DRM can be effective
March 6th, 2010
A couple of days ago I asked the question "Where does DRM come from?" From my perspective, DRM did not add up no matter how you looked at it. It is obviously bad for the consumer and conventional wisdom dictates that pirates can simply bypass it, getting a better experience. However, this is largely because one of my assumptions was ...
The dilemma of open development and polish
March 1st, 2010
We are big advocates of "open development": the philosophy of sharing all our information about Wolfire and Overgrowth with the public as often as we can. Each week we release whatever we happen to have in the SVN repository to people who have preordered the game. This has treated us well for our early development process, and I'm confident ...
Happy Birthday BSi
February 26th, 2010
This is a guest blog post written by Henry Kropf, the developer who ported Black Shades to the iPhone. Seeing as today is BSi's birthday it seemed fitting to share the story of how the game was born. The idea of a portable Black Shades first came about when David asked if Black Shades could be ported to the ...
New Lugaru page
February 20th, 2010
I hinted that we were trying to use some of the money we generated from the Organic Indie Preorder Pack to improve Wolfire. In the same vein of using some of the proceeds to improve our servers, I asked Iiro Jäppinen to tune up the Lugaru page. This is not really news to people who have been helping me test ...
Invisible computer graphics
February 19th, 2010
When we think about digital effects in movies and TV shows, we usually think of scenes that are obviously impossible. For example, we remember watching aliens blow up the White House, or Neo dodging bullets. However, modern computer graphics are so easy and inexpensive that they can replace entire outdoor sets even with a low-end TV budget. Why bother worrying ...
AppScale and the Commoditization of Cloud Infrastructure
February 11th, 2010
A summary of App Engine At Wolfire, we have been using Google App Engine for quite some time. To recap: App Engine is a platform where you can write a web application using a humble set of APIs via Python or Java, and you can deploy this code on Google's infrastructure. I have written about it in more depth ...
Server admin housekeeping
February 8th, 2010
Thanks to the Organic Indie Preorder Pack, we have a little bit of extra money lying around. In addition to taking our Subway sandwiches to the next level, we are going to be using this cash to directly improve Wolfire. Upgraded Subway sandwiches, from foodfacts.info. The first thing I'd like to announce is some simple server administration. While ...