On the road again
August 27th, 2010
I have recently decided to relocate, and I have been using the opportunity to visit some of my favorite places that inspired the terrain in Overgrowth! This is not actually one of those places, but rather a shot of Lake Shasta in northern California. Not saying I wouldn't love it, if I had taken the time to stop. This ...
Overgrowth Alpha 93
August 24th, 2010
Here is what is new in Overgrowth in the 93rd weekly alpha. If you are confused what a weekly alpha is, or even what Overgrowth is, please read our fancy FAQ. Basically, we are developing a massive video game from the ground up -- we are able to do this completely independently by accepting preorders for the game before it's ...
Face morph test
August 22nd, 2010
To test out facial expressions, I created shapes for winking, squinting, sniffing, and 'oh' phonemes. Then to see how they looked in-engine, I used Angelscript to weight them with asynchronous sine waves. This means that each shape cycles smoothly between its 'on' and 'off' state, and since they cycle at different rates, we can see them in every possible combination ...
OpenGL update
August 21st, 2010
Since my controversial post comparing OpenGL and DirectX, there have been two significant new developments: the release of OpenGL 4.1 and the release of Steam for Mac. OpenGL 4.0 Tessellation with TessMark A few months ago, the Khronos Group announced the release of OpenGL 4.0, bringing it to "feature parity" with DirectX 11, including the much-advertised tessellation ...
Avoiding artificial gameplay restrictions
August 20th, 2010
Lugaru levels were designed differently from most games. Most of the levels had the same set of rules and the same objective: kill everyone. The variety came from the layout of each level: how the enemies were placed, how they were equipped, and how the blocks restricted their sight lines. There are things I would like to add to this ...
Game length and value
August 17th, 2010
If you pay $30 for a game, how long does it have to be to get your money's worth? This is a complicated question, so I would like to look at each part independently. First I would like to discuss what 'length' means for games, then we can look at game 'value', and finally, we can think about how ...
Overgrowth Alpha 92
August 17th, 2010
Here is what is new in Overgrowth in the 92nd weekly alpha. If you are confused what a weekly alpha is, or even what Overgrowth is, please read our fancy FAQ. Basically, we are developing a massive video game from the ground up -- we are able to do this completely independently by accepting preorders for the game before it's ...