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 dialog. We both took a try at it, but I think his is a lot better.

This is an idea for a scene that we were thinking about for near the start of the game. The dialog is not final. Once again, Turner is getting himself into trouble.

We don't want to give away too much of the story before the game is out, but I am having a lot of fun doing storyboards for it. What do you guys think?

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. By baking the depth-map shadows to a texture, we can render them at higher resolution, and thus eliminate most of the common depth mapping artifacts. Using modern GPU features like frame buffer objects, this can all be done in real-time. Also, because we are saving the lightmaps as a compressed texture, older video cards should be able to load the detailed shadows even if they would be unable to calculate them efficiently.

Click here to watch in HD!

There is still a lot of work to do, but the direct lighting system is almost done. After we finish the ambient occlusion pass, we should be done with static environment shadows!

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!

This past week was really productive and I am really excited to report about it. Before you guys get too excited though, I have to admit that the latest SVN that I included is a little unstable, but that's to be expected in an alpha.

The main points that we will certainly be bragging about later this week are:
- Hotspots
- Initial scripting support*
- Fancy shadows*
- Group browser pane
- Misc bug fixes

*These are only in the Mac build right now.

What does scripting mean? We will show you later this week!

Jo-shadow is in charge of organizing the community maps and has done a great job in his thread in the Secret Preorder Forum.

Thanks as always for all the support! See you guys in IRC and the forums.

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't support payment via bank accounts and their fraud protection is way too sensitive. Google Checkout is much slower than PayPal and Amazon, which are almost instantaneous, and it tends to bounce a lot of legitimate payments leading to a lot of confusion. To make matters worse, Google recently raised their rates.

With that said, introducing:

Head over to the preorder page and try it out!

To recap, preordering Overgrowth gets you:

- The warm fuzzy feeling of directly supporting indie game development
- Access to weekly alphas of Overgrowth, every week, until it's done through the Secret Preorder Forum
- The Mac, Windows, Linux, and now the Steam version of Overgrowth!

Thanks to Hazel in IRC for testing!

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 of like legos. Using our map editor, we can rapidly connect these together in unique ways and make a lot of cool scenes like the one above.

Here's the scene again at a different angle, but with everything shrunk in place, so you can see that it is actually made up of a hundred smaller objects (click here for a larger version).

This technique has advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage is that it dramatically cuts down on development time. We can put together scenes really fast using custom tools that we are building ourselves, in engine. Here's a YouTube video of an early version of our editor, which gets better every week. Additionally, it lets the community build their own intricate maps relatively easily, sort of like in Little Big Planet. For instance, Hale's epic map, Foothold:

The disadvantage is that it is slightly less efficient than if everything was painstakingly created from scratch and hand tuned. Luckily for us, this does not look like it's going to be a bottleneck. If it does, we'll add some more specialized tools or algorithms to help people optimize their levels.