Creating Our Own Skydomes
February 19th, 2009
For Overgrowth, we are photo-sourcing all our skydomes. So far, we've been searching sites like cgtextures.com to find these images. This means we are limited to the same small set of decent skydomes that countless other game developers are looking at. We don't want to be limited, and we've noticed that the skies here in Berkeley ...
How I Make Overgrowth Assets: Part I, The Idea
February 18th, 2009
This is the first part of a series of blog posts explaining how I go about putting a 3D art asset into Overgrowth. Everybody has ideas about what they want to make but how do you know your ideas are good ones? If you don't have any good ideas, how do you get some? In a lot of ways ...
Terrain edge fading
February 17th, 2009
While the terrain in Overgrowth is quite large, the view distance can be even larger. On a clear day, you can see all the way from one corner of the terrain to the opposite corner. While this allows us to show impressive vistas (like those in our alpha trailer), it also means that you can often see the edge of ...
Overgrowth a14 released
February 16th, 2009
Continuing in the spirit of open development, it's been another week, so we are unleashing a brand new alpha! Here is what is new in Overgrowth this week... Starting with a much needed FAQ. As usual, we have fixed a number of bugs, tweaked some stuff, and implemented some new features. Aubrey has created even more art. I am ...
Overgrowth Fighting System Design Doc, 1st Draft
February 16th, 2009
Hey guys, we've been talking a lot about our fighting system recently and I wanted to provide you with a first draft of what we're planning to do in Overgrowth. These are the ideas that materialized from discussions I had with David and Phillip a few days ago. Remember that what I mention here is not set in ...
File hosting for indie developers
February 14th, 2009
This question comes up every once in a while on various indie forums: How should I host my video game? What are some good mirror services? The cool thing about this question is that now there is pretty much one canonical answer: Amazon CloudFront. There are a few things to take into account for a file host: - Latency - Throughput - Reliability ...
How We Implement Undo
February 14th, 2009
Undo is one of the most important functions in any editor. It's one of those quintessential things that makes working with a computer qualitatively different from working with traditional tools. Sometimes when I'm sketching with pen and paper, I'll impulsively think "hmm, that last line is a bit off, time for ctrl-z!" And then I get a ...