Female characters in Overgrowth
January 16th, 2009
In Overgrowth, we are working on creating many unique characters of different species, body type, sex, and occupation. Communicating distinctions between male and female characters in Overgrowth is especially challenging because of some of our basic design choices. No Hypersexualization Many games show that characters are female by making them look like strippers. That is, giving them breast implants, tiny ...
Vimeowned
January 15th, 2009
We have been using Vimeo for a while to host David's design tours. Sadly, yesterday, Vimeo notified us that the design tours must be removed. Vimeo has a strict no video games policy, with the sole exception of video games you are developing yourself. Unfortunately, since David's design tours feature other indie games, they are not welcome on ...
Step-wise Creation of Modular Buildings
January 13th, 2009
I have worked on a few commercial games and I am pretty familiar with the methods used to make cities or towns. Usually you start off with a detailed picture of what you want. An image of some cool building. Then you plan out the fewest modular pieces you will need to make that building. After that, you plan out ...
Overgrowth Alpha 9
January 13th, 2009
Well, another week, another alpha! If you're just tuning in, we are doing something a little unusual with our development on our upcoming independent video game, Overgrowth. Every week, we release our latest build, however raw it may be, to fans in our secret preorder forum. We are continuing to polish the Overgrowth alpha for our first blessed build ...
Map Editor
January 12th, 2009
The map editor in action. I'm scaling a bunch of blocks on my lovely house. Here at Wolfire, we're a small team but we want Overgrowth to have lots and lots of content. So, it's really important for us to have powerful tools to speed up asset creation. One of the main things I've been working ...
Lens Flares
January 11th, 2009
I just started working on lens flares; I need to see the sun's location so I can test shadows! I am testing a new technique for dynamic lens flares based on the anatomy of the human eye, inspired by a paper by Tobias Ritschel. The basic idea is to simulate the glare as a human eye would see it ...
Conflicts of interest in the IGF
January 10th, 2009
The Independent Games Festival grand prize is one of the highest honors an indie game can receive. More important than the $20,000 check is the fact that it can rocket indie developers out of obscurity and into headlines; if we won, we wouldn't have to fight to get people to return our emails, they would contact us first ...