Hey guys, you can get the fifth weekly alpha of Overgrowth in the usual place! If you haven’t preordered yet, I hear that this week is the best week to preorder Overgrowth.

New this week are a bunch of new models, textures and art from Aubrey. We will probably be showing them off soon in dedicated blog posts with concept art explaining them, but they are pretty hot. We’ve also gotten multiplayer working so you can create and join servers — although all you can do is chat and fly around the level at the moment. It’s a great start! We will probably be coordinating the testing of some multiplayer chat in IRC sometime this week.

Finally, the map editor is better than ever, and a bunch of new things are included. I don’t remember all the details but they are sweet. We are really excited about this build, because we think there are enough assets to start making some cool stuff, and Phillip’s map editor is better than ever. Looking forward to your feedback.

Here are a couple of screenshots. Now by popular demand, they have been annotated.

As always, see you guys in IRC and the forums!

P.S. get Lugaru for free and tell all of your friends!

This third design tour is about Gish by Cryptic Sea.
 

Design Tour - Gish from David Rosen.

I asked Edmund McMillen (co-creator of Gish) what he thought, and he said, “I thought it was a well thought out critique of the things that made Gish an important indie game, and also pointed out its flaws in realistic way. Everything you said is totally what we have been talking about for the past few years, so I think you were spot on.”

Be sure to subscribe to the blog so you don’t miss our next video! If you missed the first two, you can check them out here: Knytt Stories and World of Goo.

Hey guys, I recently attended a conference about the video game industry: the Gaming SDForum.  During the conference I had the chance to hear the inside scoop from a lot of industry professionals.  I left with 6 major takeaways that I think can help every game developer.

1.    Make your game fun!
This was opening speaker, Bernie Stolar’s, main point. This sounds like an obvious one.  After all, a game is intended to be a mechanism for delivering entertainment.  However, as barriers to entry into the gaming industry continue to drop, Mr. Stolar has observed the market becoming over-saturated with sub-par content (actually he used the word “crap” ).   The key to survival, is developing a product that’s more fun than what the rest of the crowd is making.

I had the good fortune to be able to tell Mr. Stolar about Wolfire’s policy of openness with its fans.  He agreed with me that accepting and responding to fan feedback during the development process is a good way to help you stay on the path to crafting a fun game.

2.   Make your game social!
So now you’ve thought hard about how to create fun and you’ve come up with a great structure for your game. Wouldn’t it be even more fun to incorporate chatting with friends, battling strangers, bragging about achievements, and showing off custom user-made items?  Current market trends say YES!  Do everything you can to foster a sense of community within your game.

FUN GAME + ONLINE COMMUNITY = VERY FUN GAME

3.  Physical distribution is losing to online distribution, plan accordingly!
Now that almost everyone with a computer also has a broadband internet connection, online distribution is on the rise.

Consumers like it: Ever gone to the local GameStop and found out the store was closed or that the new game you wanted was out of stock?  Well that never happens online.  With online distribution consumers never have to leave the comfort of home to access their entertainment.

Game Developers like it: Online distribution does not involve manufacturing costs, transportation costs or renting shelf space from Best Buy so profit margins from online sales are much better.  The best case scenario for game developers is distributing through their own site which gives them 100% of the profits.

Make friends with online distributors (thank you Steam) and try to streamline the purchasing process on your site. Realistically, only the big boys can still make good profits off traditional retail at this point with what Dan Winters of Activision called the “home run” model (very few highly developed and highly promoted products).

4.    Consider All Your Monetization Options!
The hard truth is that if you want to be a full time games developer, your games have to earn you enough money to pay the bills.  After listening to a discussion among representatives of Double Fusion, Echovox, Playspan, Offerpal and Twofish it is clear to me that we are in a new era of game monetization methods (but not all of them necessarily work for us indie game devs).

In-Game Advertising: Unless you have millions of users, you will not be able to convince many people to buy your in-game advertising space.  Also, if your ads don’t fit well with your game, your gamers’ experience may be negatively impacted.  Be careful with this one.

Subscriptions:  Only mainstream MMO’s can really pull off a subscription model (like WoW).

Micropayments: Look at what iTunes has done with music.  Instead of having to commit to buying full albums, we can now snipe our favorite songs for just 99 cents a piece.  Some games are now starting to successfully incorporate micropayments for items, levels, episodes and upgrades.

The Freemium Model: The freemium approach is a secret weapon that can complement all of the monetization methods above.  The freemium model is comprised of both free and premium (paying) users.  The freemium approach encourages a lot of people to try the game for free (pumping up your user base, thus “adding fun” and increasing the value of your advertising space).  Then if premium users are walking around sporting upgrades and special paid-for content, free users may transform into subscribers or make micropayments for better stuff.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with the old model of selling a game for a fixed price but it’s important to know that new monetization options are out there.  The trick is figuring out what kind of game you’re trying to make and what payment system is likely to work best for you.

5.    Know The Endgame (according to Lars)
Lars Buttler, CEO of Trion gave the closing speech at the SDForum.  His prophecy described a world where gaming platforms are no longer consumer-owned hardware.  The gaming platform of the future will be comprised of a server and your internet connection to that server.  The device sitting in your house will be just the physical UI you need to interact with the game.

Buttler said WoW is the first step.  You take a solid genre, in the case of WoW an RPG, and then make it an MMO.  However, WoW is still a static framework with dynamic players bouncing around inside of it.  Lars says the endgame (pun intended) is “server based games” where the whole world is perfectly dynamic and determined by every action of every user.  Lars believes there are still short-term holes in the market where other tried and true genres (FPS, Sports, RTS, etc.) can be made into MMO’s.

I think this prophecy is credible especially with respect to the mainstream gaming industry.  How will this affect tiny indie developers like us?  Only time will tell for sure. Hopefully, as long as indie game devs remain agile and courageous enough to innovate beyond the status quo set by the mainstream industry , we will have a chance to carve out niches where we can survive.

6.  Where There’s A Will, There’s A Way
I had a chance to speak with Professor Zyda after his speech about the USC Gamepipe Laboratory curriculum.  Professor Zyda is the same guy who served as development director for the US goverment’s game America’s Army.  I asked him what his major advice was for small indie developers like Wolfire.  He said simply “Make games that you are passionate about”.  If you are prepared to pour your heart and soul into a project, working long hours everyday, this will be reflected by the quality of your game.  I guess there’s still hope for us hard-working indies (just look at World of Goo)!

Hey guys, I know a lot of you have avoided PayPal and have been contacting us on AIM, etc. for ways to buy Overgrowth without using it. It’s frustrating because for a long time, PayPal has been the only way to order Overgrowth and we know that a lot of you guys have been holding off because of anti-PayPal sentiments.

Well, now we support Google Checkout! Google’s reputation is pretty much the polar opposite of PayPal. They are one of the most beloved companies on Earth, so buy with complete confidence. Furthermore, Google gives us a much better deal than PayPal, so please use Google if you are ambivalent. Google Checkout accepts most credit cards and debit cards.

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 via SPF
- The Mac, Windows, Linux, and now the Steam version of Overgrowth!

P.S. Please grab Lugaru for free this Christmas and give it away to all your friends.

Aubrey was showing me some of the new assets he has been working on as of late. He has been making some awesome blocks, pillars, walls, roofs, and other architecture. He was showing me how they can be put together in a number of ways to make a house using Phillip’s awesome map editor (post on that coming soon, or dare I speculate, a video tutorial?). I thought that was awesome, so he took a screenshot, and I annotated it:

Click for bigger:

P.S. Please tell all of your friends about our free Lugaru deal! We’d like to spread Lugaru as widely as possible!

In order to bring awareness of our upcoming independent game, Overgrowth, we are giving away free copies of the game that started it all: Lugaru!

Lugaru is a cult classic, indie video game that was created by David Rosen when he was in high school. It is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Since its launch, it has been sold for $19.95 without exception — until now!

This Christmas, we are giving it away for free!

All you have to do to have your free copy emailed to you on Christmas Eve is join this Facebook event and join the Overgrowth Facebook Page. Don’t open it until Christmas Day! Make sure you’re a fan of the Overgrowth Facebook Page, and be sure to invite your friends to this event!

I made a video to help explain, this is my first attempt — I’m not as good as David, sorry!

After our Steam announcement, we got this question a lot: if I preorder now, can I get a Steam version after the release?

We were a bit concerned because we didn’t want to make people choose between us and Steam. When it comes down to it, supporting us directly, getting weekly alphas, and access to SPF are awesome perks of preordering, but a lot of people really love Steam and Valve Software.

Well, after talking to Valve some more, we can go through the horns of the dilemma — we are pleased to announce that your preorder will be honored by Steam!

So if you preorder, not only do you get the Mac, Windows, and Linux (pending Ryan Gordon’s availability) versions of Overgrowth from us, you get Overgrowth on Steam as well! In other words, Valve rocks, and now is the best time to preorder.

I just finished my second design tour video, this time about Knytt Stories. Since it doesn’t use hardware acceleration I had to use my video camera to record it at a consistent framerate, so I apologize for the slight lens distortion!

Be sure to watch this in HD!

Design Tour - Knytt Stories from David Rosen on Vimeo.

I asked Nifflas how Knytt is meant to be pronounced and he said “Knytt is hard to pronounce unless you speak Swedish. I don’t think you have our ‘y’ sound, and the K is strong and does not disappear, like it does in the word ‘knit’.” I ended up just going with the ‘knit’ pronunciation and not embarrassing myself by attempting the Swedish one In response to the whole video, he said “There’s nothing I want you to change! I’m very honoured that you did this, not to mention that you really seem to like it a lot! Thanks again!”

Be sure to subscribe to the blog so you don’t miss our upcoming design tours! If you missed the first design tour (World of Goo), check it out here!

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 pièce de résistance. 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.