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 ...
Designing the solution space
January 21st, 2009
In the machine learning community, problems are often described by the topography of their solution space (the set of all possible solutions and their corresponding success). For example, if the problem is to determine the correct motor output to make a camera look towards a light, the solution space might look like this: When the camera can't see the ...
Dev Chat: Jack Monahan on Game Mastery
January 18th, 2009
I decided that it would be a cool experiment for the blog to post some of the informal discussions I have with other game developers. Perhaps this would give people some more insight behind my motivations as part of the Overgrowth team, but also give people a raw look at what being in the game industry is like. Jack Monahan ...
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 ...
Step-wise Creation of Modular Buildings
January 13th, 2009
I have worked on a few commercial games and I am pretty familiar with the methods used to make cities or towns. Usually you start off with a detailed picture of what you want. An image of some cool building. Then you plan out the fewest modular pieces you will need to make that building. After that, you plan out ...
Map Editor
January 12th, 2009
The map editor in action. I'm scaling a bunch of blocks on my lovely house. Here at Wolfire, we're a small team but we want Overgrowth to have lots and lots of content. So, it's really important for us to have powerful tools to speed up asset creation. One of the main things I've been working ...