Fighting as an end in itself
January 25th, 2009
Many games have combat, but it's usually treated as an obstacle in your path to something else. You have to kill enemies to get where you need to go, or to accumulate enough skill points. When writers make an attempt to justify it, they usually pick reasons that are unrelated to the fighting itself. Usually you're following orders ...
Game Theory Applied To Game Design
January 24th, 2009
Every modern real-time game has some form of rock, paper, scissor mechanics. As gamers we subconsciously know that such mechanics are there and that they work pretty well but no one ever explains why. With a little bit of game theory I can show you why but first I'll need to give you some brief game theory definitions. What ...
A few thoughts about interactive music
January 22nd, 2009
This post is by Mikko Tarmia who is working on the music for Overgrowth. You can listen to some of the Overgrowth music on the Overgrowth ModDB Page. I want to share some of my thoughts about music in games. Games are now a huge consumer of people's time -- some of us spend more time playing games than doing ...
Overgrowth Alpha 10
January 20th, 2009
Today marks our 10th weekly alpha. Has it been 10 weeks already? New this week: - More bug fixes - True transparency for the UI - Better behaved tooltips - New console. (now with copy/paste, etc.) - A bunch of new art from Aubrey - The rabbot runner, as featured in our procedural animation video (press 8 and 9 to toggle) - Box select added (hold ...
Getting girls involved in the community
January 19th, 2009
Wolfire has a problem. I think a lot of other video game communities have this problem too. I'd like to tackle it head on: we don't really have any girls in our online community. They do exist, but let's just say that the ratio is approaching zero. For a long time, I have written this off as ...
Audio interview with ModDB
January 17th, 2009
After witnessing the magic of modding in Lugaru (from the 3rd party campaigns Empire and Temple to Lotus Wolf's Weapon Shop), Wolfire has been steadfastedly committed to getting players as many mod tools as possible for Overgrowth. You guys are simply too creative and too talented for us to do otherwise. After we made our commitment to modding clear ...
Female characters in Overgrowth
January 16th, 2009
In Overgrowth, we are working on creating many unique characters of different species, body type, sex, and occupation. Communicating distinctions between male and female characters in Overgrowth is especially challenging because of some of our basic design choices. No Hypersexualization Many games show that characters are female by making them look like strippers. That is, giving them breast implants, tiny ...