Physically based rendering
October 2nd, 2015
This is the first tech post by our new technical artist Lukas Orsvärn! To familiarize himself with the engine he has been experimenting with physically-based rendering shaders. We know this is not the highest priority task for completing Overgrowth, but with our expanded team, we are still making a lot of progress on gameplay programming and level design, and want ...
GDC 2014 Procedural Animation Video
May 4th, 2014
This year I gave a talk about procedural animation at GDC, and the recording is now free to watch here! I put a lot of effort into this presentation because in a sense it represents much of my life's work so far: approaching technical production problems from first principles to try to maximize what a small team can achieve ...
Receiver VR mod!
November 12th, 2013
Ever since we released Receiver, players have been asking us about supporting the Oculus Rift headset and the Razer Hydra controller. The gun mechanics and exploration gameplay seemed like a natural fit for VR! We were planning to try it out at some point, but didn’t feel like we could take the time away from Overgrowth to work on ...
Exploring game design through technology
March 27th, 2013
This is a blog post adaption of my GDC 2013 Indie Soapbox talk, I hope you like it! I will link to the GDC vault video of it if it becomes publicly available. Working with technology can be intimidating as an indie developer. Isn’t tech the domain of AAA? How can we compete with their large teams of experienced ...
High-quality text rendering
March 18th, 2013
I was just working on some text rendering for the arena intro and outro (which should be in tomorrow’s alpha video), and thought I would share how we handle that problem in Overgrowth. Almost every game uses text of some kind, but since most indie game programmers are not typography experts, there are a number of pitfalls that we ...
The Oculus Rift, Receiver and Steam Greenlight
August 30th, 2012
In the past, a lot of 3D and VR experiences for games have been really disappointing. I owned a Virtual Boy, was an early adopter of the ELSA 3D shutter glasses, and recently bought a 3DS. All these devices were kind of neat in their limited way, but ultimately fell short of delivering the experience I was hoping for. However ...
Game File Systems: File Paths
May 25th, 2012
Recently I've put a lot of time into the Overgrowth file system, so I would like to share the best practices I've found for efficient file management on Mac, Windows and Linux. This is a pretty broad topic, so I'll break it into parts. In this first part, we can look at file paths. That might sound ...