Strangeland Releasing 5/25

 

Just a few days left till Strangeland is released!  For the tiny percentage of the population who reads our site, has not wishlisted the game, and can somehow be persuaded to do so: please consider wishlisting, as it will help our visibility on launch.

Wadjet Eye Games Publishing Strangeland

We are delighted to announce that Wadjet Eye Games is publishing Strangeland. Many years in the making, Strangeland is a “cabinet of curiosities” comprising the striking memories and bizarre visions that Victor Pflug (artist) and I (Mark Yohalem, writer/designer) have gathered over our lives. That cabinet has been built with thousands of hours of care by Dimitrios Thanasias-Spanos (coder).

Put otherwise, and as our last update probably indicated, Strangeland is as personal a game as I can imagine making. I spent the last weeks annotating its more obscure references, and realized it really is a map from my childhood wonders and fears to adulthood’s responsibility, regret, and recognition. I know Vic drew deeply from the well of his own personal experiences. Further, Dimitrios has achieved things with the engine (Adventure Game Studio) that no one has ever done before, allowing Vic’s surreal imagery to come to life in smooth and seamless way, and he has done through by throwing all of himself into the game’s development.

Given all the toil and anguish that went into making it, there’s no one we’d be more comfortable entrusting the game’s publication to than WEG. Our collaboration on Primordia was not just a business relationship, but a friendship and creative partnership. Dave Gilbert is second to none in directing voice acting, and WEG has earned a well-deserved reputation for releasing thoughtful games that hearken back to the classics while presenting innovations in setting, design, and narrative. We are proud that Primordia is a part of that legacy, and we are excited that Strangeland will be part of it, too. 

Bradbury, Goya, and Peake: Discussing Some of Strangeland's Inspirations

The seed of Strangeland’s narrative was sadness, and the soil in which it fell included the works of Mervyn Peake, Francisco Goya, and Ray Bradbury.

Read more in this development update on Steam.

Strangeland's Steam Page is Live!

Arnold Hendrick, Rest in Peace

On May 25, 2020, Arnold Hendrick, the creator of the revolutionary board game Barbarian Prince and the revolutionary computer game Darklands, was taken by cancer, just shy of the three-score-and-ten years the Psalmist allots us. “It is too soon cut off, and we fly away.”

I never met him; I know next to nothing of his life story. But all the same, Mr. Hendrick had a direct and significant impact upon me. Fallen Gods is inspired by both Barbarian Prince and Darklands. Both games are marvelously inventive and brilliantly realized. Sometimes works of fantasy are called “escapism.” To “escape” literally means to shed one’s cloak. (One can ponder the age of brigandage when slipping a robber’s clutches in that manner was frequent enough to coin this expression and put it in common currency.) Mr. Hendrick’s games were the opposite—the player does not shed his cloak so much as garb himself in another’s clothes. Contrary to the genre’s name, most RPGs do not achieve this effect. The player’s role is not that of a hero, but that of a hedge fund analyst, crunching numbers, maximizing upside and minimizing downside. But in Barbarian Prince and Darklands, the player is immersed in the characters and the setting. For a while, he sees a different world through different eyes. A person is greatly enriched by such an experience, while merely shedding a cloak—in contrast—leaves one a little poorer, even if we sometimes need to escape to survive.

When I began designing and developing Fallen Gods years ago, I tracked down Mr. Hendrick’s email address. When our game was ready, I wanted to show it to him as tangible evidence of the impact and inspiration of his work. But I kept delaying the email because I wanted to make sure Fallen Gods was worth his time. Now there is no time left.

So I must end where I started: I never met Arnold Hendrick; I know him only through his published games and articles about game design. To me, all of them bespoke an abiding curiosity, a creative vision, and an overflowing generosity toward his players. The man put 136 saints in Darklands. May they speed him to his Maker.

Primordia Fan Art

Fantastic piece of fan art from Ivette Navratilova (https://twitter.com/ivettenihil)! I've always loved this little moment in Primordia, glad to see it glossed by such a fine artist.

Sorry for the radio silence on Strangeland and Fallen Gods.  Both continue to progress, but what energy I have these days (after homeschooling kids, doing my day job at night, and trying to plan ahead of this slow-moving catastrophe) is better spent on developing, rather than discussing, these games.

2019 in Review

The past year has been a very good one for Wormwood Studios, and I think we’ve laid the foundation for an exciting 2020.  As always, we owe these successes to the support of our players:  without your encouragement, we’d never be able to make it through the inevitable low points of the development cycle.

In 2019, we released a major Primordia patch, likely the last we’ll ever do.  We ported the game to a new version of AGS, which significantly improved stability on modern machines, integrated French, German, and Spanish translations, fixed dozens of bugs (including a few reasonably significant ones, such as the inadvertent removal of music from an important scene), and included a variety of quality-of-life improvements to the game’s UI.

We also hit 2,000 reviews on Steam, a significant milestone by any measure and a particularly significant one for an indie adventure game.  The only other AGS title to reach that number is The Cat Lady, and it’s more reviews than Thimbleweed Park has, despite that game’s far greater prominence.  Player reviews not only help keep the game commercially viable (it’s really the only way that new players get brought in at this point), they’re also a great reward for us in and of themselves, since that kind of interaction is one of the best aspects of indie game development.  We’re lucky that reviews have held strong over the years—though our halcyon days of 98% positive are behind us, 97% percent isn’t too bad!

In one of the crazier and more delightful pieces of fan art, the Spanish heavy metal band Taste My Sweet Revenge put together two Primordia-based metal songs for their soon-to-be-released album.

Finally, we were approached with an interesting proposal from a television producer to create an animated adaptation of Primordia.  These things usually come to nothing, but we’re cautiously optimistic, given the producer’s track record, interest in science fiction (particularly robot-oriented sci-fi), and excellent background in visual effects.  We’ll post more when there’s more to share.

Strangeland can now be played from beginning to end, although it is missing a considerable amount of art (and some design) in the last 15% or so of the game.  We had hoped to finish it entirely in 2019, but we’re very close now.  The game is divisible into four sections, and we’ve had testers play the first two of those sections extensively.  The reactions seem quite positive.

Strangeland’s a bit, well, strange, in that the whole thing is confined to a dream-like carnival, which makes it feel much smaller than Primordia, even though the actual number of rooms, puzzle interfaces, characters, and so forth is probably roughly comparable.  The art is spectacular (no surprise), and benefits from four times the pixels that Primordia had in terms of resolution.  But the real leap forward, I think, is in the code.  There are dozens of features, from striking visual effects to behind-the-scenes conveniences, that make Strangeland really exceptional.  Without James’s code wizardry, there would have been no way to achieve the warped and unnerving scenario that the game requires.

We’re very hopeful for a 2020 release for Strangeland.

For a good while, I was writing Fallen God design updates that were really fun, but really time-consuming, to put together.  Then I got out of the habit, and decided that I should focus all my time on design/writing on the project.  The result has been an apparent stoppage where, in fact, there was tremendous progress.

As I’ve tweeted about recently, Fallen Gods is now a proper game—you can win and lose, and do everything we wanted on the way to that victory or defeat.  We still need quite a bit more content, and a lot of balancing, and then even more play-testing, but for the first time in the many years of development, it now feels inevitable that the game will be completed.  I am reluctant to put any release date on it, but 2020 is not out of the question.

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Once again, many thanks to all of you who have made our successes possible!  Hopefully we will live up to your support in 2020!