How I Make Overgrowth Assets: Part II, The Concept
February 25th, 2009
Continuing on my series, this week I'll talk about making concepts. I mentioned the idea of working backwards through a design starting with what you want to accomplish. This is harder for some things than others. For example, with weapons or characters that are going to be a key part of the gameplay, it is important to keep in ...
Why game designers should learn to draw
February 25th, 2009
If you're a professional game designer, it's essential to learn about the basics of every aspect of game development! Every discipline is important, but today I will focus on why it's helpful to understand visual artwork. Concept Art Having a working knowledge of 2D concept art can give you much higher-bandwidth communication with artists. For example, Aubrey ...
New Overgrowth alpha released
February 23rd, 2009
Here is what is new in Overgrowth this week... Please read our fancy FAQ. As usual, we have fixed a number of bugs, tweaked some stuff, and implemented some new features. Aubrey has created even more art. We have included a number of new models and textures this week. There is not a whole lot to show this week as ...
New rock and statue assets
February 22nd, 2009
Here are some new assets I have been working on. Rocks are surprisingly hard to get right. Small features like cracks or areas where the rock has sheared off have a lot of small details that are kind of tricky. I am planning on doing a few more rock sets, so I still have a chance to improve :) Modeled after ...
Forum Management
February 20th, 2009
Wolfire has a long history of taking a relaxed approach to forum management. We do in fact have rules but because we don't refer to them or enforce them much, most people don't know they exist. The precedent, with few exceptions, has been that pretty much anything goes. However, since our official start on Overgrowth last September, we ...
Creating Our Own Skydomes
February 19th, 2009
For Overgrowth, we are photo-sourcing all our skydomes. So far, we've been searching sites like cgtextures.com to find these images. This means we are limited to the same small set of decent skydomes that countless other game developers are looking at. We don't want to be limited, and we've noticed that the skies here in Berkeley ...
How I Make Overgrowth Assets: Part I, The Idea
February 18th, 2009
This is the first part of a series of blog posts explaining how I go about putting a 3D art asset into Overgrowth. Everybody has ideas about what they want to make but how do you know your ideas are good ones? If you don't have any good ideas, how do you get some? In a lot of ways ...