Comic update, pages 40-42
June 9th, 2010
It's been a long time since the last Overgrowth comic update, so this may be totally new to people who have started reading the blog more recently. To all the fans of the comic; thanks for your patience-- as you can see, the story isn't over after all! I took the break to figure out some more of ...
Overgrowth Alpha 82
June 8th, 2010
Here is what is new in Overgrowth in the 82nd 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 ...
Using profiling for optimization
June 6th, 2010
Most of game code optimization comes down to reducing the CPU cycles that you need for each frame. One way to do this is to just optimize every routine as you write it, and make sure it's as fast as possible. However, there is a common saying that 90% of the CPU cycles are spent in 10% of the ...
Early Gish hacking
June 5th, 2010
Shortly after Alex Austin released Gish's source code, Gish got its first new public feature courtesy of FrozenCow. I find these "zero day open source contributions" really interesting. It reminds me of the immediate rush to crack DRM or to exploit a newly disclosed vulnerability, but this is unequivocally awesome, feels good, and is only motivated by positively helping ...
Activision Indie Games Competition
June 4th, 2010
You may have heard that Activision is hosting an independent games competition, like a much higher stakes version of the Independent Games Festival. We've been getting messages from fans about it, encouraging us to enter. However, after reading the finalized terms, this seems to be an entirely different kind of competition: an indie game / business plan jam to create ...
Aquaria goes open source!
June 3rd, 2010
Aquaria has gone open source under the GPL! Now all four of the games that pledged to open in the Humble Indie Bundle are officially open source -- the others are Lugaru, Gish, and Penumbra Overture. I am especially excited about the modding possibilities for Aquaria because of its excellent level editing tools. Here's a video showing an early version ...
Overgrowth Alpha 81
June 1st, 2010
Here is what is new in Overgrowth in the 81st 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 ...