Map Editor Video
January 30th, 2009
A lot of people were asking how to use the editor in the latest Overgrowth alpha, so we decided to make a video to show off all the tools! It stars John as the narrator, and includes a tools tutorial, timelapse building construction, and exclusive footage of the elusive Rabbot. Be sure to watch it in HD! Press the triangle ...
6 Tips For Becoming A Game Developer
January 29th, 2009
After manning the meebo widget for a few months, I've been asked many times about the best way for someone to enter the realm of game development. Granted, Wolfire is a very young company, and out of all the guys on our team I'm probably the least experienced when it comes to game development. However after consulting the ...
Scaling images with alpha
January 27th, 2009
To put transparent images in games, we usually use images that contain an alpha channel specifying the transparency of each pixel. Here's an example of an image being composited onto a new background using an alpha channel: There are several reasons why we would need to downscale an image. In 3D games, the most common reason is to create ...
Overgrowth Alpha 11
January 27th, 2009
We've got some pretty cool stuff in Overgrowth this week. As mentioned yesterday, we now have fancy texture compression. This will let Overgrowth run on many more computers, because it will use a fraction of the VRAM it previously used. Starting up Overgrowth is also much, much faster now. As usual, we have fixed a number of bugs, tweaked ...
DXTC texture compression
January 26th, 2009
Why do we need compression? To achieve our target level of detail in Overgrowth, we have to use some very high-resolution textures. We would like the game to run smoothly on older graphics cards, which often have less than 128 MB of video RAM. This is a problem for texture storage: just one uncompressed 2048*2048 RGBA texture uses 16 ...
Fighting as an end in itself
January 25th, 2009
Many games have combat, but it's usually treated as an obstacle in your path to something else. You have to kill enemies to get where you need to go, or to accumulate enough skill points. When writers make an attempt to justify it, they usually pick reasons that are unrelated to the fighting itself. Usually you're following orders ...
Game Theory Applied To Game Design
January 24th, 2009
Every modern real-time game has some form of rock, paper, scissor mechanics. As gamers we subconsciously know that such mechanics are there and that they work pretty well but no one ever explains why. With a little bit of game theory I can show you why but first I'll need to give you some brief game theory definitions. What ...