Fallen Gods News

Other than me, no one has worked on Fallen Gods as long as Dan, who jumped into the fray in June 2014. At the time, my ambitions from the project’s visuals were modest: I pictured simple hex tiles like in table-top campaigns and “3/4 perspective combat sprites akin to those of old school jRPGs like Breath of Fire or Ogre Battle.” Dan assured me we could do better, and sent an amazing first pass at the combat sprite for the fighter. There was no looking back.

To “animate” literally means “to breathe life into,” and Dan breathes life into his pixels—with just a few frames, he’s able to convey not only motion but also weight, momentum, and personality. We were very fortunate that when Strangeland needed a step up for some of its key animations (walk cycle, talk cycle, etc.), Dan was there to help on that game, too. So his breath will have infused two Wormwood Studios titles once Fallen Gods is released. (And in addition to doing FG’s pixel work, he has also contributed a number of illustrations to the game.)

Dan is the only Wormwood Studios collaborator I’ve met in person—we used to break bread (or slurp noodles, at any rate) at a dive pho restaurant in Los Angeles—and I just had the great pleasure of meeting up with him at a dive izakaya in Japan, which has been his home for years. Within moments of Dan ordering food for us, one artist, then three artists, had come over and engaged Dan (and, with him translating, me) in conversation. This was not an artists’ bar or Dan’s usual stomping grounds, just a testament to some inherent spark in Dan that kindles artistic communities wherever he goes. He has brought that same light and warmth to the Fallen Gods development team.

You can see more of Dan’s work (including his non-pixel art) at his portfolio and read his answers below.

- Mark Y.

Mark: The sprites in Fallen Gods range from tiny world-map avatars just a few pixels in height to huge foes that fill a quarter of the screen, but somehow you’ve created all of this artwork pixel by pixel. What stays the same in working at these different scales and what, if anything, changes?

Dan: To me, from a drawing standpoint, quite a bit changes. In fact, I look at them completely differently.

Higher resolution digital artwork likes to masquerade as a traditional drawing or painting form, but considering the hand position, the tool shape, the floating posture, and the approach between media and substrate, I see it as closer to spray paint or airbrush. For me, that correlation holds true in the techniques that I apply at higher resolutions. There are more additive and reductive capabilities in terms of color and line, and hand movement has a more direct effect on line gesture and weight. Also, a line can be calibrated gradually by pushing back and forth between negative and positive space on either side, carving its edges with continuous gestural movement.

Smaller resolution work, on the other hand, is to me closer to actual mosaic tile or textile as a technique. There’s a greater emphasis on compositional space, tangent making, and symmetry. Also, the smaller work really emphasizes the magic that is almost unique to pixel art in the precision of color selection. When a desired line crosses a pixel, or two colors must share a single pixel—it’s never as simple as mixing the two, or determining the dominant color by percentage; in my experience it’s always a case-by-case process of experimentation based on “feel” or “impact,” and often the desired result comes in wildly unexpected ways.

Of course, a larger-scale pixel art image can be zeroed in and calibrated on a fine scale, and a smaller sprite contains gesture, but in my experience, smaller sprites can get lost in the weeds very easily, and larger sprites can get stuffy or lose their sense of life if they’re too overcooked, and so I try to preserve the unique capabilities of both.



Mark: What are some of the most challenging aspects you’ve faced in creating the pixel art for Fallen Gods?

Dan: In the animation work itself, sometimes the greatest challenges come out of nowhere. Years ago, I remember being brought to my knees by a slither cycle of a snake sprite, whereas human walk cycles (seemingly much more complex) never gave me too much trouble. More recently, I spent about an hour on a successful drawing of a hand for a cursor, and then set out to draw a second hand sprite in a slightly different position, and it took me about 5 hours. Conversely, sometimes I’ll lose confidence and think that there’s no way I’m capable of animating certain things (such as a recent animation of an eagle turning in mid-air), and I’ll spend a great deal of time agonizing over the hypothetical, but when I finally get past my emotion and start animating, things sometimes go much more smoothly than I thought.

But I think that for me, the larger challenge has been in the massive amount of work that game creation requires. The work itself is a pleasure, and I find it fascinating and massively fulfilling, but once days click over into months and years, it can be both a cause and an effect of feature creep, and this has been a huge learning process. It can be hard to watch out for which visual features are going to take months to accomplish, let alone which ones are worth it or not. And by the time a shiny new aspect is in the game and in the process of climbing that mountain, my capabilities inevitably improve, and eventually it can make the earlier work obsolete, so it’s difficult to avoid this trap of constantly redoing everything.

Another huge challenge for me is the social isolation of this work. I’ve never really felt safe in online communities, including art and gaming communities, and I’ve had some traumatic experiences, so I tend to shy away. But in my day-to-day life, especially as I take in years, the people that I can have an absorbing conversation with about video games can be few and far between, and I can count on one hand the people that would specifically be willing to spend time talking about pixel art. This makes me all the more grateful to be in contact with this incredible team, and our weekly meetings are such sweet succor, but it can be very frustrating to love an art form which for most is disposable, and of which there is little widespread understanding of the massive labor and intricate work involved.



Mark: You joined Fallen Gods just one month into its now decade-long development cycle. Has anything changed about your approach to the game over the years?

Dan: Before FG, I had spent a few years doing throwaway work for throwaway mobile games, where I would give sprites and then have no input or involvement in the back and forth of their implementation. I came to FG with a lot of big, blustery ideas about what pixel art “should” be. I think that in these 10 years, with all the skills and technique I’ve gained, I’ve also softened and been humbled quite a bit. I’ve experienced the sacrifice that is required to connect artwork to programming language, and I’ve gained a lot more patience and perspective. I think I’m much more willing and less emotional when a new approach or a workaround is needed, or when a nice shiny perfect idea needs to be scrapped. I’m no longer a unified pixel grid dogmatist (although I think my dogmatism might have rubbed off on Mark).

I’ve known James since 2010, when he joined the Primordia team as its coder about two weeks into development, and he was one of the “three musketeers” who started Wormwood Studios in May 2012. Alas, because he’s in Greece and I’m in the U.S., we’ve never met face-to-face, but despite that he’s a dear friend and a role model to my daughters—whom he’s known since their birth and who view him as the consummate problem-solver and as the instigator of many of the “Crispinisms” I wrote for Primordia.

There’s no one I’ve collaborated with as much in game development as James—a third of my life!—and no commercial Wormwood Studios game has ever been released without him. So when he was able to join Fallen Gods in 2022, my stress level dropped considerably.

You can follow James on Twitter and read his answers below.

- Mark Y.

Mark: You’ve coded every commercial Wormwood Studios release: Primordia, Strangeland, and your own action-platformer Until I Have You. What unique challenges has Fallen Gods presented?

James: It’s a genre in which I have little expertise for starters. While very complex, it is also uniquely fascinating to see all the inner systems of such a game come together and understand how they work.

The biggest challenge has to have been the map generation algorithm. The most difficult part has been making it stable and ensuring that while it is randomly and procedurally generating content, but at the same time is not constrained due to some technicality. Within the generation algorithm of the game, there’s a lot of inner algorithms—detecting roads, erasing weird shapes on our roads, eradicating roads that lead nowhere, placing docks properly on the map, removing rivers that make no sense as well, etc. There’s an impossible amount of small adjustments that happen as a player generates a map, allowing for the ruleset to be expandable and dynamic (if you know me, that’s my favorite word). Ultimately, I think it’s not that relevant to list all these small but yet significant adjustments and expand upon the decision making. But to summarize, the fact remains that we’ve put a lot of emphasis on generating maps that make sense and work well.

Mark: Conversely, is there anything about Fallen Gods that’s more fun, easier, or more interesting than the prior Wormwood Studios projects?

James: Pretty much about everything. It’s not just that the engine that’s different, but also the implementation is less constrained this time around. On our earlier projects, there were challenges from a fake 3rd dimension and we were limited by not getting necessary animations and backgrounds. Here, we have been able to create something more alive and fluid with fewer assets.

Mark: What aspect of your work on Fallen Gods are you proudest of so far?

James: That would easily be the way the game during its generation, places the docks on our map. Each map has four docks, in addition to towns, where you can depart or arrive on a ship, and we wanted to, one, make sure those docks are distributed in a useful way, and, two, name them Northdock, Eastdock, etc. so the player can easily identify them. All of that was hard.

First, the game determines a list of hexes that are able to have a dock and are not within a town’s reach. Even if that would seem that this would be very few hexes, it’s still about 100 of them (at the very least) on every generation. Then it splits those 100 into four significant groups based on their angle from the center of the map, and places those four groups that have a certain median angle, as close to the cardinal directions (NORTH, WEST, EAST, SOUTH) as possible. If it fails, then it attempts to find a diagonal approach or an approach that makes sense. All these steps took an insane amount of work to be coded.

After that, the docks are named. Naming the docks when they’re cardinals is easy, but naming them in the fallback diagonal approach is not as easy as you’d think it to be. But luckily I was able to get past that obstacle and now, no matter what, we always have properly placed docks and properly named docks, as the game’s algorithms for both generation and naming have been finetuned!

Maciej—a multilingual philologist, RPG aficionado, and award-winning writer—joined the Fallen Gods team in October 2014 as an editor. He quickly proved indispensable, and his role grew to include scripting events, then helping design events, then editing voice over, then implementing Unity content, then setting up combat encounters, then selecting the “deck” of events for different dungeons, then…. Well, you get the drift. “Longsuffering” barely begins to describe it.

While Maciej modestly claims not to have “made” any part of the game, the reality is that the fingerprints of his careful touch are everywhere. We’ve all benefited from his guidance, and I’ve never had anything comparable to his editorial work on any of my prior projects (even AAA RPGs with budgets in the millions of dollars). The only question is which of us will have the greater trauma from the process!

- Mark Y.

Mark: One of your principal roles on Fallen Gods is editor. How has your experience playing RPGs and adventures over the years informed your approach to the game’s text?

Maciej: To put it bluntly, my experience and preferences regarding games have made me wish for the texts simply not to waste the player’s time. Many games have very little regard to what is really communicated through their text — whether all of it is truly useful, or whether some of its parts could be removed with no loss in substance — which leads to a lot of meaningless reading that the player is compelled to sit through, just because it might hold something of value. I feel like in Fallen Gods we’ve put a number of constraints on ourselves that let us avoid this pitfall, and while in some cases the game does throw extended texts at you, I believe that each time all of it is significant.



Mark: You also serve as a sounding board and scripter for the event design—that is, the gameplay framework in which the game’s text appears. What do you look for in a good event?

Maciej: First and foremost — choices with weight. And by this I don't mean that they should all be epic in scale, but rather that they should always make you consider which one to pick. The antithesis of this is finding a desk and having choices like, “1. Open the left drawer,” “2. Open the right drawer,” “3. Look in the trash bin.” It’s empty content that brings very little to the gameplay experience and is only meant to draw it out by having you mindlessly click three buttons to get what you could have just been given at the outset with no input.

Instead, to follow the same example, I should have some knowledge of what the drawers hold, opening each should have some risk to it (the owner put a venomous snake in the left one), and I should only have enough time to open one of them safely — because the owner is about to barge through the door with a shotgun.

Obviously there are also other aspects, particularly those that pertain to replayability or obscure outcomes that require multiple “keys” to access and which are very cool to get on your nth playthrough, but I think the “weightiness” of the options presented is by far the most important one.

Mark: As one of the first team members on this project, and a de facto producer, what do you think have been its biggest challenges?

Maciej: The greatest challenges have always lain in the ebb and flow of the development cycle, primarily since everyone involved in this game isn’t doing it on a “full-time” basis, so every now and again someone may disappear for an indeterminate time. In other words, the hardest part is to keep up with the flow when everyone’s productive, and to keep it going when someone is dormant.

In the former case, considering that I have to manage and implement so many things, when I’m suddenly flooded with a lot of new UI assets, events to (re-)script, bugs to fix, VO to mix, and whatever else, it can simply get incredibly overwhelming. And given that some of these may be interconnected and require one for the other to work, it’s important to set priorities for yourself, as well as make sure you’ve noted down everything that needs doing. Because that’s the other major problem — when juggling a dozen different things, it’s easy for one to get lost somewhere, and that’s also definitely true for the project in general when you have to manage it for such a long time.

In the latter situation, during periods of slower productivity, the challenge is often to simply make sure that the development keeps rolling. It can be hard to implement new mechanics when you don’t have the UI to support them, or work on game balance when half the events are unfinished. You have to start taking shortcuts or making placeholders for everything, and these also have an uncanny propensity for taking root and staying in the game for much longer than they should. But overall, this is a small price to pay for not having to run a tight schedule where everyone is forced to work on the game, and letting them pace themselves.

Very early on in the development of Fallen Gods, while researching runestones, I had the idea of using one to tell the world’s backstory. When I found Cleo’s gallery, I found with it the one artist on earth seemingly able to execute what I described as “my dream, although I'm skeptical that it could be executed”: that the lore of the world be “depicted in a single continuous illustration, like a Norse-style carving on a runestone, but in an outward spiral from the center.” Cleo’s laconic reply: “Feasible, but really challenging.” Needless to say, Cleo rose to the challenge.

Almost a decade later, I reached out to Cleo to see if she’d be interested in writing about creating the runestone. Cleo immediately agreed but also wanted to use the skills developed in the intervening years to make Fallen Gods’ main menu screen a suitable vehicle for the original spiral carving. And, again, Cleo delivered... not only the new screen, but also the breathtaking new logo for the game.

So, without further ado, I turn the floor over to the artist.

-Mark Y.


Mark: Knotwork, runestones, and traditional Norse/Celtic art have been a focus of your work for over a decade. How did that interest begin, and what do you find most appealing about that kind of art?

Cleo: My mom is a jeweler/goldsmith and once bought a book about Celtic designs to use as patterns for jewelry. Once I got a hold of that book I was fascinated with knotwork designs at first sight.

I started out copying the designs from that book and later began doodling my own creations, which grew ever more complex over time. Eventually, they were seemingly good enough that I started to get requests for tattoo commissions online, which became the backbone in my early years of being a freelancer.

As I picked up more diverse artistic skills in my studies, and refined the ones that I already had, the kind of commissions that I am doing have now shifted away from knotwork designs towards 3D visualization and character illustration. I still get the occasional commission for Celtic or Norse knotwork art, but not nearly as much as in the beginning.

Personally, I find it somewhat meditative to draw knotwork designs. Also, I love busy ornamentation/visual noise, where your eyes have to actively go around the image to look for all the hidden details, and follow every twisted line from its origin to its end. The spiral design for the menu stone itself is a pretty good example of this.

Mark: The Fallen Gods knotwork tells the story of the game’s setting in a single widening spiral. Can you explain some of the techniques you used to weave its scenes and elements into a single unified image?

Cleo: I made the spiral in my very first year of being a freelancer. I didn’t have the best tools back then: I only had an A4 scanner, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t have my lightboard yet. So it was more complicated than if I had done it nowadays—nowadays I’d probably have made it digitally from the start. The original spiral illustration was done on five separate pieces of A4 paper that each had a part of the spiral that had to match at the seams if rotated. Those were then arranged digitally and incorporated into the runestone illustration.

Mark: Your initial rendering of the knotwork and runestone in early 2015 was part of your application portfolio to university. Almost a decade later, you came back to the project to update the runestone and craft the game’s logo and main menu. Did your approach change at all with the passage of time?

Cleo: My general approach has definitely changed since then.

Regarding the knotwork, I have better tools now that make my work easier than it used to be back then. Nowadays I’d also use different line weights in the knotwork designs to make the details pop a bit more. Also nowadays I make all sketches digitally for easy iteration; the final design is either traditional, or digital depending on what my customers need. Overall, apart from the fact that I developed a better general sense of composition since then, my approach and workflow there has largely stayed the same.

My approach and workflow have changed for everything else that isn’t knotwork designs. I’ve learned a lot in those nine years and honed my artistic skills. I offered to completely rework the background from scratch and large parts of the runestone, except for the knotwork, which I left as is. The old version of the menu screen was very lacking artistically, had the wrong aspect ratio, and terrible layer management on top of that. The new version looks a lot more professional and allows for some dynamic effects with the layers.

The logo I approached from my ornamentation-designer angle since I’ve always loved ornamental logo designs. Minimalist graphic design is not what I do, so of course there had to be at least some knot-ornaments in the logo! Of course I was also very conscious about not overdoing it too much, readability was still the primary concern here, all the while offering more to the eye than just the game’s name. I made several initial designs in different styles and colors, and we settled on the one with the more Celtic-looking uncial font.

I can’t remember who approached whom in 2016 when Anders and I first connected, but it hardly matters: he was the perfect composer for Fallen Gods. I’d been struggling over what the game’s musical soundscape should be ever since discovering “Fornnordiska Klanger,” an album of prehistoric Scandinavian music created by Prof. Cajsa Lund. I knew I wanted something with that rich history, rather than just a typical orchestral fantasy soundtrack. But how to get that? Then, from Uppsala, Sweden—the very heart of ancient Norse religion—emerged Anders, the man of the hour!

Working with him over the many years since has been a joy. Like Nathaniel Chambers on Primordia, Anders is deeply committed to the soul of the game, and that strong connection means that his music not only complements the art and narrative, but helps shape it. The rawness and beauty of his score is something I’ve aspired to match in the events accompanied by that music.

Below, you can hear some of Anders's atmospheric music for Fallen Gods and learn about the approach he takes to composing it. Then stop by his portfolio on SoundCloud for more goodies.

- Mark Y.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Mark: We have no written, let alone recorded, instrumental music from the era that Fallen Gods draws upon, and very little even in the way of description of the music. So how did you go about creating a musical score that feels authentic to the game’s setting?

Anders: To get a sense of consistency to the music within a soundtrack, I try to set up a palette of instruments that I then lean upon. For Fallen Gods I simply tried to find instruments that sounded like they belonged in that era. I found a few that I liked—which evoked something that of course wasn’t unique, but was perhaps a little unusual—and then mixed those along with more common European instruments, like the Irish flute and bass recorder.

Now, I don't know how to play those properly at all, so they probably sound strange to someone who recognizes how they are supposed to be played. But I hope this becomes an asset for Fallen Gods, which lives in its own world, which would develop its own forms of expression.

It’s also a ravaged, undeveloped world, and their music would perhaps often be so as well. So we tend to leave the music quite unpolished even as we put it in-game, both in performance and structure—the tracks are often merely sketches that say their thing once and then fade away. With that as a base to work from, what seemed most important and inspiring to me was to convey the bleakness of the world, its abandonment, to have the music reach for something that’s both lamenting and soothing at the same time.

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Mark: Fallen Gods consists of several different kinds of gameplay, including real-time combat, open-world exploration, dungeon delving, and standalone events. Each of these has a different pace, rhythm, and duration. Does your approach to the music change when you’re composing for these different segments?

Anders: A little bit. I feel most comfortable starting out with a few chords that convey something that’s fitting, or tug at my heart strings in some relevant way. And then I try to find a melody that can live beside them. But as we tried to make the different locations stand out a bit from each other musically, some locations called for starting out with certain instruments, e.g., percussion for the more lively towns, a couple of lonely bassoons for the wight-infested barrows, or a plucked lyre for the solitary little villages.

Sometimes, I try to find an instrument that can speak for a certain creature or set of characters, like the low strings—to my ears somewhat threatening but also ambiguous—for one of the Firstborn, Berkanan. And little bells—lost and mindless—for the stolen children surrounding him.

Sometimes, I just write whatever strikes my fancy and send it off to Mark and Maciej, and see if they can find a place for it. I think my favorite music placement is for an innocent little piece I thought wouldn’t fit in the game, but that they found a place for in the “Idle Tongues” event, where a few playing children suddenly meet the fallen god.

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Mark: Anything interesting that you’ve learned over the eight years you’ve worked on Fallen Gods?

Anders: Eight years feels like a long time to work on one thing, and it’s been a bit of a challenge sometimes to stay consistent within the style we’ve found for the music, as my tastes change, what I listen to changes. But to a far larger extent it’s just been a blessing to have so much time to slowly get a sense of what the game is, how the music can support it and be a part of it. To be able to wait for the tracks to come to me (as life gets more and more hectic around me), not have to rush anything at all. Also, it’s just been a joy and honor to be a part of this creative thing we’re doing together, so in that sense too it’s just been a blessing for it to keep lingering in my life.

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