops.

I’ll let the results speak for themselves. Within a week, we had our press page translated into 15 languages, with about 5 more in progress!

English

Croatian

Czech

Dutch

Finnish

French

German

Hungarian

Italian

Latvian

Norwegian

Polish

Russian

Spanish

Swedish

Tagalog

In the overt ops forum, we have compiled a list of virtually every video game magazine, website, blog, etc. in the world! Pretty soon, we are going to announce Overgrowth globally - all thanks to our fans!

I think this is a great way to get world class PR without spending a dime. Especially handy if you are an indie studio like us, which cannot begin to afford a professional PR team. Thanks guys! We are eternally grateful to our fans.

As always, if you are a native speaker of a non-english language, please join us in Overt Ops, and if you see any errors with our fan translations, please let us know! Even if you are not a native speaker, if you have any creative marketing ideas on a zero dollar budget, we would love to hear them in Overt Ops. As always, we love to hear from you.

See you guys in IRC and the forums.

We are starting on actually making our landscapes look like real landscapes! So far we have completed a lot of the macro detail, like the general shape and color; but we still have a lot of work to do on the details.

Well, the 500th fan has joined the Overgrowth Facebook page! That is truly amazing and we are pretty much stunned. That is quite an army of Wolfire fans! It’s crazy that about a week ago I was bothering my roommate to join to bump the fan number up from 5 people to 6 people. You guys are the best community ever!

As promised, we are going to begin alpha testing, which is what most of you guys have been waiting for! Alpha testing is limited to the secret preorder forum and is starting immediately. People have been playing around with it for the past 20 minutes in the IRC channel and things are getting pretty exciting!

Thanks and happy testing! See you guys on the forums and in IRC.

Edit: to clarify, this doesn’t mean that alpha testing is closed. Anyone else who preorders will still get in on the testing! In fact, John told me that now is the best time to preorder.

Aubrey carved this Wolfire pumpkin last night!

Phillip, John, and I set it on fire, in the spirit of the old school Wolfire logo.

See the full album on our Facebook page.

Add yourself to the page while you’re at it!

(Larger version) (Largest version)

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.