Environment shadows - step 4
April 10th, 2009
I just started working on baking ambient occlusion into the lightmaps. This is currently performed by accumulating the shadows from 64 random light sources in the sky, and using the resulting ambient occlusion map to modulate the indirect lighting contribution. Here is what the Foothold map looks like with ambient occlusion enabled (above) and without (below): It's a fairly ...
How's Our Blogging?
April 9th, 2009
Hey guys. We've been working hard on the blog to keep you up to speed with all parts of the Overgrowth development process. The truth is we could talk about more than could be fit into a thousand blog posts but we really want to focus on the things that people find most interesting. If we use the number ...
Storyboards for Overgrowth
April 8th, 2009
We are working on the story for Overgrowth and we have started making storyboards for some cut scene ideas. I really like this way of working because it also helps me concept each setting and get ideas for characters and props. It takes 15-20 minutes for each storyboard, so I can do a lot really quickly. David is writing the ...
Environment shadows - step 3
April 7th, 2009
Our biggest design goal for the Overgrowth editor is to achieve high-quality graphics with a minimum production time. This not only includes the time to create the level, but also any preprocessing steps we might have, such as lightmap calculation. To keep the lightmap calculation fast, we're using a hybrid system of traditional texture baking and modern depth-map shadows ...
Overgrowth Alpha 21
April 6th, 2009
Here is what is new in Overgrowth in this weekly alpha. If you are confused what a weekly alpha is, or even what Overgrowth is, please read our fancy FAQ. Basically, we are developing a massive video game from the ground up -- we are able to do this completely independently by accepting preorders for the game before it's done ...
Wolfire now accepts Amazon Payments
April 5th, 2009
I just added a new option for preordering Overgrowth: Amazon Flexible Payment System! This allows people to preorder Overgrowth using an Amazon.com account, and therefore any credit card, bank account, or whatever Amazon might support. As much as I love Google, I was a little frustrated with Google Checkout, which was our original alternative to PayPal, because they don ...
Modular map making
April 5th, 2009
In recent screenshots of Overgrowth, a lot of people assume that our buildings, trees, and other models are just one epic sculpture made in 3ds Max. This is not true, and not really sustainable for an indie game with a single artist. Instead, we actually are building a number of reusable components that can fit together in many ways -- sort ...