Following up my earlier post on polearms, here are three new bladed weapons that I finished last week for Overgrowth. One visual theme that ties a lot of the dog equipment together is the repeated use of rectangular shapes. This even carries through to their architecture. With these weapons you can see it with the studs on the handle, and also reflected somewhat in the shape of the blades.

A small knife

This is a standard issue knife for dogs. It is not very useful as a throwing weapon but the weight and sturdiness of the knife make it more effective against armored targets.

This is a standard dog sidearm

This sword is the standard sidearm for spear-wielding dog soldiers. The weapon is especially bulky so that it can cleave through the hafts of spears more easily.

A double-handed broadsword

This double-handed broadsword is used mostly by command units in dog war packs. This weapon is the most effective at lopping heads off of spears, but has a significant reach disadvantage.

Thanks for the awesome feedback in the comments to the last post. We do our best to use all the feedback we get. I have one more weapon left to show in part three so stay tuned!

One of the hardest parts of game development is simply getting started. This is something people ask us about a lot on meebo. Just setting up your workstation with all the proper tools can be overwhelming. There are far too many choices, and all the most professional looking apps are extremely expensive. Luckily, for any given commercial resource, there is usually a free, open source version that is almost as good and sometimes even better. Of course, these free alternatives tend to have very little money for marketing, so they can be hard to find. To help orient aspiring developers to these free resources, we've started a list of some of our favorites. You can click on each item to bring up a brief description and a link to further information.

As you can see, there are quite a few blank spaces above, and this is still a work in progress. I'm sure there are many more great resources that should be added to the list. If you guys can think of any, please let us know in the comments!

Update: I've begun adding some of your suggestions to the list! I'll continue to do so, and perhaps bring this back as a more comprehensive list in the future. Thanks for the ideas!

Hey guys some of you may have noticed that we missed our blog post on Sunday night (I know Roboneko did because he stopped by on Meebo to tell me). However, I feel we had a fairly legitimate excuse because we were visiting Edmund McMillen (Gish) for his 29th birthday!

David, Jeff and I got to road trip to Santa Cruz with Derek Yu (Aquaria) and Tom Francis (from PC Gamer UK, visiting all the way from Britain). After enjoying the chance to pick their brains about the state of the gaming universe on all topics from Spore to Spelunky, we arrived at Edmunds party.

It almost felt unreal because we have never seen so many indie gaming giants in the same place at the same time. The above is a picture of Edmund graciously accepting our humble gift of homemade Gish balloons. From left to right that's Jeff, David, Edmund and me.

Below is a picture of Jonathon Blow (Braid), Kyle Gabler (World of Goo) and our very own David Rosen (Lugaru).

It was really amazing to get so many cool perspectives on the gaming industry from guys with so much experience. I was within earshot of these three for a good part of their conversation but when they hit the topic of graphics optimization and texture compression I knew it was time for me to get a beer.

Sadly we don't have any other pictures to show off but other highlights included getting to play Dance Dance Revolution with Derek and joining forces with Tom for some X-Men Arcade. We want to thank Edmund for inviting us to such an awesome event on his special day and we hope to see everyone again at GDC.

I decided this week I would take a break from my modeling series and show off a little of what I have been working on. I am finishing up a bunch of 3D weapon models for dog characters and I am pretty happy with how they have come out.

A spear

I think that a normal dog soldier is often armed with a spear and sidearm. The spear would make an effective throwing weapon against lightly armored opponents. Dogs often fight against other dogs, and the longer weapons help keep their enemies out of biting range.

A bladed polearm called a glaive

The glaive is another standard armament for dog soldiers. It cannot be thrown like the spear, but it makes up for it by being better at slashing attacks. The prong on the handle can be used as a handle for extra leverage or to parry incoming strikes.

A defensive weapon called a rabbit catcher

The rabbit catcher is a more unusual weapon. Although rabbits usually don't like to fight, it is not unheard of. This weapon is used to prevent rabbits from jumping over defensive fortifications or into the middle of troop formations. It's fearsome appearance is usually deterrent enough to prevent their enemies from even trying it.

I have more weapons to show off soon. What weapons would you like to see in Overgrowth?

I am not sure if you guys are familiar with the recent Skittles.com sensation. Basically, Skittles made national news and caused a huge stir online by changing their homepage from a traditional site to literally nothing but a palette of links to their Facebook, Twitter, etc.

The other day, I was getting coffee with my roommate and we were talking about Skittles' site. Looking past all of the hype it generated since they were the first massive brand to do this (and because people were vandalizing their wikipedia page, etc.), it is actually a really good idea. We maintain a number of "web presences": Facebook, ModDB, Steam, Twitter, and YouTube.

Each of these is valuable in a number of different ways. Our main page, Overgrowth, is pretty (thanks to Aubrey's awesome art) but it is a little limited. You can go there, look at some cool OG stuff, but that's it. On the other hand, our Facebook page, for instance, lets people spread the word about our game to their friends very easily and our ModDB page reaches thousands of gamers every time we update it.

The problem is that each one is probably equally important, and it is really ugly and not very user friendly to just have a wall of links sending people to them. Our YouTube description is out of control. Enter Skittlr.

Last weekend, I whipped up a web app on Google App Engine called Skittlr. It is very simple. It basically lets anyone create their very own fancy link widget in about 15 seconds. Here's an example of one.

I did the initial burst of code this weekend as kind of a proof of concept and now my roommate is going to take over and hopefully add a lot of cool features and themes.

Feel free to make your own Skittlr site here! Here are a couple of other cool ones: Sites that end with R and recursion.