Sky and lighting editing ~ part 1
July 11th, 2009
Lighting is a big part of what ties a scene together and gives it a distinct mood. Until recently, all our Overgrowth levels had, for the most part, the same lighting conditions. We had sandy deserts, rolling plains, and mountainous valleys, but they all had a similar tone: bright afternoon on a cool, cheery day. Now we can make things ...
Learning from mistakes
July 8th, 2009
Sometimes I will try out a new technique to see if I can improve on the art in Overgrowth, or make something just as good but in less time. One new technique I was thinking about was applying a very common technique used for making 3D buildings in games to models of natural terrain. Here are some textures for it ...
Creating the illusion of accomplishment
July 8th, 2009
Many game developers are starting to find that games with illusory challenges sell better than those with real challenge. They believe that what gamers want most is an experience that conveys the feeling of accomplishing a difficult task, but without the difficulty. Games like this have spawned a new genre of simplified 'parody' games that highlight the techniques used to ...
Overgrowth alpha 34
July 6th, 2009
Here is what is new in Overgrowth in this 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 done ...
Wolfire Answers Community Questions
July 3rd, 2009
Everyone already knows that if they want to ask us questions, they can find us in the Public Wolfire IRC channel or on our live chat widget. However, a couple of weeks ago we announced that we would host a Q and A using fan questions on the blog. Unfortunately people asked us so many good questions that we can ...
Linear algebra for game developers ~ part 2
July 3rd, 2009
Now that I've introduced vectors in Part 1, we need to look at some of the fundamental tools for working with them. The most important tools to understand are length, normalization, distance, the dot product, and the cross product. Once you wrap your mind around these concepts, and write functions to use them, you can solve most vector problems ...
Starting Grass
July 2nd, 2009
We have started some very early groundwork for grass in Overgrowth. The first step is making a grass object so we can test out what things look like with basic object shading -- next, we can figure out how to improve it! Here is my first test asset for grass. It looks black because you are actually looking at the back ...