Part of our strategy for getting the word out about Overgrowth revolves around various social networks. Pretty much the only way we grow is organically through word of mouth. This is why we take social networking sites very seriously, because we are able to grow without being dependent on (insert giant news site here) to randomly write an article on us.

We have tried a lot of things, and here are the top five sites that have been really good for us. Here's a skittlr to view all of them at once: Overgrowth Skittlr!

Web 2.0 Explosion

1. Facebook (3750 fans)
Facebook is the king, hands down. It has long since been the largest social network in the world, and pretty much everything about it is designed to be spread virally.

It is perfect for game developers, because it supports a music player, high def videos, photos (a.k.a. concept art and screenshots), and notes (a.k.a. the Wolfire Blog). Therefore, I try to treat our Facebook Page as a valuable standalone site instead of simply a way to redirect people back onto wolfire.com.

Our Facebook Page gets around 350 visitors per day with occasional random spikes boosting it to 1000 - 2000.

2. YouTube (412 subscribers)
I think we all are familiar with YouTube. It is the uncontested king of video sites. It's 720p HD is ideal for demoing video games. A lot of people treat their video provider as sort of a dumping ground for their videos to embed on their own site. YouTube is actually much more than that.

One thing we've noticed is that some of our videos that we put up on YouTube get crazy amounts of traffic even though we've never even posted about them. I've always wondered how this happens and where these videos are getting so much traffic from. YouTube recently launched a hardcore analytics tool for their videos and now I can answer this question precisely. It turns out that YouTube has a number of ways to promote videos internally. Search, showing up at the end of YouTube videos, showing up on the sidebar of other videos, and other random internal YouTube stuff makes up about 30% of all our video views. Some of our videos have over 30,000 views purely from internal YouTube features.

We get 300 - 1.5k video plays per day, and about 30% of those are from internal YouTube features. The rest are from embedded players on ModDB, our blog, and the direct sharing on AIM, etc.

3. ModDB (417 watchers)
ModDB is sort of like a collection of Facebook pages but it is just for indie video games and mods. Pretty much the perfect fit for us. While it doesn't have the insane 100 million users / day that Facebook does, it is a huge site and has a lot of potential to raise awareness about your game.

We tend to get about 100 visits / day on average to our ModDB page, but every week when we update our page with some new news, we get a boost to around ~1000 visitors.

4. Steam (435 members)
Steam is probably the hardest to quantify. We definitely get a lot of people contacting us on Meebo claiming to have found us through our Steam page, but we don't really get any stats from Steam. Also, our Steam page doesn't really have any fancy features so it is mostly useful for transferring people over to Facebook and ModDB.

5. Twitter (447 followers)
I really, really wanted to love Twitter. There is so much hype about it and all of my friends seem to twitter non-stop. It is gaining traffic exponentially. Could it be the next Facebook? Well, I gave it a fair shot, but I am sad to report that it is not too useful, albeit very addictive.

How can we measure Twitter's impact?

Well, it is pretty easy to just look on Google Analytics and see how many referrers we get from Twitter. The answer is about 40 per day. Anyone on Twitter who shares a Wolfire Blog post or links to Overgrowth is counted in that figure. This includes my very own tweets that often link to Wolfire. So how many people are clicking on my tweets and how many are organic from other people spreading the word about us? Well, using a URL shortener like bit.ly, I can tell exactly how many. The answer is that only about 10-30 people click on my links.

I think I will save my criticisms of Twitter for its own blog post, but basically, it is pretty misleading. You will think that you are building up a huge crowd, but the truth is that most of your updates will be seen by virtually no one. 40 hits per day is nothing to sneeze at though, and maybe Twitter will become more useful later on, so I will continue to use it.

So that has been my experience so far with various social networks. What are some other ways we might reach new people?

One of the technologies we've been focusing on recently is game scripting. As part of this effort, I've been working on hotspots. Hotspots allow us to assign a physical location to scripts. We will be using them to initiate dialogues, trigger special effects, incite AI reactions, and much more. And, of course, they will be fully moddable. Here's how they work:

We have Google's V8 javacript engine running in the background. This allows us to execute javascript scripts whenever we want. We keep these scripts running in a persistent context, so functions and variables defined in one script can be referred to in others. Previously, users could write and run scripts only in the console. Now, hotspots can also execute scripts. In the following video, I create two hotspots, one to initiate a "woozy" camera effect and a second to end it (the actual scripts are loaded in a file chooser offscreen). John once again owned the voiceover.

Click here to watch in HD!

Press the triangle button for captions (download transcript)

These scripts have the full power of javascript at hand. But they must also interface with the engine itself. To do this, we explicitly expose certain engine functions to the javascript interpreter. For example, when the interpreter comes across "Camera.setFOV(90)" it knows to call back into the C++ engine, executing "Camera::Instance()->setFOV(90)" in engine.

Hotspots aren't the only entities that can call scripts. At the start of each level, a "level script" is executed. The level script serves to setup parameters, and it's a convenient place to define functions for later use. Here's the code for the level script in the video:

With this level script in place, the first hotspot was just linked to a script that calls woozy.start() and the second was linked to woozy.stop().

Right now, the scripts can access various camera, graphics, and network controls. Soon we will expose much more (e.g. object creation, movement and transformation controls, rabbot spawning, etc). Hopefully it will be flexible enough that people can make all sorts of random mini-games.

Do you guys have any suggestions for how hotspots and scripting should be handled?

Sometimes we get a little spoiled because almost everyone that visits us on the blog, the forums, IRC and meebo already knows that Overgrowth is a ninja rabbit fighting game inheriting the spirit of David's original game Lugaru. However, we've come to realize, that when our media hits more mainstream channels, people don't really know what to make of Overgrowth. The confusion is most visible on our GameTrailers profile where the comments on our videos seem to be split between "Overgrowth is awesome!" and "What the hell is this?".

One great way to convey the essence of Overgrowth to people who haven't heard of it before might be to regularly lodge a tagline underneath the Overgrowth logo. Here are some likely candidates (followed by some less likely ones):

• Overgrowth: The Ninja Rabbit Fighting Game
• Overgrowth: That Ninja Rabbit Fighting Game
• Overgrowth: Ninja Rabbit Combat
• Overgrowth: The Rabbit Warrior
• Overgrowth: Long Ears, Short Temper
• Overgrowth: Cottontail, Iron Will
• Overgrowth: Whale Man Approved
• Overgrowth: There's nothing funny about this bunny.
• Overgrowth: Hippity Hop Meets Karate Chop

If I learned anything at GDC it's that the phrase "action adventure fighting game" sounds boring and generic while the phrase "ninja rabbit fighting game" is unique and makes people want to know more.

What tagline do you think might work best for Overgrowth? Are there any good ones I haven't mentioned? In what other ways could we make Overgrowth more accessible to people who are bumping into our media for the first time?

You probably know that David made many of his early games for competitions but I wanted to talk about competitions I have entered, and a little bit about competitive spirit.

Concept art for Dominance War 4

I don't know the secret to getting good at art, but I can tell you how I got better at it. I used to think I was a pretty good artist. I was better at drawing things than my friends, and I could compare my stuff to comic books and think it was pretty close. Since I thought I was a great artist I applied for a job at a game company.

Another recent concept

The fact was that my art was terrible. I was able to trick myself into thinking I was good because I never worked with the same limitations of other artists and I never got much feedback except from people who wanted to be nice to me. The game company turned me down, but directed me to a website called Polycount. It started to dawn on me that maybe I wasn't as good as I thought. Polycount is a community with many members that are professional game artists, and so I posted some of my best art there for feedback. The feedback I got was that my art was mediocre at best.

My first finished normal mapped character

It was only when I realized how bad I was that I started to improve. I stopped making art for myself and started to think about what other people wanted to see, and I was able to have my art judged fairly by complete strangers. Some people may have given up, but I really wanted to be good. After a lot of practice I entered into a competition called Dominance War. My final entry didn't place well, but that was okay. It just meant I had to get better.

I have entered Dominance War again this year. You can check out my progress here.

David and I are twin brothers, and our family has a cabin in Sierra City. About 12 years ago, when we were 10 years old, we were wandering around town and noticed an unusual young dog.

He started to follow us around the neighborhood. He didn't have a collar but we assumed that he belonged to one of the neighbors, and played with him whenever he showed up. We taught him a number of cool tricks -- his best trick was sliding down the slide in the playground (climbing the steps was the hardest part to learn).

Every time David and I left the cabin and went for a walk, the dog would soon appear and follow us. He went everywhere with us. However, after a couple of weeks, we had to go back home to San Francisco. As we left, he ran after the car for miles, but eventually shrank to a distant speck and disappeared around a bend.

When we came back to Sierra City a few weeks later, we heard reports from the locals that a strange dog had been howling on our porch for days after we left.

David and I looked for him all over the neighborhood, but couldn't find him. We were about to give up, when we noticed a number of "I found a missing dog" flyers pinned up with a description that clearly matched our new friend.

We called the number and went to check up on him. He was really happy to see us! Since he didn't have a home, we decided to adopt him.

We couldn't just keep calling him 'dog', so we decided to pick a name. Our mom wanted to call him Jacques. David and I came up with Wolfenstein, or Wolfie for short. He responded much more favorably to Wolfie than to Jacques, so that is what we named him.

When David was thinking of a name for his video game company, Wolfie sprang to mind. If you add an 'r' you get Wolfire. Wolves are cool, and so is fire, so why not Wolfire?

When we started selling Wolfire T-Shirts, we soon found out that most of our customers were named Mr. or Mrs. Wolfire, and got a kick out of seeing a logo that is literally a wolf made out of fire.

Wolfie is about 13 now (we assumed he was about a year old when we found him), and is still alive and well, although he has slowed down a little. We don't know how much longer he will be around -- but his name will always live on in Wolfire.