If you follow the blog you probably already know we work on Overgrowth almost all the time. You may be wondering if we have any time off at all. Actually we do. Unlike a regular game company we don't really keep normal hours. It is kind of understood that we are going to work on the game as much as we can without completely burning out. I usually take days off when I need them, which means that some weeks I work all seven days on Overgrowth, while other weeks I may take a few days off to recharge.

Let me give you some background information first. Recently I have been noticing all the cool games that are made by a person working alone; David made a bunch, and there are all sorts of other people out there who have made really awesome games too. I have been trying to make games for a long time now, but I have never finished a game I could call my own. I was feeling kind of down about it since I don't have any excuses.

This got me thinking about what kind of games I could make on my own, since I am not really good at programming. One thing that came to mind was making a point and click adventure. There was a game I really loved on my NES called Shadowgate. I got pretty excited about this idea and started to draw:

I had all sorts of crazy ideas about cool puzzles and neat settings. I had some good ideas for what I was going to draw next so I jumped right into it:

After I drew this one, I started to think "how am I going to animate that bird?", "maybe I should put the clouds on their own layer so they can move around", "It won't look right without a way to make the ocean animate"

At this point I began to think of all the problems, and ways it would be cooler. I couldn't do animated characters or monsters without help. I could ask David, but then it wouldn't really be "my game" anymore

I finished this and I wasn't even very happy with it. I was starting to realize how great it is to be able to work with a team that is really good at what they do. I can work on making cool art, and they can work on making the game fun and having all the technology work. Overgrowth is going to be so awesome it would be crazy not to want to spend all my time making it as good as possible anyway.

But in a way I was still working on stuff for Wolfire. Who knows what game we'll make after Overgrowth is done. We are always thinking of new cool games to make, and I could add this one to the list. I even tried out some new painting techniques to make these and I was pretty happy how they worked. So when I woke up today I made an Overgrowth concept using my new techniques:

Now that is a game I want to make!

This post is by Mikko Tarmia who is working on the music for Overgrowth. You can listen to some of the Overgrowth music on the Overgrowth ModDB Page.

I want to share some of my thoughts about music in games. Games are now a huge consumer of people's time -- some of us spend more time playing games than doing anything else (even sleeping). Technology is still an obstacle for getting the most out of games, but I think audiowise we already have all the technology that is needed for creating "high-end" soundtracks. It's not a matter of computing power anymore, it's the budget - both developers' and consumers' wallet - which decides how good the music will sound through gamers' speaker systems. In my opinion we have been on par with movie industry for years. Growing budgets in the game business have opened a door for using live orchestras (if one can afford it) and even some of the top movie composers have shown interest in interactive markets (Elfman, Greggson-Williams, Badalamenti to name a few).

To create a working and seamless interactive soundtrack one has to adapt an ability to see things in a non-linear way. Interactivity in music is a collaboration of audio creation and programming. There are multiple ways to control music to change with a player's actions during the game and some of them require more inventiveness from composers, but I believe the real innovations lies in the hands of audio programmers. In linear entertainment (movies and tv-shows) there has never been any option for it: all the innovations have been purely done with the use of music, and tricks are getting short. I'm not a good predictor of the future, but I can sense that the experiments in gaming will drastically change during the next decade. Hopefully this will also create a need for new kind of audio tools to create even more elastic game music as I believe there are still lots of things to improve in audio interaction.

I think the most successful in-game music is the kind you don't notice consciously. The function of in-game music is quite similar to underscore music used in movies - it's background music, a supporting moodsetter which shouldn't override any other element shown/heard in the picture (exceptions are there for applying various effects). Its purpose is to make the immersion whole, and I think neutrality in music (which is mostly done by careful use of melodies and instruments/sounds) is a key element for making this immersion durable. I'm sure you have all experienced almost unbearable frustration with games, trying to jump over an impossible gap or trying to kill an undefeatable boss for half a day, and the same background music with annoying melody is still playing there, tripling the frustration. Or you could try playing Radar Rat Race for few hours in a row with volume turned on (remember to keep your Valiums near!). :)

For Overgrowth, we are doing our best to meet the requirements set by the changes in plans for the game content. As the original Lugaru 2 concept is now being updated and will show its new fur in the form of Overgrowth, so also will the music made for L2 be improved. I'm also excited about the collaboration with Anton Riehl, who played the ethnic flute for the Overgrowth Main Theme. We will be hearing some more of his playing later.

It would be interesting to know about your experiences with game music. Name a few game soundtracks, both good and bad. Tell me why it ruined or saved the game and what was the reason for it. This was my input today, now I'm going to turn on my C64 and play some serious rat racing for a while. ;)

In the machine learning community, problems are often described by the topography of their solution space (the set of all possible solutions and their corresponding success). For example, if the problem is to determine the correct motor output to make a camera look towards a light, the solution space might look like this:

When the camera can't see the light then the error is 100%, but as it rotates to center on the light, the error starts to drop down to nothing. A common technique to solve these problems is local optimization: start with your best guess, and then keep refining it until the error is as low as possible. On the solution space, you can picture this as a stream of water flowing down the slope.

My intuition is that players approach puzzles in games in much the same way. They start with their best guess, and then observe the game's response, and if there is a clear path to follow, then they meet with success. If there isn't, they try again with their next best guess. One of our key jobs as game designers is to make sure that this solution space is curved towards the 'correct' solution, and not flat, or curved the wrong way. For example, let's look at the solution space for an old-school adventure game that gives no useful feedback for wrong answers:

Here the player has tried eight different solutions, and none of them worked or provided useful feedback on how to proceed. In this case, the player has run out of ideas, and is now stuck. If this is a casual player, he will likely just stop playing. If it is a more hardcore player, he is familiar with sites like Gamefaqs and will use a walkthrough for the rest of the game. Either way, the player will be unable to experience the rest of the game as intended.

The most successful adventure games succeeded largely because they figured out ways to ease the pain of failure, motivating the player to retry many more times than otherwise. For example, in the Monkey Island games, Guybrush Threepwood had witty replies for anything you could try, even if it made no sense. It's important to remember that the player's path will inevitably end in failure a couple times, and you have to think of that as part of the game experience. If player's have fun failing in your game, then you're doing something right!

Most modern games have a much more complex solution space than an old-school adventure game, something more like this:

This demonstrates a second way to get stuck: locally optimal points. These are paths that seem promising, but really lead nowhere. For example, an interesting building you can enter that has nothing in it, or a puzzle that your character is not yet equipped to solve. Giving positive feedback for the wrong path is even worse than giving no feedback at all, because the player is going to be much more hesitant to try again. The only way to find these flat areas and locally optimal points is through play-testing. Odds are that you will find that players are confused by things that you couldn't possibly have anticipated, and you have to tweak them to smooth out the solution space. This way, everyone will be able to find the solution eventually, no matter what idea they start with or how fast they go.

This is different from holding the player's hand, or telling her what to do, because we are still letting her start wherever she wants. We are also not just making the game easy: problems can still be very complicated and difficult; we are just making sure the players can usually find their way through them.

One of the best recent examples of crafting the solution space is Portal. The puzzles quickly get very complicated, but through extensive play-testing the developers found effective ways to guide the player's attention towards the most important things by making them more interesting, and away from irrelevant things by making them less interesting. For example, in one level there is a box which is very important to solving the puzzles, and they found that players kept ignoring it, because it seems tedious to carry a giant box around with you. To solve that, they decided to paint a heart on it and have the AI voiceover talk about it constantly, calling a weighted companion cube. Suddenly, all of the players were happy to carry it around with them, and it become a viral internet phenomenon. Similarly, a lot of the levels started out with introduced too many elements at the same time, causing a really lumpy solution space, so they added small intermediate levels to introduce each element one at a time, each with a much smoother solution space.

I am a visual thinker, so it is helpful for me to visualize game design in this way. I hope it is helpful for you as well! Please let me know in the comments if you can think of anything that could help expand this metaphor, or counter-examples to show that it's inaccurate.

Today marks our 10th weekly alpha. Has it been 10 weeks already?

New this week:
- More bug fixes
- True transparency for the UI
- Better behaved tooltips
- New console. (now with copy/paste, etc.)
- A bunch of new art from Aubrey
- The rabbot runner, as featured in our procedural animation video (press 8 and 9 to toggle)
- Box select added (hold down right and left click simultaneously and drag)
- Groups are now hierarchical
- Save selected objects (ctrl-shift-s) and load them as a set

Also, here is a summary of Wolfire news this past week:

Vimeowned
We were kicked off of Vimeo. This also happened to 2dboy. I think it's time for a massive indie exodus. Subscribe to us on YouTube and GameTrailers!

ModDB hotness
We have been voted one of the top 100 upcoming indie games on ModDB! Vote for us here. We also did our first podcast interview with ModDB.

More distributors!
We signed a deal with Direct2Drive and a few other digital distributors. We have updated our standings here: Indie Friendly Online Distributors.

Wolfire has a problem. I think a lot of other video game communities have this problem too. I'd like to tackle it head on: we don't really have any girls in our online community. They do exist, but let's just say that the ratio is approaching zero.

For a long time, I have written this off as simply "girls don't like Lugaru". However, since we started an Overgrowth Facebook Page, we can actually see some really rough demographics:

This 7% figure is a little startling; we expected more like 0%! This called for more research. Whenever someone purchases Lugaru, we ask for their name to generate a unique serial number. I ran this database through an international name analyzer I found. The results are pretty crazy:

Granted, some of these female names are probably moms who purchased the game for their son and put their own name in the serial number field. Our data is pretty dubious. However, combined with the Facebook data, this is pretty compelling evidence that some girls do play Lugaru.

Unfortunately, on the forums, it is extraordinary to see a girl. Our IRC channel is still in its infancy, but I have never seen a girl on the channel.

So why don't girls who play Lugaru get involved with the community?

I'm just a humble engineer, not a sociologist, but I have a few theories.

Anti-girl feedback loop
It's inaccurate to say there are no girls on the forum. A more accurate statement is that there are no girls who stay for longer than a few days. For instance, there is a legendary thread in the secret preorder forum where a girl posted about how excited she was to join the community, alpha test, etc. The title was ":squeals with joy: Im sooo excited!! ^,...,^" Anyways, 54 posts later, filled with a lot of weird stuff, she is missing in action.

Sadly, this happens a lot.

Poor seeding
So the huge quantity of guys on the forum seem to be scaring away girls. But how did it get this way in the first place? Well, Lugaru started its life on the 99% male idevgames.com developer forum, so the community was seeded with guys. All the beta testers were guys, and therefore the early active forum members were all guys. It's a self fulfilling prophecy.

Forum members are hardcore
You have to be pretty serious to participate on online forums. It's stereotypical, but maybe it's more of a guy thing to dive into a game so far that you begin to contribute to its community or work on its wiki. Girls are more casual?

I am most interesting from hearing from girls themselves in the comments and possible solutions to break out of the old boys club. What can we do to help?