GamePlasma was recently given the opportunity to talk with the independent developer Wolfire Games. They are currently working on a new title called Overgrowth.
Check out the full interview below.
1) First of all, thanks a bunch for taking the opportunity to talk to us. It's greatly appreciated. That said, for our readers at home, could you give us a rundown of who you guys are and what you're all about?
Thank you John for taking the time to interview me.
Wolfire Games was created by David Rosen. David has been using computers since he was three years old and made his first game at age 7. I was actually going to elementary school with him at the time and had the privilege of looking over his shoulder at recess while he programmed on the library computers. David managed to use the black and white flip-book-based programming language HyperCard to create his own stick-figure, choose-your-own-adventure war game. He even engineered his own realistic gunshot and explosion sound effects by blowing into the computer's microphone. The end product was so fun that it quickly spread around school and had to be promptly banned for being too violent.
David soon moved on to other projects like pong but realized it was boring so he added fireballs and razor blades to spice things up. By the time David hit high school he was making 3D games. Black Shades (now available for the iPhone) was his award winning first person shooter which took place in a procedurally generated city and incorporated realistic skeletal animation. By the end of high school David had made his own physics-based, 3rd person fighting game called Lugaru known for its furious and intuitive combat. He was then recruited by top companies like Crytek but turned them down to go to college and then start Wolfire Games full time.
David is now leading a team of five and we're hard at work on a sequel to Lugaru called Overgrowth.
2) Wolfire Games develops titles for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. What kind of complications arise from writing code for these three different Operating Systems and maintaining it across these platforms? How do you deal with these problems?
Using OpenGL allows most of our code to be cross-platform compatible. However, for fancier hardware-reliant graphics and physics techniques, there are often a lot of system-specific cases to work through. While in a perfect world we could make all Overgrowth builds compatible for all systems all the time, in reality it is much more efficient for us to experiment with new features by just getting them running on our own computers. Then once we are confident we know exactly how a feature will work, we can really go in and work on optimizations, fallbacks and compatibility cases.
For a small indie company like us, the benefits of cross-platform development outweigh the costs. Jeff explained why this is so in a hot blog post which ended up getting picked up by Slashdot, Arstechnica and Digg.
3) Lugaru is much more visually impressive than the hardware requirements would have one believe. Was it difficult to optimize the game for lesser hardware?
Since his early days on HyperCard, David has been skilled at doing more with less. However, because Lugaru was made five years ago, it actually had pretty high-end graphics for its time. The real miracle these days is that Lugaru still runs so well on modern operating systems.
David definitely did some careful research realized that not only was OpenGL the best 3D technology for cross-platform development but that big games like Quake III were causing Nvidia and ATI to compete intensely with each other to offer better and better OpenGL support. As a result Lugaru contains popular technologies that are still well-supported to this day.
4) What drove you to create Lugaru and what was your inspiration?
Lugaru definitely takes place in a unique setting. David chose to use humanoid animals for a few reasons. First he didn't want the Lugaru world to be full of cliche fighting characters like barbarians and space marines. He also wanted to avoid the uncanny valley so that it would be easier for players to suspend their disbelief (in other words no one already has a crystallized idea of what a humanoid rabbit should look like so it's hard to reject how they have been portrayed in Lugaru). Finally he wanted characters that could still do cool martial arts moves that us humans can relate to. I think there are quite a few people who enjoy watching Lugaru depict what it would be like to jump off of a wall and kick someone in the face (I know I do).
In terms of David's revolutionary fighting mechanics, he was heavily inspired by two games: Rune, a 3rd person Viking deathmatch game known for brutal dismemberment and Oni a 3rd person close quarters combat/3rd person shooter hybrid. David essentially took his favorite parts from each game, improved upon them and added a lot of his own new features to create the popular Lugaru fighting system. I recommend downloading the free Lugaru demo to experience it first hand.
5) Moving on to Overgrowth, the sequel to Lugaru, can fans of Lugaru expect the same core gameplay?
Overgrowth will definitely be inheriting the spirit of Lugaru's tried and true combat fluid movement. However, we are going to take things a step further by adding more moves, more characters, better physics and more weapons.
6) Is there anything you wish you could have done better in Lugaru that you've addressed in Overgrowth?
Overgrowth is Lugaru on steroids and will improve on every major aspect of the game. However, two major areas we will really focus on are accessibility and moddability.
David put in a ton of subtle gameplay elements into Lugaru. However, because the tutorial didn't mention many of these details, players had to discover certain things the hard way or sometimes never discovered them at all. For example, some players never learned that the enemies can detect you by using smell. They therefore also would have missed out on the fact that standing upwind of an enemy with a bloody knife makes you a lot easier to detect than standing downwind with a clean knife.
In terms of moddability, David put almost no mod support into Lugaru. However, 3 awesome fan-made campaigns emerged anyway: Empire, Temple and The 7 Tasks. These campaigns rival the quality of the Lugaru story that David made himself. The lesson we have learned is that the Wolfire community is too talented and creative to be kept out of the loop. For Overgrowth we plan to provide players with lots of easy-to-use mod support. Preorderers have already gotten their hands dirty on the map editor included in the alphas. One of the first things the fans built in-engine was the Overgrowth logo. Now that the map editor tools have become more polished, people are starting to build their own houses. Modding excitement has been building at the Overgrowth ModDB page.
7) What kind of new gameplay changes and other elements will Overgrowth add to separate itself from its older brother?
Well perhaps the best way to see what we're thinking about for new gameplay mechanics is to check out the first draft of our fighting design doc. One big change that we're thinking about is adding right click as an input button for fighting and climbing. We will also probably require users to time their attacks instead of being able to hold left click and have the game auto-attack for them at the right time. Nothing is set in stone yet. We can talk about ideas all day but until we get our proposed fighting features in-engine and playtest the bajesus out of them, we won't really know how well they will work. Now that we have finished up most of our map editor features, we should be able to proto-type our fighting system fairly soon. Fans can also expect a new level of brutal realism to go hand in hand with Overgrowth's new fighting system. Just check out these early blood effects.
8) What kind of things did you learn from developing Lugaru that has helped make working on Overgrowth easier?
Lugaru was pretty amazing. Despite the lack of any formal marketing or promotions by David, it achieved huge recognition. It was purchased a few thousand times and pirated many more times beyond that. Lugaru was further proof that David really knows how to make fun games, that there was something very appealing to people about the Lugaru universe and fighting system and that the Wolfire Fans are absolutely awesome so we should involve them as much as possible in the Overgrowth development process.
9) Lastly, is there anything in particular you want our readers to know?
We pride ourselves on being very open with the community so if anyone wants more information on Overgrowth or Wolfire they should check out the Wolfire Blog and Overgrowth Facebook Page. If they want to chat with developers online they can join us in our public Wolfire IRC channel or chat with me privately on Meebo through our contact page.
Thank you very much for taking the time to interview me.
