Has it been a week already? That means it’s time for a new build of Overgrowth.

If you’re just tuning in, we are doing something a little unusual with our development on our upcoming independent video game. Every week, we release our latest build, however raw it may be, to fans in our secret preorder forum.

New this week is a bunch of multiplayer improvements (post on this coming soon), new and more optimized shadow, and some new map editor things from Phillip (post and video of the map editor, also coming soon).

With this alpha, we are going to start working towards our first “blessed build”. For the next week or two we are not going to be working on new engine features, but rather polishing and optimizing our existing code base. There will still be new stuff, for example, Aubrey has a bunch of hot art, models, and levels to reveal soon, but the main focus is to get a solid build out so we can do some serious testing.

Also, David recently came down with the flu and is not feeling very well right now. Here is a get well thread for him on the forums.

When designing algorithms for 3D rendering, it’s often tricky for me to visualize what I’m doing. I find that if I stop for a few seconds and sketch the idea out using pen and paper, it helps understand how it all fits together. There are all sorts of computer programs that let you make charts and outlines really efficiently, but for graphics tech, nothing beats drawing on paper. This is an example of some of the scribbling I did today while optimizing the ray-traced terrain shadows.

The shadows are cached, so the player never waits for them to calculate anyway, but it’s important to streamline the map creation process as well! The basic idea is that I wanted rays cast from each terrain texel to take advantage of the information we already have from previous raycasts. This worked, but only cut the shadow calculation time from 22 seconds to 16 seconds for the 2048*2048 terrain. That wasn’t enough, so I used OpenMP to parallelize it, and now it takes only 6 seconds on my quad-core. That’s a pretty big improvement!

Next I will try calculating the shadows on the GPU: ideally I would like all the static object shadows to update in real-time in the editor, even though they’re all pre-calculated when actually playing.

A few weeks ago, we tried something new. We gave Lugaru away 100% for free in a holiday promotion. It was only covered by a few big sites, the largest two being the awesome TIGSource and IndieGames Blog. Initially we were disappointed by the lack of coverage but this quickly disappeared as it was passed around the internet like crazy in a big game of telephone. I definitely saw many posts about the following games:

Free Lugaro
Free LAGARA
FREE ARUGULA
Free Rugalu

And, my favorite, Free Lugaria!

The Results
We distributed free Lugaru to over 10,000 people! Additionally, we partnered with our friends at MacHeist and were given the opportunity to be part of their Mac Giving Tree, which doubled that number to about 20,000 (we were the secret referral app). It’s insane because we were tracking our own free Lugaru results gradually organically spreading throughout the world on Google Analytics, and then BAM, MacHeist has the power to outperform us in one fell swoop. All the more reason to support Mac OS X.

Free Game = More Sales
What’s most interesting is that while Lugaru was free, sales were up! Yes… by making Lugaru free, we sold more copies than we usually do. Additionally, another forward thinking indie, Pocketwatch Games, had a similar promotion and experienced strikingly similar results with his Venture Arctic holiday giveaway.

This has huge implications for indie game developers.

Indienomics
It’s much more complicated than this, but for the very small indies, this promotion makes a lot of sense. So few people know about your games, that the influx of new people is enough to boost your meager sales. Basically, it takes a very, very small amount of those 20,000 people to feel incredibly generous and buy a copy of Lugaru to shatter our extremely modest trickle of regular Lugaru sales. I am not sure what the long term implications are of this find, but in the short term, I suspect we are going to be seeing a ton of “Free (insert indie game here) !” pop up really soon and we will all be happy.

In addition to this bizarre economic realization, we accomplished our #1 goal: make people aware of Overgrowth. Not a lot of people know this, but Lugaru was created 100% by David Rosen when he was in high school as a hobbyist project. The goal was to show Lugaru to as many people as possible and then explain to them how much awesomer Overgrowth is going to be. Hopefully a lot of the new guys stick around and follow our progress on this blog!

Feel free to introduce yourself in the comments.

The last post had many design tour requests, so I picked one of the most popular for this week. Sorry it took so long; it’s a long game! This is the fourth design tour, and it is about Aquaria by Bit Blot.
 

Design Tour - Aquaria from David Rosen.

Be sure to subscribe to the blog so you don’t miss our next video! If you missed the first three, you can check them out here: Gish, Knytt Stories and World of Goo.

One challenge I have as the artist on Overgrowth is working with David so that each area can help tell the story of the game. As a gamer, I don’t like having to sit through drawn-out cinematics when I could be playing. To help avoid that, I am working hard so that the visuals of each level tell you what is going on there. Some parts of the story are still best told in cut-scenes or with dialog, or even with ambient audio. When designing a level I can plan that out too.

The setup for the level in this concept is that Turner is trying to get some information from a specific pack of dog warriors.

The dog soldiers have decided to stage a last stand against a superior force. They have chosen this location because it is easily defended, and thus has been the site of numerous previous battles. The rocky crag is covered with the graves of those dog warriors who fought and died in the past — these graves are monuments to their bravery in combat.