So what are we actually doing with your preorders? Investing them back into Wolfire, of course! As an indie developer, 100% of a preorder goes directly to Wolfire. There’s no publisher, investors, board of directors, or anything; it’s just us.

So far, every last cent of it has been put towards better equipment and licenses to help us make a better game. Since it’s your money, we thought you’d like to know what we are doing with it!

First, we bought David (co-founder and lead programmer) a kick ass quad-core computer. David’s old computer was actually destroyed by UPS when he was shipping it back to the Bay Area from Swarthmore College. I lent him my PC (I use my Macbook Pro 95% of the time), but it was slow. Compiling took forever and David was wasting a lot of time looking at loading bars. Our solution:

This is a pretty tricked out Dell XPS quad-core computer. Now David can compile super fast and all cores are being used heavily. Our next purchase: our other graphics programmer, Phillip, can now stop developing on his old school desktop replacement laptop. He now has a similar computer to David’s, plus a new 22″ monitor:

However, Aubrey’s computer is the pièce de résistance. We finally got enough preorders to give Aubrey what he really deserves. Aubrey is our artist and does everything: 2d, 3d, video editing, you name it. This, of course, takes a huge amount of CPU power and Aubrey’s old computer just wasn’t cutting it. It was painful to see Aubrey’s extraordinary talent be limited by his computer. In fact, we hit a hard limit recently with World Machine. Aubrey’s computer just didn’t have enough RAM to output the highest quality textures. Our solution?

This computer has a quad-core processor and 8 gigs of RAM. Yes, 8 gigs! It’s loaded with a 64 bit version of Windows and we’ve got 64 bit versions of all of the software Aubrey needs. Now he is good to go and will make sweet art for you guys faster than ever! We also got him a new 24″ monitor that is supposedly color calibrated and extra fancy.

Thanks again to all of our fans! As always, see you guys in IRC and the forums, and stay tuned for more updates. Don’t forget to subscribe to the blog.

Hey guys, the results are in from the Lugaru video contest! We will be divvying up our prizes of free Overgrowth and Wolfire t-shirts to the winners soon!

Grand Prize Winner: Zantalos for his masterpiece Lugaru Contest Video. From wall kicks to flip tricks, Zantalos fearlessly showcased every possible Lugaru move often confronting multiple enemies simultaneously (and he picked a pretty sweet soundtrack too). Watch it below!

First Runner Up: Lotus Wolf for the lovely composition Kung-Fu Fighting (Lugaru Music Video). Impressive Kung Fu fighting with psychedelic custom skins left only one option for the soundtrack to this awesome video.

Second Runner Up: Tailsfanatic for Lugaru Trailer. This video does an excellent job of weaving together Lugaru’s fighting with it’s story line. Oh yeah, and just wait until Tailsfanatic breaks it down at the end.

Special awards go to:
Tannim for his multiple creative entries. Tannim made complex mazes out of elements like fire and stone, custom skins and even convinced the Lugaru trees to grow upside down.

Dlrgold for his video: “3 Wolves INSANE” This received a huge amount of Likes, but unfortunately some of them were manufactured by an anonymous party, according to WeGame. We talked to Dlrgold and believe he is innocent. Nonetheless, he will be getting a prize too!

Thanks to everyone who entered! WeGame’s Lugaru section now has a ton of awesome videos and screenshots in it and we hope to see many more.

Usually what happens in SPF stays in SPF, but this was just too cool not to publicize.  Silverfish used the alpha 2 map editor tools to create the Overgrowth logo in-engine.  We couldn’t be prouder of this achievement. Silverfish has also been keeping our ModDB page up to date and thanks to him we are one of the most popular games on ModDB!  Thank you Silverfish for everything you do. (For those of you with SPF access, you can contribute to the thread here: http://forums.wolfire.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=4223)

joshkirklin, who hangs out with us all the time in the Wolfire IRC changed the terrain to look like a Wolfire logo:

Awesome job guys! User created content is one of our top priorities in Overgrowth and we’re excited to see people playing around with it even in its earliest stages.

Aubrey passed me along a set of weapons to show you guys from Overgrowth.

Here are the rapier and main gauche. The rapier is designed for piercing while the main gauche is used for parrying and disarming.

As you can tell from the engravings, these are used by the cats. They’re not really the kind of weapons you’d expect to see every day. There are a number of blacksmiths who make weapons in the Overgrowth world and each one has its own unique style.

We are officially starting phase two of the Lugaru video contest! All of the entries have been submitted and now we are starting a three day voting period, ending Saturday, December 6th at 11:59 PM PST.

You can view all of the entries here: Lugaru contest entries

The owner of the video with the most WeGame “Likes” at the end of this period will win a free copy of Overgrowth and a $50 gift certificate to the Cafépress Wolfire T-Shirt Store! The next two runners-up will receive a free copy of Overgrowth! We reserve the right to award subjective bonus prizes for notable efforts, even if they don’t win. Remember, even if you didn’t submit a video you can still vote here and feel free to vote for as many videos as you like.

We’ve seen stone mazes, fire mazes, 8 vs 1 fights, stick legs, melon heads (I guess that’s all Tannim so far), the AI tricked into barbecuing itself, challenge level 2 beaten in 5 seconds, savage fights with 70’s funk, savage fights with 90’s rock, something about Wal-Mart!? and more. Needless to say, regular users of WeGame were a little confused by all the random Lugaru videos and some of them accused us of spamming! Luckily we talked to the founder of WeGame prior to launching this contest and this is officially condoned.

Awesome job guys and good luck in the voting period!

And Steam is picking up Overgrowth!

Well, I guess Overgrowth has become big enough to be noticed by the guys at Valve — Overgrowth is going to be distributed on Steam! This is huge news for us, given that Steam is the premiere platform for PC games. We are really excited by this news, and it’s awesome to think that Overgrowth is going to be sold next to games like Far Cry 2, Crysis, and GTA IV.

This is a huge day for Wolfire Games, and a huge day for indie developers in general!

P.S. We are still looking for distributors. Steam is a good start, but we want more! Let us know if you guys have any connections or other ideas for getting the word out about Overgrowth.

I extended the shadows and ambient occlusion maps to include static objects such as rocks and trees! The only thing left to do for the static lighting is to add lightmaps for shadows cast onto the objects.

Hey guys, we have just posted this week’s Overgrowth Alpha, bringing us up to week 2! There is a lot of new stuff that’s been covered on the blog recently (be sure to subscribe) and, of course, a little bit that hasn’t. The big changes are with the terrain rendering engine, bringing sweet shadows and higher detail terrain (although the highest detail has yet to come).

- New sky
- Sweet terrain shadows
- Higher detail terrain
- Ambient occlusion
- More objects, including new rocks, a joshua tree, and a small bush.
- Instead of a single floating cube, there is now a nice little scene Aubrey whipped up using Phillip’s editor.

More notes in the secret preorder forum, and of course, that’s where you can find the download links.

Whenever I play a game, I look for design lessons that I can learn and apply to my own games. Recently, I decided to show these lessons in the form of a video tour of games that make interesting design decisions. The first one is about World of Goo by 2Dboy. Please forgive the stiff narration; I am still getting used to talking to myself

Be sure to watch this in HD!

Design Tour - World of Goo from David Rosen on Vimeo.

Just got a response from Kyle Gabler from 2Dboy!

“Wow thanks David! I laughed out loud at some of the very small, and embarrassingly correct, details you managed to pick up on. I remember the day we got the balls stretching and squishing along the velocity vector - an entirely cosmetic feature - but it instantly made the game more fun and tactile. Also, you noticed we used blurred foreground and background textures as a sneaky way to have higher image compression ratios. That’s completely right, which is funny, since that was a case of a technical limitation that actually caused the game to look better with more depth.

Very perceptive, thumbs up!”

Be sure to subscribe to the blog so you don’t miss our upcoming design tours!

Yes, you read that right! Thanks to TrialPay, you can get a copy of Overgrowth for free simply by signing up for a free trial for another company like Netflix or by completing an offer for much less than the $29.95 Overgrowth costs.

We have been testing this out in IRC to make sure everything works. Well, the experiment was a success and we’d like to thank the eight people who have used it so far to preorder Overgrowth! This includes myself, much to TrialPay’s dismay ;). I’ve asked our volunteers to pop into the comments and testify that this is legit, even though it sounds a little too good to be true.

The way it works is that based on your geographic location, TrialPay will generate a number of offers for you to choose from, ranging from signing up for a trial of Netflix.com to sending someone flowers. Once you sign up for the offer, Netflix or whoever you signed up with will cover the cost of your Overgrowth Preorder and you will instantly get access to SPF and everything else just like a regular Wolfire customer.

To get started, head over to our preorder page and enter your email address and, of course, forum username to get Secret Preorder Forum access. Go ahead and give it a try!