Overgrowth Interview

Next year will see the release of Overgrowth, a game made by a small indie  developer, so it seemed an appropriate time to speak to John Graham, one of the team at Wolfire.

Most of our readers won't have heard of Overgrowth; can you briefly explain what its about?

Overgrowth is a 3D action adventure game with brutal and intuitive melee combat. It is a world of wolves, rabbits, rats and cats that use paws, claws and medieval weaponry to engage each other in battle. One of our fans on TIGSource put it best when he said “Overgrowth looks like those Redwall books with bigger balls.”

How closely linked will Overgrowth be to the game's predecessor Lugaru?

Overgrowth will start a few years after the end of Lugaru. Now that Wolfire’s Phoenix Engine has been completely retrofitted with cutting edge technology, fans can expect top-notch graphics (check out our latest screenshot:

) and brutally realistic fighting physics (see our initial blood effects here) along with the tried and true essence of Lugaru combat:

What has been the most challenging part of making Overgrowth so far?

It’s very hard to fight the urge to focus on the fun stuff prematurely. We will probably most enjoy building and refining Overgrowth’s mix of martial arts moves and parkour platforming. However, it is very risky to program a movement system before establishing the environment in which the characters will move. With this in mind, we have been conscientiously finishing Overgrowth’s terrain. David Rosen, the man who started Wolfire and our lead programmer, just released his initial work on procedural animation (here). More fun stuff is just around the corner.

You recently announced Overgrowth would be on Steam - do you see this as a big milestone for the game?

We definitely consider partnering with Steam to be a major step towards the success of Overgrowth. Our main problem, as you mentioned earlier, is that most people don’t know we exist. Steam is so large that if we can grab the attention of even just a small fraction of their users, this would be a huge benefit to Wolfire.

However, we would still prefer to do most of our sales through the Wolfire site because we get to keep a larger share of the proceeds. Some of our fans are now worried that if they buy Overgrowth through our site, they won’t be able to switch over to Steam later. However, Steam has assured us that this is not true. They’d be happy to help us switch preorderers from our site over to their system and have already done this before for games like World of Goo.

We have no delusions of grandeur. We know we’re a small indie company and we need all the help we can get. While we’re really excited about getting a chance to partner with a big distributor like Steam, we are definitely still looking for publishers and other distributors. If anyone has any information that might help us please feel free to contact me at john (at) wolfire (dot) com.

Do you see any games currently out there as particular inspiration for Overgrowth?

David, who singlehandedly created Lugaru about 4 years ago, says his major influences were Rune (a 3rd person Viking melee combat game) and Oni (a 3rd person futuristic shooter/melee combat hybrid). David picked his favorite parts of both games and improved upon them to make his own movement and combat system. Overgrowth will inherit this system and I think it’s fair to say that there are no longer any modern games like it.

With the recent rise of Xbox Live Community Games, can you see future titles being on consoles?

Yes definitely. In fact we’d love to get Overgrowth on Playstation 3 and/or Xbox 360. We have the impression that we’re too early in our development process to get noticed by anyone just yet but we are confident that Overgrowth would lend itself nicely to consoles. Unfortunately the Wii probably won’t have the raw processing power needed to render Overgrowth at a reasonable level of detail but you can bet that we’re going to do our best to get Microsoft and Sony’s attention. If anybody has friends in high places, please tell them to contact me john (at) wolfire (dot) com.

What advice would you give to people wanting to get into game development?

I guess I have 2 major pieces of advice:

First: You should only develop a game that you’re really passionate about. You have to put your heart and soul into your product and if you’re not sincere about it, this will be reflected by your game’s quality. Not everyone has the desire to pour long hours into game development, seven days a week for over a year while sitting on a dwindling supply of money that you might never come back. However, like I said, if you sincerely love making games, just do it.

Second: Fans are really important. At Wolfire we do everything we can to be open with our fans. We value their feedback whether it takes the form of complements or complaints and we try to give them many different ways to reach us. We are always combing the Wolfire blog , forum and OG Facebook page for new comments. We have a public IRC channel (here) where fans can chat with us and each other at any time, and we’ve committed to releasing weekly alphas so that preorderers can take a look at what we’re doing and give us feedback.

In addition to letting fans view and influence our design process, we are also planning to get them a ton of mod support so they can make their own versions of Overgrowth. You can see the modding excitement building at our fan-run ModDB page .

Being part of a very small team, do you find yourselves being the jack of all trades?

Definitely. With a small team like ours, each person has to cover multiple roles. Aubrey, for example, is tackling all of Overgrowth’s art (from terrain, to assets and the characters themselves). It’s been really fun to watch his 2D concepts become beautiful 3D assets. While this is a huge undertaking for Aubrey, it means that Overgrowth will have an unprecedented level of coherent art direction that will make the game extremely immersive.

Our ‘king’ jack of all trades is Jeff Rosen, David’s twin brother. Jeff helps Wolfire with everything from raw coding, to PR (Jeff was the mastermind behind the launch of Wolfire’s t-shirt line and business. He’s a true renaissance man.

Part of the fun of working for a small indie company is that despite having to work long hours, you get to do a lot of different interesting things.

Overgrowth is coming out on PC, Mac and Linux - why did you choose to release the game on Linux as well?

David has set a precedent at Wolfire for making cross-platform games with his titles Black Shades (here) and Lugaru (here). We think Linux users should get a chance to play games too.

How close are you to finishing Overgrowth, with the release date scheduled for Q1 09?

Now that we’ve been developing Overgrowth for a few months, we’re realizing that we will probably need more time to make sure we get everything we want into the game. A more realistic prediction is that Overgrowth will ready by the end of summer 2009.

What plans have you got for the future?

We’re not quite sure yet. We can’t help but toss ideas out to each other from time to time but nothing’s sticking yet. We also don’t want to indulge in this too much because we need all of our creative energy channeled towards Overgrowth. When Overgrowth is finished we’ll probably catch our breath for a week or two and figure out our next move.

Thank you very much for interviewing me. Not everyone makes time for small indie companies like Wolfire. If you still want more information about Wolfire or Overgrowth please check out the latest news at the Wolfire Blog.

Thanks  John for taking the time to speak to us.

UPDATE 23rd December '08:

You can get a free copy of Overgrowth's predecessor Lugaru! Details here.