More Magical Meebo Memories
September 27th, 2009
Our live chat widget continues to be a useful tool for meeting professionals in the industry, offering customer service and introducing new visitors to our site. However, enough time has passed that I've gathered another set of silly moments. meeboguest269449 : Do you want to know about Jesus? wolfirejohn: I usually don't discuss religion with people on meebo :) wolfirejohn ...
How saving mechanics affect fun
September 26th, 2009
Game saving feels like a fairly benign topic at first. However, if you stop to reflect on the issue, the mechanics of progress saving have a dramatic impact on your gaming experience. In the old days, a single-player game was a challenge to see how far you could get without dying. Games like Asteroids, Tetris, Mario and Sonic would throw ...
Overgrowth Soundtrack: Ambient 1
September 24th, 2009
More Overgrowth music has arrived on our YouTube channel. The songs are composed by the talented Mikko Tarmia and often feature Anton Riehl on the flute. Today it is my pleasure to release to you, Ambient 1. People laugh when I say this, but be sure to listen to it in HD because I think the sound quality is slightly ...
Ambient occlusion for characters
September 23rd, 2009
We've already discussed ambient occlusion for terrain and for objects, but we haven't yet discussed how it applies to characters. Ambient occlusion (AO for short) is a measure of how much light would reach each point on the model if it were surrounded by a spherical light source. Here's a picture of the unlit rabbit model with ...
Character rim lighting
September 22nd, 2009
When I loaded Aubrey's new rabbit model, it was clear that we needed a new rendering method in order to do it justice. Our basic object shader works best for hard surfaces like wood, leather and stone, not fuzzy ones like fur and cloth. This problem was most obvious when the model was lit from behind: It suffers from ...
GDC Austin: Wolfire's PR Tips
September 21st, 2009
As you might know, we were recently invited to give a talk at GDC Austin about our PR strategy, which is essentially to be as open and transparent as possible. As promised here are the slides from the lecture! Below is a quick summary of the hour-long talk. Part I: The Philosophy PR is defined as the art of controlling ...
Normal map vs. mesh
September 18th, 2009
Whenever we post a new model for Overgrowth, a comment we often get is "there's no way that can go in the game -- there are way too many polygons!" That is true. However, we can simulate it pretty well using normal mapping. I'll save the technical details of what a normal map is exactly for another blog post ...