What do you do for a living?

My twin brother and I founded Wolfire Games, an independent video game studio. We’ve been working hard for the past year along with three other guys to build Overgrowth — the ninja rabbit fighting game.

What type of audience would overgrowth appeal too?

Overgrowth is a pretty unique game. At its core, it is about free movement and fighting. You can play it carefully, sneaking around and carefully breaking people’s spines by slamming them into the ground from behind. Or you can just run into the fray and just brawl with as many guys as you can take. There are not very many controls, but you can improvise awesome moves, for example, jumping over someone’s head and kicking them into a group of enemy wolves, causing them to get knocked into sharp rocks.

I think fans of violent, action games will have a great time with Overgrowth. Squeamish people, not so much.

How long did Overgrowth take to develop compared to your other titles?

We’re approaching the one year mark of five dedicated guys working full time on it. We also have a number of amazing contributors, for instance, Ryan Gordon working on the Linux build, and Mikko Tarmia working on music for us. We’re taking it really seriously.

Lugaru, on the other hand, was built in maybe a couple summers, single-handedly by my brother during high school.

What engine does your game run on?

We are very proud that we’ve built our own engine from the ground up — we call it the Phoenix Engine. It’s a huge, huge investment of resources to do this and the vast majority of games use a pre-built game engine.

The advantage of our engine is that we can custom tailor everything for Overgrowth. Overgrowth is truly built from the ground up to be a ninja rabbit fighting game. Everything about the procedural animation system to the map editor has been tailored specifically for Overgrowth, and I hope that this will show in the final game.

What inspired you to create a game company? Was it from just being a gamer or some other influence?

My twin brother and I have been interested in video games since before I can remember. We’ve been interested in making games pretty much since we started playing them. When we were maybe seven years old, we actually mailed a letter to Lucas Arts, the creators of Monkey Island, asking if we could work on video games for them. They respectfully declined — but we were determined.

My brother is kind of a programming natural and actually started making video games, really, really early. He started making HyperCard games in maybe second grade, then moved on to BASIC games, and then progressed to full fledged, 3D games in high school. After he graduated college, we decided to make Wolfire official and start seriously developing games.

How many games has Wolfire released?

Overgrowth will technically be the 5th game, however, it will be Wolfire’s first “serious” game. The level of technology, quality, and the sheer amount of time and effort we are putting into Overgrowth dwarfs all of Wolfire’s other games combined.

When did you first hear about Disqus?

I heard about it right when you guys were getting started from my roommate who went to highschool with the founders. I finally got around to installing it on the Wolfire Blog and I was extremely impressed.

What’s your favorite feature within Disqus?

The most valuable to me is the threading and organization of the comments.  That has transformed the comment section of our daily blog from an unreadable mess into awesome conversations, where 100 comments is not unusual.

My favorite feature is probably Facebook Connect. Its awesome for Facebook users to not even have to sign in. I don’t really know how they do it but if you click the Facebook button, it just works!

If you could add one feature to Disqus, what would it be?

I think the next step is smart social media reactions. My dream feature would be to have Reddit, Digg, Facebook, and Twitter buttons at the top of the comments so that people could Digg, Tweet, etc. my blog posts without leaving the page, and with the click of a single disclosure triangle, could view the comments from Reddit, or people’s tweets, without them mixing in with my blog comments.

After Overgrowth is released, are there any other big titles planned?

For sure! We haven’t announced anything yet, but we have a ton of awesome game ideas brewing. Overgrowth is just the beginning.

What are you thoughts about computer games vs console games?

I own all three of the current gen consoles, so I’m a huge fan. While I love to play multiplayer games like Little Big Planet and Super Smash Brothers with my buddies on the console, ultimately I would never trade PC gaming for it.

The PC is a much more open platform — companies like Wolfire would not exist without it. The only games you’d ever see would be hand picked by Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft.

With that said, consoles are looking really nice from a developers perspective. It kind of sucks when you make a PC game and upwards of 90% of your downloads come from pirates. Most indie developers who have made it onto the consoles report that their game had much, much higher sales than on PC. It’s really hard to ignore that.

I think there is definitely room for all platforms. We support everything we can, including Mac and Linux. If Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft let us on their platform, that would be very interesting.

Besides making games, what else are you passionate about?

I love all types of biking and probably bike around Berkeley more than I walk. I’m a pretty hardcore nerd and love all kinds of technology and the startup culture in general.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

One cool thing about our game engine is that we’ve embedded WebKit thanks to the Awesomium library. This means that all of the user interface elements you see in the game are created with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

In other words, don’t be surprised if you stumble across Disqus comments while you are playing Overgrowth.

If you would like to learn more about Jeff and his game company Wolfire visit their twitter, website, or Disqus Profile.