Fallen Gods News

[p]As the Earth completes another orbit (15 of them since Primordia got underway), we look back happily at all the love our games have gotten from fans and, somewhat more ruefully, at the sweat and effort that went into those games in the past twelve months.[/p][p][/p][h2]Fallen Gods[/h2][p]Our foremost effort has been on Fallen Gods, which is nearing completion! (Not a bad time to wishlist it!) The team poured thousands of hours into its development this year, and the additions are too numerous to list. Significantly, we finished the game's hundreds of illustrations, hundreds of events (comprising tens of thousands of nodes), and hours of voice-over. We added tons of new animations, interfaces, sound effects, and other pixel art. Here's a peek at some of the new stuff![/p][p][/p][p]New Backgrounds and Combat Animations[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Seed Menu (for replaying recent maps or trying seeds recommended by friends)[/p][p][/p][p]Difficulty levels[/p][p][/p][p]Zoomable world map[/p][p][/p][p]Scoreboard and achievements[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Tutorial and integrated pop-up tips[/p][p][/p][p]Dynamic ending slides and after-action saga[/p][p][/p][p][/p][h2]Primordia and Strangeland [/h2][p]We still found hundreds of hours to put into our never-ending work on Primordia and Strangeland (both 70% off in the current Steam sale), fielding player questions, patching bugs, keeping the games compatible on modern systems, and working on translations and ports.[/p][p][/p][p]Primordia got three patches; Strangeland got two patches and was upgraded to a newer version of Adventure Game Studio. Having ported Primordia to the Switch a few years ago, James has been working ever since on getting Strangeland onto the Switch as well, and now has a working version that's playable start to finish. Strangeland also hit some big milestones as it approaches its five-year anniversary of release: 800 reviews (the best thing you can do to support indie devs is leave reviews!) and 50,000 copies sold. We're also still plugging away on the Spanish translation for Strangeland.[/p][p][/p][p]All told, it's been a great 2025, and we're looking forward to an exciting 2026, hopefully with the release of Fallen Gods to kick it off![/p]

[p]I learned today of the passing of Julian LeFay, the polymath developer at Bethesda who was project lead on Daggerfall. Bethesda credited him as "the driving force in the creation of The Elder Scrolls." Such worlds are the works of many hands, but LeFay's fingerprints were all over that series and Daggerfall in particular. It was an awesome game in the most fundamental sense of the world: from its engaging intro cinematic to its vast scope to the endless approaches one could take to character creation, my friends and I could only gawp as we attempted to wrap our minds around it. LeFay was not only project lead but also a lead programmer, creative director, and voice actor, which means much of those wonders came directly from him.[/p][p]There are titles from which I can trace a direct inspiration to my own game development, and developers whose names I knew even as a kid. That isn't true of Daggerfall or LeFay. But Daggerfall opened broad vistas of possibility not only within itself but as to game development in general: nothing was beyond reach. Like all games, Daggerfall must have begun as a dream, and it filled me with dreams of my own. [/p][p]Godspeed, Julian LeFay.[/p]

Today would have been the 69th birthday of Joe Dever, the late amazing writer and creator of the Lone Wolf series of game books (among other things). Anyone who has followed the long development of Fallen Gods knows that Lone Wolf was one of its core inspirations; not once, but twice, it had an important influence on me as a game designer.


I first discovered Lone Wolf in the 1980s when I was a kid, and I was enthralled. Dever’s writing and Gary Chalk’s art brought the world to life with spare, vigorous prose and evocative ink drawings.

As an avid consumer of all things fantasy, the books could have held me if they were nothing more than novels. But what really sank the hook was that they were structured somewhere between a Choose Your Own Adventure (which I loved) and Dungeons & Dragons (which I had struggled to connect with). If you haven’t played these gamebooks, you should because they have a particularly special quality seldom captured in computer games: the options you don’t take—whether the Kai Disciplines (super powers) or gear you forgo at the start, or the choices you opt not to take as the adventure progress—are as evocative as the ones you do take. Even after you’ve “won” a book it’s impossible not to pick it up and play it again and again. Over time, the character sheet was shredded from erasures, the spine broken, and nearly every page dog-eared... in book after book.


In fact, the first game I ever designed was a dice-driven gamebook called The Road to Doom’s Castle, made using The Print Shop on our Apple IIc and a borrowed thermobinder. (I imagine the clip art will be familiar to anyone of a certain age...) As homages to Lone Wolf go, it is a poor one (given the limited abilities of an 9-year-old), but it was one of my first steps on the road of game design, with Joe Dever pointing the way.


And then, video games and computer games caught up to Lone Wolf in storytelling, and I drifted away from gamebooks and into Gold Box and later Infinity Engine cRPGs, Sierra and LucasArts adventures, and every jRPG I could get my hands on. My designs and stories for Primordia, Strangeland, Infinity, and other games have their roots in those adolescent obsessions of mine. I probably never would have spared another thought for Lone Wolf, and never would have launched the great undertaking of Fallen Gods, except that Joe Dever did something else that showed what an amazing person he is.

In 1999, Dever authorized Project Aon to republish the Lone Wolf books, for free online. He wrote:

I would be especially pleased if my granting of the rights to distribute my books in this way was seen as my ‘millennium gift’ to all those devoted readers who have kept the Kai flag flying high, through all the good times, and the not-so-good. It would make me very proud indeed if this enterprise laid the foundations of a lasting legacy, securing the longevity of Lone Wolf by making my creation freely and readily accessible to current and future online generations.

(Gary Chalk, naturally, showed the same generosity and allowed his illustrations to be used as well.)

As a result, in 2005, the games were waiting for me to play again—without wearing out erasers or pages or spines in the process—and I consumed them avidly, enjoying that rare double-vision delight where you look through jaded and youthful eyes at the same time, and through both sets see something splendid. “Nostalgia” doesn’t explain it. The gamebooks are just damn good. The choices still have their impact. The balance remains excellent. The writing is still lean and muscular. The art is still fantastic. The world of Magnamund and the nation of Sommerlund remain as enthralling as ever.

Joe Dever’s generous heart is as much an inspiration as his creative mind—it’s one reason I’ve enjoyed releasing free games (and free content) to our fans whenever I can.

In whatever summerland his soul rests, I hope he knows that the lasting legacy of Lone Wolf left its DNA in Fallen Gods. “Blessed is the giver, richer through the giving of a gift.”

As 2025 begins, we wanted to take a moment to express our gratitude for all the incredible support we've received this year -- a big thank you to our amazing friends, fans, players, testers, translators, and teammates! Your enthusiasm and dedication have been crucial to everything we've accomplished. Here's a quick overview of some of our major achievements this year:

Fallen Gods

This year marked a significant milestone for Fallen Gods, our longest-running project, now approaching its 11th year! While we're not quite there yet, we're in spitting distance. The core content and engine are firmly in place, meaning 2024 was about refining and adding the finishing touches. That included features such as the tutorial, ending slides, world map, quest log, scoreboard, and run summaries. Art-wise, we completed a major UI overhaul; refined, replaced, or added dozens of illustrations; and added pixel art for new combat animations, diagonal movement sprites, and map details. On top of that, we expanded the game with more events, music tracks, sound effects, and voice-over nodes, while enhancing the ambient soundscape.

There's still a bit to go, but we're committed to ensuring Fallen Gods is as polished as possible before we cross the finish line. One nice thing about the development of the project is that we're not beholden to any timetable.

Primordia

The big update for 2024 was Marauder Film exercising the option we signed years ago, which gives Marauder the right to produce a Primordia movie. While this doesn't guarantee the film will get made, it's an exciting development! At the outset, I was very hesitant about agreeing to an adaptation of Primordia, as the world, characters, and story are so near and dear to my heart. Still, after seeing my teammates' enthusiasm and Bastiaan’s evident excitement for the project, I was persuaded. It's going to be interesting to see someone else's story and take on our creation, and the Marauder team seems excellent.

Meanwhile, James has continued to polish and support the game, the proverbial Man the All-Builder returning to perfect his creation, with a number of small bug fixes and improvements.

Strangeland

Late in 2024, the lead on Strangeland's Turkish translation reached out to me and James to let us know that he had gone back through and revised it, line by line, because he wanted the translation to do the game justice. He sent us a touching note, explaining how much video games had meant to him growing up, and adding:

This perspective is what makes meeting individuals like you such a joy for me. Learning about your journey as developers and reading about the experiences that shaped your creative vision has been profoundly moving. It’s clear that your work isn’t just about making games but about creating meaningful art that resonates with people on a deeper level.

These kinds of messages mean so much... as I've said for years, the connections our creations make with our players is like calling out into the void and hearing a friendly voice answer back. Knowing that something we poured ourselves into matters to someone else is the whole reason for creating indie games.

Strangeland also got a first pass at a Spanish translation right at the end of the year, and we're hoping a final, integrated version will be ready by May.

These translations spring from the incredible generosity of our fans. I've enjoyed working with the translators on both Primordia and Strangeland to make sure the "voice," themes, and wordplay come through as much as possible -- a daunting task. There's always a fair bit of technical work for James in implementing them, and given this time commitment, these may be the last translations we do for a while. Still, it's satisfying to look back at the many translators and translations we've had the pleasure to work with and on over the past decade!

Website Overhaul

In collaboration with Nicolas Dekaise (developer of Enoch: Children of Fate) and superfan James Boehme, we finally gave our website, www.WormwoodStudios.com, a much-needed overhaul. I'm not sure how much traffic developer websites even get these days, but we wanted to present our games in a cleaner, more attractive way.

Sundries

Finally, in Wormwood-adjacent news, the amazing Carbonflesh (which James has been working on forever) got its reveal and a demo, as did Infinity, the very first commercial game I ever worked on as a writer/designer (a quarter century ago!). And Iron Tower's Colony Ship, which I had the pleasure to consult on, had its final content patch, the culmination of many years of development. As anyone who's been through it knows, RPGs take a long, long time to make. I just hope that when Fallen Gods finally crosses the finish line, it's as great as these three games are!

- Mark

I’m pleased to continue our team introductions with two of the more recent team members—which is to say, they’ve been working on Fallen Gods for many months rather than many years. Hailing from the Czech Republic and Argentina respectively, Jan Pospíšil and Marcelo Orsi spread our team even farther across the globe!

I first crossed paths with Jan way back in 2018, not long after he began work on Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind, when he generously offered to contribute some art to Fallen Gods. Since King of Dragon Pass was one of the important inspirations for Fallen Gods, and since Jan’s art is (and was) phenomenal, it was a wonderful offer to receive! Unfortunately, conflicts on both ends kept intervening, and it wasn’t until late 2022 that we finally were able to connect, and not until late 2023 that Jan had time to dig in more. Now he’s taking on one of the critical pieces of our art: the illustrations the player sees in the game’s many different endings. He also contributed a couple of event illustrations.

Marcelo and I met on Twitter, as his striking artwork for There Is No Light and Inscryption kept catching my eye (as well as James’s). It turns out Marcelo is as much a fan of our games as we are of his art, and we were all glad to find an excuse to collaborate. (Marcelo’s also helping on Carbonflesh with James.) Very quickly, we bonded over our shared love of Borges (an Argentine author who influenced Primordia’s characters and worldbuilding) and asado. So far, Marcelo has worked on assembling a lorebook for Fallen Gods from other artists’ material—an assembly process that benefits from Marcelo’s excellent artistic skill—and we’re looking forward to sharing The World of Fallen Gods soon. We also are looking forward to additional contributions from him in the game itself, such as beautifying the items, and in its manual.

Both Jan and Marcelo have amazing galleries that shouldn’t be missed!


[h3]Jan Pospíšil[/h3]

Mark: You’re best known for your work on Six Ages, another game that is grounded in mythology, folklore, and history—but a different set of influences for each. What steps did you take to make your Fallen Gods art capture the different setting?

Jan: I played the game for a bit and looked at the existing art a lot. The overall visual language actually felt quite familiar, the challenge was mostly in adjusting my tools and process to produce similar-enough results. I definitely simplified my drawings compared to Six Ages, which was in a way quite liberating. There isn’t as much need for a ton of culture-specific details and other than the god there aren’t many recurring characters. Then it was a matter of keeping the color palette more muted than I did in Six Ages, as well as leaning into strong lighting setups rather than flat local color.

Mark: Initially, you did a pair of event illustrations for Fallen Gods before taking on the ending illustrations. Are there any differences in approach you’ve taken to the endings?

Jan: The endings definitely require more flash and drama—using both lighting and composition they need to feel impressive and final. It obviously depends on the nature of each ending, but the player should typically be feeling big emotions while looking at the painting. We meet strong important gods, prevail in battle over terrible monsters and see bright bridges of light shoot up into the heavens—the art needs to deliver that spectacle. In other cases we get just a landscape that has to communicate a certain mood, or half a character facing away from the “camera” or cut off by deliberate composition that needs to get their relationship to the god across.

In the end I think I just planned a bit better before I started and tried a little harder while I painted. ;)


[h3]Marcelo Orsi[/h3]

Mark: What first attracted you to Fallen Gods?

Marcelo: I think the atmosphere of the game was the first thing that hooked me in. It was something beyond just “retro,” which would imply something created now that wants to emulate something old... no, this game felt as if it was actually created in the past, in a period where I think games were truly magical. The art, the music, and the narration just transported me to that awesome era.

Then, the gameplay loop sealed the deal for me: it wasn’t just the atmosphere; this thing played as a classic game, too! It wasn’t obvious; I had to figure out how to win this thing. It was like a puzzle, something I kinda miss with the standardization of mechanics these days. That’s what I mean when I say it felt from that classics era: it was fresh, as games from back then were. After a few runs, I went from being interested in it to actually loving it.

Mark: As an artist yourself, what do you look for in creating a book to showcase the diversity of illustrations within Fallen Gods?

Marcelo: Well, the first thing I looked for was an element that would help me achieve some kind of cohesion. That’s when the UI of the game came into the scene: just had to adapt it and it would give me the forms I needed to link each illustration together, as well as the type for the text. This of course had to be modified to suit the new format, but the game already has that “book” feel, so it was an easy adaptation.

Now, for actually compositing everything, I treated each page as if it were an illustration that will now include the frames and the text: it needed focal points, and a flow. And most importantly: it needed to be clear to the reader... so even if I added some effects here and there to spice things up, I always tried to keep them subtle. The illustrations and text had to do the heavy lifting, my work just needed to frame them and enhance them without getting too much attention.