We finally have become the number one search result for Overgrowth! Thanks to turbochop in the secret preorder forum for letting us know!

This sounds kind of dumb, but you would be surprised about the difference between the number one result on Google and the number two. One of the biggest things you learn in web development is that you really have milliseconds in order to get someone's attention. You'd think intuitively that if someone reads or hears about Overgrowth somewhere, and decides to Google for us, they'd look through all the results and not be deterred that the first result is not Wolfire Games. Well, our search engine traffic for the keyword "Overgrowth" has just about doubled over the past few days!

We love Google and are very thankful for their benevolent dictatorship. Just for fun, here are ten services from Google that we use extensively.

1. Feedburner
2. Gmail
3. Google Analytics
4. Google App Engine
5. Google Alerts
6. Google Calendar
7. Google Checkout (see our blog post on it)
8. Google Chrome (built into Overgrowth)
9. Google Docs
10. Google Website Optimizer

I could write massive blog posts about each of these services because each of them are critical to us and totally awesome. Maybe I will some day. :)

Google is an amazing company that is pretty much key to our ability to bootstrap Wolfire Games. It is amazing because they are giving us enterprise level applications absolutely for free (well, ad supported in some cases). Most of their stuff puts even the expensive enterprise software that I used at other places to shame and we're not paying a dime.

The downside is that Wolfire is completely hitched to Google, so if they ever decide to turn evil, I guess we will have to migrate to another service? I guess I don't really see the downside! I love Google.

Last I checked, Mac OS X had around a 5% market share, and Linux had much less than that (among consumers). I can feel that many PHBs look at this small number and think "5%? Why should I support a whole new platform when I could just blow some more money on brand advertising?"

Obviously supporting Mac OS X and Linux means you tap into another platform and expand your potential market base. That much is clear. But surely adding an extra 5% is negligible, right? Wrong. Not all five percents are created equal. I'm not an economist, just a humble engineer, but let me take a stab at an explanation.

First, here's a breakdown of Lugaru sales by platform:

From a short sighted, graph reading viewpoint, supporting Mac OS X and Linux directly increased sales by around 122%. However, this seemingly unbelievable number is actually understated. Here's my attempt at an explanation in five points:

1. It's good to be a big fish in a small pond
As a pretty niche independent game, Lugaru was never covered by PC Gamer, IGN, and other behemoth media publications. However, it was just large enough to get covered in a variety of Mac journals. One website, Inside Mac Games fell in love with it and posted about it all the time.

If you support Macs, even a small indie video game can rapidly spread throughout the community whereas the huge Windows market might just ignore you.

2. More platforms means more opportunities
As an indie video game studio, we don't have many resources in the way of marketing. It's embarrassing how much we rely on serendipity, for example, getting posted on fun-motion right when the admin decides to take a break, or getting called up by Igromania randomly.

We have had more than our fair share of Mac serendipity though. A recent example: Lugaru was promoted in MacHeist's Giving Tree. This generated the equivalent of like three diggings worth of traffic. We were up to 30 requests / second at its peak and dwarfed any event in the history of our Google Analytics. If we didn't have a Mac OS X build, we simply wouldn't have had this opportunity.

3. Vocal minorities
Having a Linux build meant coverage on Slashdot. This of course generated huge interest in not just the Linux version of Lugaru, but the Windows and Mac versions too. Lugaru also made an appearance in a few Linux magazines. A lot of people heard about and supported Lugaru simply because we had a Linux build.

4. You can't choose your evangelists
If you're familiar with Guy Kawasaki's philosophy of evangelism, this shouldn't be any surprise. You'll notice that a small minority of your users will go crazy with your game and spread it all over the place. On the internet, all it takes is one thread on a popular forum, and you've literally got hundreds or thousands of new visitors. Basically, a small amount of your users can make a huge difference for you, and they might be Mac and Linux users.

A notable number of the Wolfire fans who hang out in IRC and spread Overgrowth like crazy are Mac users and we would be much smaller without them.

5. You can't choose your power users
In the same vein as the above, you never know who the movers and shakers are going to be in your community. In Wolfire's case, we are forever indebted to Wolfire forum regular, Silb. He actually reverse-engineered portions of Lugaru and made a kick-ass, extremely popular replacement campaign for the game, providing a huge amount of extra content to other people. His single, epic thread has been viewed over a hundred thousand times.

Oh yeah. He's a Mac user.

To conclude, if you're not supporting Linux and Mac OS X from a philosophical standpoint or for the fans, at least do it for the money. If you don't support non-Windows platforms, you're leaving a lot of cash on the table. I don't know about you, but I'm not in a position to just say f--- it to a large community of people who want to support us.

Hey guys, we just heard that Overgrowth was previewed in Igromania, the largest video game magazine in Europe! We are pretty much speechless. We're just a humble, indie video game company, and we have a full page in Igromania! One mantra we have at Wolfire is "What would Ron Carmel do?" He probably would shrug it off and keep working.

I promptly told everyone I know and printed out a copy and put it on the fridge.

Click for the full PDF:

Here is a record speed translation in English, provided by GreenFlame of the Wolfire Forums.

Thanks for spreading the word, guys! This preview was no doubt a result of Overt Ops. Keep up the good work! We know this kind of stuff happens because of you.

If you run a website, magazine, tv show, or blog, no matter the size, we would love to spread the Overgospel to you. Please contact us and we hope we can spread the word.

Anyone who follows this blog will have seen a few of our highly polished concepts for characters in Overgrowth. I went all-out on these, detailing the grass or fur and backgrounds. Making them in full color. While I really enjoyed creating them, they are only a small part of the concept work that gets done.

The main purpose of concept sketches is to articulate our art direction to other people who want to help us. For example, recently we have gotten a few artists who were happy to help us work on Overgrowth. We need to give them stuff to work on, however, it is not practical to make highly detailed art for every single model we make. So what do I do? I try to make a concept that shows all the important parts of a model as fast as I can.

Here are a couple of examples to illustrate this point:

This one was modeled by Vrav, who hangs out with us on IRC a lot. It is a buckler -- a small shield worn on the forearm.

and this one was modeled by Pawan. It's a backpack designed and worn by the dogs of Overgrowth.

If you'd like to help the cause and have serious talent, feel free to contact us! As an independent studio, we are grateful for all the help we can get.

Happy Holidays from Wolfire!

Thanks to the thousands of people who have joined the Overgrowth Facebook Page, we are giving away Lugaru for free for the next few days. David Rosen (the creator) has been selling this game here for $19.95 since it was launched, without exception. For the first time ever, for the holidays only, we are not just discounting it, we are giving it away for free.

All you have to do is go here, http://www.wolfire.com/free-lugaru and we will send you a free copy.

Here are a few words about Lugaru. It is a Mac, Windows, and Linux compatible game created by David Rosen (our fearless leader) while he was in high school over the course of a couple of summers. It is a pretty kick ass independent, physics-based fighting game and over the years, many fans have created mods for the game including entirely new campaigns that are much longer and arguably better. Also, the graphics have been updated in the form of a high resolution texture mod. You can find all of this on the Wolfire Forums after you're done playing the original.

Here is a video composite of Lugaru, created by Zantalos from the Wolfire Forums to help get you in the mood:

Grab it here: http://www.wolfire.com/free-lugaru! Keep in mind that this is a very limited time offer, as much as I'd like to spread David's game forever.

As always, thanks for the support! We hope you enjoy your free copy of Lugaru, and feel free to press the ShareThis button below to spread the word!