Hey guys, continuing with our experiment in weekly builds, we have launched the latest weekly alpha to SPF: Alpha 4.

New in this week's build are sweet static shadows. We've also made a lot of progress on the net code. Finally, we are working on the new console and a chat window.

The chat window at the bottom looks a bit funky right now, but it will look more like this soon:

Thanks to braden for the awesome rabbit ascii art! We should have some sweet multiplayer action to test out soon. Namely rabbit chat.

As always, see you guys on IRC and the forums.

So what are we actually doing with your preorders? Investing them back into Wolfire, of course! As an indie developer, 100% of a preorder goes directly to Wolfire. There's no publisher, investors, board of directors, or anything; it's just us.

So far, every last cent of it has been put towards better equipment and licenses to help us make a better game. Since it's your money, we thought you'd like to know what we are doing with it!

First, we bought David (co-founder and lead programmer) a kick ass quad-core computer. David's old computer was actually destroyed by UPS when he was shipping it back to the Bay Area from Swarthmore College. I lent him my PC (I use my Macbook Pro 95% of the time), but it was slow. Compiling took forever and David was wasting a lot of time looking at loading bars. Our solution:

This is a pretty tricked out Dell XPS quad-core computer. Now David can compile super fast and all cores are being used heavily. Our next purchase: our other graphics programmer, Phillip, can now stop developing on his old school desktop replacement laptop. He now has a similar computer to David's, plus a new 22" monitor:

However, Aubrey's computer is the pice de rsistance. We finally got enough preorders to give Aubrey what he really deserves. Aubrey is our artist and does everything: 2d, 3d, video editing, you name it. This, of course, takes a huge amount of CPU power and Aubrey's old computer just wasn't cutting it. It was painful to see Aubrey's extraordinary talent be limited by his computer. In fact, we hit a hard limit recently with World Machine. Aubrey's computer just didn't have enough RAM to output the highest quality textures. Our solution?

This computer has a quad-core processor and 8 gigs of RAM. Yes, 8 gigs! It's loaded with a 64 bit version of Windows and we've got 64 bit versions of all of the software Aubrey needs. Now he is good to go and will make sweet art for you guys faster than ever! We also got him a new 24" monitor that is supposedly color calibrated and extra fancy.

Thanks again to all of our fans! As always, see you guys in IRC and the forums, and stay tuned for more updates. Don't forget to subscribe to the blog.

Hey guys, the results are in from the Lugaru video contest! We will be divvying up our prizes of free Overgrowth and Wolfire t-shirts to the winners soon!

Grand Prize Winner: Zantalos for his masterpiece Lugaru Contest Video. From wall kicks to flip tricks, Zantalos fearlessly showcased every possible Lugaru move often confronting multiple enemies simultaneously (and he picked a pretty sweet soundtrack too). Watch it below!

First Runner Up: Lotus Wolf for the lovely composition Kung-Fu Fighting (Lugaru Music Video). Impressive Kung Fu fighting with psychedelic custom skins left only one option for the soundtrack to this awesome video.

Second Runner Up: Tailsfanatic for Lugaru Trailer. This video does an excellent job of weaving together Lugaru's fighting with it's story line. Oh yeah, and just wait until Tailsfanatic breaks it down at the end.

Special awards go to:
Tannim for his multiple creative entries. Tannim made complex mazes out of elements like fire and stone, custom skins and even convinced the Lugaru trees to grow upside down.

Dlrgold for his video: "3 Wolves INSANE" This received a huge amount of Likes, but unfortunately some of them were manufactured by an anonymous party, according to WeGame. We talked to Dlrgold and believe he is innocent. Nonetheless, he will be getting a prize too!

Thanks to everyone who entered! WeGame's Lugaru section now has a ton of awesome videos and screenshots in it and we hope to see many more.

Usually what happens in SPF stays in SPF, but this was just too cool not to publicize. Silverfish used the alpha 2 map editor tools to create the Overgrowth logo in-engine. We couldn't be prouder of this achievement. Silverfish has also been keeping our ModDB page up to date and thanks to him we are one of the most popular games on ModDB! Thank you Silverfish for everything you do. (For those of you with SPF access, you can contribute to the thread here: http://forums.wolfire.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=4223)

joshkirklin, who hangs out with us all the time in the Wolfire IRC changed the terrain to look like a Wolfire logo:

Awesome job guys! User created content is one of our top priorities in Overgrowth and we're excited to see people playing around with it even in its earliest stages.

Aubrey passed me along a set of weapons to show you guys from Overgrowth.

Here are the rapier and main gauche. The rapier is designed for piercing while the main gauche is used for parrying and disarming.

As you can tell from the engravings, these are used by the cats. They're not really the kind of weapons you'd expect to see every day. There are a number of blacksmiths who make weapons in the Overgrowth world and each one has its own unique style.