Overgrowth takes place in the savage world of Lugaru where rabbits, wolves and other animals are forced to use paws, claws and medieval weaponry to engage each other in battle. Combining 3rd person adventure platforming with intricate melee combat, Overgrowth achieves a unique feel. Overgrowth also benefits from Wolfire's brand new Phoenix Engine which has been built from the ground up to allow the use of cutting edge graphics, animation, and physics. Add to these exciting features Overgrowth’s realistic artificial intelligence and streamlined control system and the result is an astoundingly immersive experience.
The scent of Valerian root used to be considered pleasant and harmless, an intoxicating delicacy. Now, it haunts the nightmares of the cat nobility. It's...
Desura is definitely the most promising Steam competitor. Here are our thoughts as a developer, plus a chance to get into the beta!
One common problem with detail textures is that they can change the overall color of the terrain. For example, let's say we have a patch of terrain that's...
The terrain in Overgrowth has looked nice in the distance, but many of you noticed that it looked a bit blurry close up. This is because it didn't have...
Here is a new concept painting Aubrey did while thinking about seasonal variation in Overgrowth. This rabbit is in full combat gear. The shoulder and...
When I was testing out character shadows on Hale's Riverhurst level, the framerate was not as smooth as I would like it to be. To remedy this, I'm taking...
In my recent post on automatic skinning, one of the steps involved creating a voxel representation of the character. I couldn't find any explanations...
David suggested a while ago that I try to make an informational video to help familiarize people with Overgrowth. I thought oh snap, maybe I should try...
After seeing our rigging tutorial, a number of you asked me how we calculate our vertex weights. However, many of you reading the blog are probably asking...
The existing Overgrowth shadows worked well for static shadows and ambient occlusion, but didn't have the detail required for character shadows. To achieve...
A lot of people have mentioned the plants as an area we could improve in Overgrowth. For this reason, I made a point of trying out games that have great...
Mibbit is a small web startup that provides a web-standards-based widget to interface with IRC channels. Sort of like the recently-mentioned Meebo, but...
Whenever we post about physics or animation technology, people always ask why we don't use Euphoria. Instead of replying to all of these comments individually...
A few months ago I decided that I could make better environment art but improving in art is hard, and often requires trying something completely different...
People that follow Wolfire regularly already know what Overgrowth is. However, many people who stumble across our videos end up confused by what they...
We've explained the virtues of open development in depth, but it's not obvious how this development strategy should apply to the Overgrowth story. I've...
A couple of days ago, David asked me to add a new feature to the animation editor UI - animation mixing. Here's a video of how the UI works!
It's been a little while since we've done a tech demo, and I've heard some clamoring on IRC and elsewhere for an explanation of how our new features work...
The rim lighting shader went a long way towards making the fur look soft when lit from behind, but it still looked hard when lit from the side. This problem...
Most modern games use a form of depth-map shadow mapping, because it's efficient on modern graphics cards, and simple to implement. However, it doesn't...
When we made the first Overgrowth alpha a long time ago, we needed an icon. Aubrey quickly whipped up a stylized Overgrowth "O". This was, of course...
We've discussed a lot of the subtle techniques we're using to make the Overgrowth characters look realistic, but we still haven't explained the most important...
Each week we release a new Overgrowth alpha. Since there is no incremental update system in place, those ~500 megabyte zip files really add up. We use...
Game saving feels like a fairly benign topic at first. However, if you stop to reflect on the issue, the mechanics of progress saving have a dramatic...
We've already discussed ambient occlusion for terrain and for objects, but we haven't yet discussed how it applies to characters. Ambient occlusion (AO...
When I loaded Aubrey's new rabbit model, it was clear that we needed a new rendering method in order to do it justice. Our basic object shader works best...
Whenever we post a new model for Overgrowth, a comment we often get is "there's no way that can go in the game -- there are way too many polygons!" That...
Most UI is designed in terms of pixels, with the assumption that a pixel is a constant unit of measurement. This is troubling because, depending on the...
As you might know, we were recently invited to give a talk at GDC Austin about our PR strategy, which is essentially to be as open and transparent as...
The goal of almost all game designers is to make games that are fun. A common method for giving the player a "fun experience" is to let him start out...