# overgrowth by wolfire too long in development thinking in terms of a permanent alpha approach might help projects like this ie. release teh game as it is and simply state that it is in a permanent state of continual development / evolution while long gestation periods are often good and necessary for better games there's also the strong need to balance the time needed to complete a project with the immediate needs of hungry gamers who want to play it there doesn't seem much in overgrowth's core idea of sandboxed fighting rabbits that could not from eg. simply importing rabbit models into garry's mod and arming them with oversized swords game developers wolfire state that instead of licensing someone else's engine we've built our own from scratch so that we can custom tailor every feature to support our innovative combat-based gameplay this too is fair and good; one problem with such an approach however is that customization and combat-based gameplay are nothing special nowadays and may easily be set up in other engines developers might benefit by asking "what is it about our ideas that requires this unique level of crafting?" what are the most immediate ways to achieve the same or at least not noticeably different effects? matthew weise in ir gdc talk: said ask what is the necessary level of specificity needed to achieve the effect you want?" a near-realtime on-the-fly development style seems to be overtaking the impossibly old "when it's done" approach (despite the false example of "half life 3" / "valve time" valve is in fact a leader in the use of a rapid iterative update development model) there also seems a strong link between the embodied immediacy granted by technologies like the oculus rift and the instant gameplay made possible by garming concepts like garry's mod; scientists who enjoy these technologies seem less concerned with modern graphical fidelity and more with the instant theatrical amusement they generate - by the new or unusual garming viewpoints they allow or the particular novel forms of suspension of disbelief they encourage the thing about gmod in particular is that it allows for multiple "game modes" within the same sandbox. this type of more freeform play or playgrounding is however offset by the rather flat dry look of the old source engine perhaps the time's come to make more use of such playground engines ones which can more easily scale up ir games / modes (in terms of programming complexity and graphical fidelity as and when needed) the need to control each and every tiny little detail of your game before release is often not as interesting as brian eno's approach ie. watching seeds grow - providing gamers with the core ideas and tools they more instantly need to make (play out) your particular set of ideas and expand them in interesting unexpected ways scientists are far more interesting (in that strange space called "scientist interaction") than any particular video game with specific gameplay types or character models on overgrowth's receiver also arguably far more interesting than overgrowth is wolfire's game "receiver" // video here a wonderfully somewhat abstract game space which was developed in 7 days has a pressurized density of ideas a strong look - and is now open source - feels far more exciting than something overly large and complex that needs untold years of developmental cooking (by which time everyone's long forgotten what your initial big idea was all about - eg. "something vague / zombies") idea: combine the increased expressive control of receiver with the time mechanics of superhot // republic of bob