Primordia News

Hello, everyone!

In our attempts to keep Primordia always updated and playable, we've passed the verification process of Valve, and Primordia has now moved from playable to verified! To enable our players to move their saves from and to the Steamdeck, we've decided to upgrade the Windows version from 3.4 and 3.5.0.26

That means that issues like that red border and other glitches with the OPEN GL renderer, are now fixed.
We want to ensure that you are able to continue your progress prior to the update, so if you have savegames before this update, you can revert to the previous version of Primordia, and resume your progress. We're also providing savegames in key-parts of the game, to help you move to the new version, if your heart so desires.


- If you want to revert to the older Primordia, opt into beta channel "oldprimordia", password is "oldprimordia".
Here's a small guide.
1) Right click on Primordia, go to PROPERTIES.
2) Properties
3) Betas
4) typing in that text input box "oldprimordia" WITHOUT QUOTES, hitting check code
5) Hitting the blue button that will appear
6) The game will begin downloading files and once that's done, your saves will still be there and ready to be loaded.


BELOW ARE SAVES FOR THE NEW VERSION:
- Here are saves in case someone needs em!

http://primordia-game.com/Files0/Primordiasaves.zip

If you want, u can extract them into your saves and load the relevant names.
Your saves are located at:
1) Windows:

%USERPROFILE%/Saved Games/Primordia

2) LINUX:
~/.local/share/ags/Primordia

3) OSX/MAC
~/Library/Application Support/Primordia

Next week, as part of our decade-long support of Primordia, we will be updating the game's Windows build. This build will improve the game in significant ways, including: ensuring save-game cross-compatibility with Steam Deck, Linux, and MacOS; integrating the Italian translation; and resolving issues with both OpenGL and Direct3D.

Unfortunately, the updated build will not work with saved games from older builds. If you want to continue saved games from older builds, you will be able to revert back to the current version using three simple steps that will be described in the news post associated with the update. We are sorry for this inconvenience, a persistent problem with the AGS engine, and we appreciate your understanding.

If you want to lock current version of Primordia (and not get the update) you can do the following:

Here's a small guide.
1) Right click on Primordia in your library, go to PROPERTIES.
2) Properties
3) Betas
4) Type in that text input box "oldprimordia" WITHOUT QUOTES, hitting check code
5) Hitting the blue button that will appear

We're quite late with this, but finally, almost a decade later, we listened! So, for the first time ever [besides GOG where it has always been available], the Official Soundtrack that accompanies the game, composed by Nathaniel Chambers, is available!

Hope you enjoy

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

[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. 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. 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]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! These kinds of false starts are not uncommon with fan translations.

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

[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]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!

Exactly nine years after Primordia's release, we are honored to be able to share an Italian translation, courtesy of the hard work of Marco de Vivo, one of the tireless volunteer translators who have helped make Primordia available to players around the world. This Italian translation is particularly important to me because the humanistic themes of the game owe so much to Italian writers such as Calvino, Levi, Buzzati, and Ecco, whose works I have only been able to enjoy thanks to translations into English. To give one specific example, this sentence from Invisible Cities rolled around in my head while creating Metropol and the struggle between Clarity and Metromind: "In the seed of the city of the just, a malignant seed is hidden, in its turn: the certainty and pride of being in the right—and of being more just than many others who call themselves more just than the just." It is a great satisfaction, and a humbling moment, to be able to share Primordia back to a culture from which I have received so much.

In order to avoid breaking save games, we are not integrating the patch into the main build, so you will need to follow the steps below to install it. As we always have done, we will provide prompt and continuous support to make sure that any bugs and snags with the translation are taken care of quickly. We hope you enjoy the game, and that it finds another nine years of kind reception from our players.

INSTRUCTIONS:

1) Click on settings [gear] and then select [Properties]


2) Make sure the Updates settings are set to automatic.


3) Select "Italiano" as your language. This will begin updating the game.


If you wish to revert back to your saves and continue your progress without being able to play the game in Italian, change the language to English.