Fallen Gods News

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.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
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.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

As Fallen Gods nears completion, I wanted to introduce the crew that’s working with me to get it done. Our founding principle for Wormwood Studios was to create independent games with a small, international but close-knit team. From day one, we had teammates on three continents: North America, Europe, and Australia. On Fallen Gods, we’ve added Asia and—with our newest team member, Gessony (“G.”) Pawlick—South America.

The moment I saw the first illustration signed “G. Pawlick,” I knew he was the artist to help bring Fallen Gods’ events over the finish line. His works do exactly what I hope our game will do: restore the uncanny, alluring, unsettling elements that are sometimes lost in “cool” modern fantasy conventions, while also capturing the timeless elements that make folklore, fairy tales, and epics so familiar. It’s no wonder that G. is also a student of magic and history. My faith in G. was thoroughly confirmed when, working on one image, he asked if I could help him find references for the ceilings of barrow burial chambers.

You can see G.'s gallery here, and hear his thoughts on Fallen Gods below.

- Mark Y.

Mark: You’re one of the newest members of the team. Are there any particular challenges or opportunities in coming into a project that’s been in development for so many years?

G.: I think there are always two sides, good and bad, but so far I’ve seen only advantages. In long projects, the good part is that there is already a cohesive and well-founded universe. This gives a certain level of security when creating—after all, there are always resources and references to help with the creation and development of each illustration. Normally, the bad part about projects that already have a history is the possibility of encountering limitations when trying to develop a concept, or being tied to a formula that does not allow innovation. But that hasn’t happened to me in Fallen Gods. There was always an exchange between me and the rest of the team when ideas emerged, and I’ve had a huge scope to add to the project.

Mark: Fallen Gods uses static illustrations to unfolding, dramatic events. What techniques do you use to give dynamism to a still image?

G.: Above any technique, the main thing is to try to transport the situation and make an emotional parallel with the essence of the scene. Of course, having some notion of composition and a good visual library helps to develop the storytelling that the image needs, but finding the point of connection with the image is fundamental.

Mark: Is there a particular illustration among the many you’ve done that is your favorite? Why?

G.: There are some already, and I believe that others will also emerge as the project progresses. At the moment, “Dwerg Workshop,” “Changelings,” and “Stone Cold Killer” are my favorites. But I believe that it is part of the process to fall in love with each of the ideas and, as new illustrations emerge, to let them take the place of the previous ones.

I also don’t think there is a specific reason that makes me have these illustrations as my favorite at the moment. Sometimes it is the concept or the storytelling that fascinates me, in others it is basically a well-executed drawing, or even some emotional connection that I have established with the idea.

2021 was a momentous year for Wormwood Studios, with major achievements on Fallen Gods, Strangeland, and Primordia.

[h2]Fallen Gods: Significant Further Development[/h2]
Fallen Gods is now many, many years into development. Its progress is slow, but steady, and has been significant on a number of fronts this year—significant enough that we finally published the game’s Steam page (and we’re grateful for the thousands of wishlist additions that have followed).

Art-wise, we added dozens of new illustrations to the game (every event in the game is accompanied by an illustration), new combat sprites and animations, new character portraits with varying moods, updated mountain and marsh tilesets, and various small visual enhancements across the board. Audio-wise, we added dozens of new voiceovers for events (the first text node in each event is narrated), dozens of new musical sketches, and numerous sound effects.

The most significant advances have been design-wise. Fallen Gods is an open-world, procedurally generated, non-linear, narrative, rogue-lite RPG. While other games (including its forebear, the board game Barbarian Prince) have had many of these features, this is the first game I’ve developed that did not have a predefined structure. One of the greatest challenges has been ensuring that the game still has clear direction, strong pacing, and satisfying progression, along with a high level of challenge. As more of the game came together, we’ve revised a number of systems, including how dungeons are traversed, how information is doled out to the player, and how the economy works. We also introduced some additional victory conditions. I’m relatively confident that the design is now in the “refinement” rather than “reworking” stage, which should help us fill out the rest of the content. We’re hoping to release Fallen Gods in 2022. The major challenge is simply that the older I get, the less time and energy I seem to have, which has slowed the design/writing down.

My hope is that in the next month or so, we will finally be able to share a lengthy gameplay video showing a run through the game. There is still quite a bit of placeholder content, but it will at least be satisfactory proof of life!

[h2]Strangeland: Released, Translated, and Ported[/h2]

In May, we released Strangeland, our long-awaited adventure game follow-up to Primordia. We are grateful for the response so far. Strangeland is an intensely personal game. Using the psychological horror genre, we poured the tragedy, despair, hope, and redemption that we’ve experienced in our own lives into the vessel of a classic point-and-click adventure game. Originally conceived as part of a three-week jam, Strangeland consumed over four years of our lives into a full-length game, which many thousands of people have now played and enjoyed (and a few people have played and disliked!). The connection between players and the game is the most important thing about this work for us, so the reaction we’ve seen has been wonderful.

For the past year, we have been working very closely with a group of volunteer translators to make Strangeland available to non-English speakers. It is an exceedingly tricky game to translate, given the rich allusions, complicated wordplay and puns, and occasional language-based puzzles. Thanks to the hard work of Endre Linea, we were delighted to release the first translation, into Hungarian, just before the end of the year. We expect to release a German translation next, with Spanish and French close behind. Unfortunately, the Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and Polish translations are stalled—but perhaps we will be able to get them started again too in 2022!

Finally, we ported Strangeland to MacOS and Linux... and laid the foundation for some even more significant porting next year. We’ve always wanted to offer native Mac and Linux builds, and we’re glad to be doing so now!

[h2]Primordia: Optioned, Translated, and Ported[/h2]

Rather unexpectedly, a film adaptation of Primordia that once seemed a pipedream appears to be progressing (with sufficient reality that we were paid a non-trivial option-extension fee). We can’t share much publicly about it, and it’s always safest to assume that these things won’t pan out, but it’s a serious team working on the film project. It just speaks to the strength of the community that you alll have built around Primordia that our little old game continues to attract such attention. Next year will mark a decade since our game was released, and we celebrated our 300,000th copy sold this year.

More down to earth, Primordia received an Italian translation this year, courtesy of volunteer translator Marco de Vivo—adding to the existing official French, Spanish, and German translations and unofficial Russian one. As with Strangeland, we have had some false starts into other languages this year (and in years past), but we plan to keep trying to bring Primordia to new languages and new audiences as the years go by. Recently, Russian and Turkish translators approached us, so we’ll see where that goes.

We also achieved our long-running goal of releasing native Linux and MacOS ports of Primordia. As with Strangeland, we made a more significant port this year, too, which we should be able to announce early next year. Needless to say, we’re very excited about it.

[h2]Conclusion[/h2]
As always, we want to end by thanking all of you, who have made our dreams of game development possible. You’re awesome, and we are grateful for your support. We hope that in 2022 we are able to continue sharing our best work with you, continue enhancing our existing games, and continue participating this wonderful community that you’ve helped create. Happy New Year!