When designing algorithms for 3D rendering, it’s often tricky for me to visualize what I’m doing. I find that if I stop for a few seconds and sketch the idea out using pen and paper, it helps understand how it all fits together. There are all sorts of computer programs that let you make charts and outlines really efficiently, but for graphics tech, nothing beats drawing on paper. This is an example of some of the scribbling I did today while optimizing the ray-traced terrain shadows.

The shadows are cached, so the player never waits for them to calculate anyway, but it’s important to streamline the map creation process as well! The basic idea is that I wanted rays cast from each terrain texel to take advantage of the information we already have from previous raycasts. This worked, but only cut the shadow calculation time from 22 seconds to 16 seconds for the 2048*2048 terrain. That wasn’t enough, so I used OpenMP to parallelize it, and now it takes only 6 seconds on my quad-core. That’s a pretty big improvement!

Next I will try calculating the shadows on the GPU: ideally I would like all the static object shadows to update in real-time in the editor, even though they’re all pre-calculated when actually playing.

A 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!

Feel free to introduce yourself in the comments.

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.

Happy New Year!

It seems like just yesterday we officially formed Wolfire Games and announced Overgrowth. In just a few short months, I think we have accomplished a lot and Overgrowth is really starting to pick up.

2009 is going to be awesome, and I can’t wait to show you guys what we have in store.

It’s things like this that make me proud to be an indie game developer. RealArcade, a subsidiary of RealNetworks, recently released Tiki Towers, a game that looks quite similar to 2DBoy’s hot game World of Goo. Like identical twin similar.

I don’t want to make any allegations about the inspiration for Tiki Towers. For all I know, they could have came up with the idea totally independently. However, what is really noteworthy, is that despite this game having the backing of RealNetworks, and over a year of professional development, the indie game World of Goo is totally kicking its ass.

The reviews are coming in and so far, it looks pretty weak. Now compare it to World of Goo, one of the highest rated games of the year, with “universal acclaim” according to Metacritic.

It’s refreshing to know that two dedicated and independent game developers, Ron Carmel and Kyle Gabler, can still utterly destroy a team of programmers, PR people, and the corporate behemoth backing Tiki Towers - a company with over half a billion dollars in annual revenue.

Here is a bonus, indie fail whale:

At Wolfire, we don’t take breaks for pesky occasions like Christmas or Hanukkah. One of the advantages we have over the big guys is our insane work ethic. Continuing our fine tradition of weekly alphas and open development, I bring you Overgrowth Alpha 7!

Following right on the tail of our unexpectedly hot post about why you should support Mac OS X, we’re eating our own dog food.

The big news this week is that THE UI WORKS ON OS X. We are using Google Chrome for all sorts of hot stuff in Overgrowth, including the user interface. I’ll explain this in more detail later, but Chrome is not very Mac friendly (yet).

However, in the spirit of the holidays, I recently gave my personal Macbook Air to the Webkit genius AJS, and a Christmas miracle happened: the Chrome underpinnings used in Overgrowth are now Mac OS X compatible!

I hope you guys are happy. This MacBook Air was given to me for doing some work at a web startup and it was awesome!

We also have PPC support, courtesy of the god-like Ryan Gordon. If there ever was a time to be an old school Mac user and Wolfire fan, it’s now! The PPC build is untested right now except in emulators, so let us know how it works in the secret preorder forum.

Also new this week are more map editor improvements (blog post on this coming soon), dynamic shadows (so objects can have shadows cast on them, not just terrain), and some other hot stuff.

Here’s a screenshot of dynamic shadows:

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

We finally have become the number one search result for Overgrowth! Thanks to turbochop in the secret preorder forum for letting us know!

This sounds kind of dumb, but you would be surprised about the difference between the number one result on Google and the number two. One of the biggest things you learn in web development is that you really have milliseconds in order to get someone’s attention. You’d think intuitively that if someone reads or hears about Overgrowth somewhere, and decides to Google for us, they’d look through all the results and not be deterred that the first result is not Wolfire Games. Well, our search engine traffic for the keyword “Overgrowth” has just about doubled over the past few days!

We love Google and are very thankful for their benevolent dictatorship. Just for fun, here are ten services from Google that we use extensively.

1. Feedburner
2. Gmail
3. Google Analytics
4. Google App Engine
5. Google Alerts
6. Google Calendar
7. Google Checkout (see our blog post on it)
8. Google Chrome (built into Overgrowth)
9. Google Docs
10. Google Website Optimizer

I could write massive blog posts about each of these services because each of them are critical to us and totally awesome. Maybe I will some day.

Google is an amazing company that is pretty much key to our ability to bootstrap Wolfire Games. It is amazing because they are giving us enterprise level applications absolutely for free (well, ad supported in some cases). Most of their stuff puts even the expensive enterprise software that I used at other places to shame and we’re not paying a dime.

The downside is that Wolfire is completely hitched to Google, so if they ever decide to turn evil, I guess we will have to migrate to another service? I guess I don’t really see the downside! I love Google.

Last I checked, Mac OS X had around a 5% market share, and Linux had much less than that (among consumers). I can feel that many PHBs look at this small number and think “5%? Why should I support a whole new platform when I could just blow some more money on brand advertising?”

Obviously supporting Mac OS X and Linux means you tap into another platform and expand your potential market base. That much is clear. But surely adding an extra 5% is negligible, right? Wrong. Not all five percents are created equal. I’m not an economist, just a humble engineer, but let me take a stab at an explanation.

First, here’s a breakdown of Lugaru sales by platform:

From a short sighted, graph reading viewpoint, supporting Mac OS X and Linux directly increased sales by around 122%. However, this seemingly unbelievable number is actually understated. Here’s my attempt at an explanation in five points:

1. It’s good to be a big fish in a small pond
As a pretty niche independent game, Lugaru was never covered by PC Gamer, IGN, and other behemoth media publications. However, it was just large enough to get covered in a variety of Mac journals. One website, Inside Mac Games fell in love with it and posted about it all the time.

If you support Macs, even a small indie video game can rapidly spread throughout the community whereas the huge Windows market might just ignore you.

2. More platforms means more opportunities
As an indie video game studio, we don’t have many resources in the way of marketing. It’s embarrassing how much we rely on serendipity, for example, getting posted on fun-motion right when the admin decides to take a break, or getting called up by Igromania randomly.

We have had more than our fair share of Mac serendipity though. A recent example: Lugaru was promoted in MacHeist’s Giving Tree. This generated the equivalent of like three diggings worth of traffic. We were up to 30 requests / second at its peak and dwarfed any event in the history of our Google Analytics. If we didn’t have a Mac OS X build, we simply wouldn’t have had this opportunity.

3. Vocal minorities
Having a Linux build meant coverage on Slashdot. This of course generated huge interest in not just the Linux version of Lugaru, but the Windows and Mac versions too. Lugaru also made an appearance in a few Linux magazines. A lot of people heard about and supported Lugaru simply because we had a Linux build.

4. You can’t choose your evangelists
If you’re familiar with Guy Kawasaki’s philosophy of evangelism, this shouldn’t be any surprise. You’ll notice that a small minority of your users will go crazy with your game and spread it all over the place. On the internet, all it takes is one thread on a popular forum, and you’ve literally got hundreds or thousands of new visitors. Basically, a small amount of your users can make a huge difference for you, and they might be Mac and Linux users.

A notable number of the Wolfire fans who hang out in IRC and spread Overgrowth like crazy are Mac users and we would be much smaller without them.

5. You can’t choose your power users
In the same vein as the above, you never know who the movers and shakers are going to be in your community. In Wolfire’s case, we are forever indebted to Wolfire forum regular, Silb. He actually reverse-engineered portions of Lugaru and made a kick-ass, extremely popular replacement campaign for the game, providing a huge amount of extra content to other people. His single, epic thread has been viewed over a hundred thousand times.

Oh yeah. He’s a Mac user.

To conclude, if you’re not supporting Linux and Mac OS X from a philosophical standpoint or for the fans, at least do it for the money. If you don’t support non-Windows platforms, you’re leaving a lot of cash on the table. I don’t know about you, but I’m not in a position to just say f— it to a large community of people who want to support us.

Hey guys, we just heard that Overgrowth was previewed in Igromania, the largest video game magazine in Europe! We are pretty much speechless. We’re just a humble, indie video game company, and we have a full page in Igromania! One mantra we have at Wolfire is “What would Ron Carmel do?” He probably would shrug it off and keep working.

I promptly told everyone I know and printed out a copy and put it on the fridge.

Click for the full PDF:

Here is a record speed translation in English, provided by GreenFlame of the Wolfire Forums.

Thanks for spreading the word, guys! This preview was no doubt a result of Overt Ops. Keep up the good work! We know this kind of stuff happens because of you.

If you run a website, magazine, tv show, or blog, no matter the size, we would love to spread the Overgospel to you. Please contact us and we hope we can spread the word.

Anyone who follows this blog will have seen a few of our highly polished concepts for characters in Overgrowth. I went all-out on these, detailing the grass or fur and backgrounds. Making them in full color. While I really enjoyed creating them, they are only a small part of the concept work that gets done.

The main purpose of concept sketches is to articulate our art direction to other people who want to help us. For example, recently we have gotten a few artists who were happy to help us work on Overgrowth. We need to give them stuff to work on, however, it is not practical to make highly detailed art for every single model we make. So what do I do? I try to make a concept that shows all the important parts of a model as fast as I can.

Here are a couple of examples to illustrate this point:

This one was modeled by Vrav, who hangs out with us on IRC a lot. It is a buckler — a small shield worn on the forearm.

and this one was modeled by Pawan. It’s a backpack designed and worn by the dogs of Overgrowth.

If you’d like to help the cause and have serious talent, feel free to contact us! As an independent studio, we are grateful for all the help we can get.