Imbalanced fights
June 6th, 2009
Game developers often talk about balance. Fighting should be balanced. Characters should be balanced. Weapons should be balanced. Balance is definitely important. But I think there's a place for imbalance too. Indeed, I often find imbalanced, David versus Goliath fights to be the most captivating and memorable. Here are four reasons why imbalance is important. 1. Imbalance makes for ...
2D coloring tutorial
June 4th, 2009
A couple weeks ago I did a drawing tutorial. A few people mentioned that they would like to see how I do coloring also. It is actually very simple. Below is an animated gif demonstrating each step (click it to download). Here is an explanation for each step: 1. This is how the image starts -- as a grayscale drawing. I ...
OffTheGrid revisited
June 2nd, 2009
What is OffTheGrid terrain? OffTheGrid is a terrain technology we developed to bring detailed terrain data to in-game resolution without losing much detail. Below you can see a comparison between heightmap terrain (left), and OTG terrain (right). The OTG terrain is actually using fewer polygons. How does it work? We start with a high-polygon terrain, and iteratively discard the least ...
Overgrowth alpha 29
June 2nd, 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 ...
Overgrowth animation editor UI
May 30th, 2009
The animation editor in Overgrowth is one of the last pieces of the puzzle that will let us transform the Phoenix Engine from cool tech into a sweet ninja rabbit fighting game. This (combined with the upcoming physics editor) will let us rig character models to a physics based skeleton and start creating all of the running animations, combat moves ...
Whale Man Origins
May 28th, 2009
From this morning: [05:07] meeboguest921835: whats this whaleman thing everone is talking about? A lot of you who have been hanging around the Wolfire site already know how the Whale Man was created. However, those of you newer to the community probably know only a small piece of the story. Today I thought it might be fun to tell ...
Target Renders for Overgrowth
May 28th, 2009
You are probably familiar with this image from Alpha 27. It is missing a lot of things we would like to have in the final game. Sometimes it is useful to make what is called a "target render". A target render shows what a screen shot from the final game would look like once it's done. This is a ...