Excellent Reception

Overgrowth shaping up, early modding abilities playfully demonstrated.

By Nathan Davis on 8 May, 2009

The Phoenix Engine is a new independent 3D game engine written from scratch by a small group that calls itself Wolfire Games. The developer says it was “built from the ground up to allow the use of cutting edge graphics, animation, and physics.” Using this engine, the team is now working on a third-person, action-adventure platform game dubbed Overgrowth, and one of the key goals is to make it highly moddable.

“We’re a team of five guys working hard to make an awesome game,” explains Wolfire. Overgrowth transpires in a vicious fantasy world where various anthropomorphised animals, such as cats and rabbits, must duke it out with not only their claws and paws, but also medieval weapons. It’ll feature both a single-player side and multiplayer through a co-operative mode.

The really intriguing draw, however, is how the combat mechanics work. Rather than offer pre-set moves and button combinations, fights are carried out in a much more context sensitive manner. An example given involves ducking a roundhouse kick, then immediately grabbing that leg by standing up, allowing the player to consequently kick the opponent away.

Interestingly, probably the most controversial decision behind the game was the choice in scripting language. As opposed to using something more popularly seen in games, such as Lua, Wolfire chose to instead implement JavaScript, a scripting language most often found in use on websites. It recently posted a piece explaining why JavaScript was chosen by dispelling what it calls four myths about the scripting language, including ‘JavaScript is very slow’ and ‘JavaScript is a crappy language and only suited for small browser tricks.’

Something I find fascinating about the project is that Wolfire is working on the game full-time, funding it from eager fans already pre-ordering the game while it’s still under development. What’s really cool about this is that instead of waiting for the game to eventually come out, those who pre-order are given access to the latest alpha development build so they can play around with it, and even make suggestions along the way.

Wolfire has a surprisingly playful sense of humour, which can be witnessed by watching the latest development video. In it, one of Wolfire’s spirited developers light-heartedly demonstrates some of the game’s early modding capabilities by building a simple running race course. Aside from exhibiting Bill & Ted and even Arnold Schwarzenegger impressions, it features a certain (and awesome) ‘Whaleman’ and also ‘Rabbot,’ the game’s development placeholder character.

I’m pretty excited to see what will come out of Overgrowth, and the following question one of the developers recently posed certainly helps: “How can we represent different kinds of fight scenes in Overgrowth without resorting to cut scenes?” Good riddance to quick time events.

Perhaps what’s most impressive about Overgrowth is how it will run under your operating system of choice, whether that be Windows, Linux, or Mac. For a five-man team, this is astounding.

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