Fallen Gods - upcoming Norse saga-inspired roguelite from Wormwood Studios

[Monolith]

Yes. I will try to put up a year end post summarizing. Lots of design progress. Lots of new art and sound. Some new writing, but writing remains a major chokepoint.

Looking forward to it!

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1641190/view/3138444617228983729

Goodbye 2021, Welcome 2022​

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

Fallen Gods: Significant Further Development

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!

Strangeland: Released, Translated, and Ported

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!

Primordia: Optioned, Translated, and Ported

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.

Conclusion
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!

 

[MRY]

That wasn’t the post I was promising—it’s pretty superficial.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

That wasn’t the post I was promising—it’s pretty superficial.

...writing remains a major chokepoint.

 

[MRY]

Question: As between a gameplay video with no dev narration (i.e., I play the game but say nothing), a gameplay video with dev narration, and a streaming session of the game on Twitch, which do you think is best? I've realized it's simply not feasible to try to take 500 screenshots and write a full narrative of a run, whereas a video would probably only take an hour or so.

 

[Abu Antar]

The second option.

 

[Quantomas]

Indeed the second option makes most sense. It shows the game and the explanation gives the showcase more depth. Your explanations and comments are always a plus. Most important: make sure to record the livestream.

Good to hear that there is progress that you can show.

 

[Zombra]

Question: As between a gameplay video with no dev narration (i.e., I play the game but say nothing), a gameplay video with dev narration, and a streaming session of the game on Twitch, which do you think is best? I've realized it's simply not feasible to try to take 500 screenshots and write a full narrative of a run, whereas a video would probably only take an hour or so.

Best for what purpose?

Assuming you're trying to sell me the game, my personal preference would be vertical slice gameplay, no commentary, with clear chapter markers indicating combat sequence, story sequence, inventory screen, etc. In case you don't know how chapter markers work, look at this Youtube video, hover over the progress bar to see which chapter you're in, and note the clickable chapter markers in the description. When shopping for games, I like to flip around in preview videos and find the stuff that interests me in that moment. "Combat looks neat (but I don't want to watch 9 more minutes of it); I wonder what the dialogue system looks like."

If I'm really fascinated, sometimes I will let a whole video play from beginning to end, and in these cases commentary is appreciated. Usually, though, I don't want to invest the time to sit there watching the whole thing linearly, so an explanation track isn't helpful.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Question: As between a gameplay video with no dev narration (i.e., I play the game but say nothing), a gameplay video with dev narration, and a streaming session of the game on Twitch, which do you think is best? I've realized it's simply not feasible to try to take 500 screenshots and write a full narrative of a run, whereas a video would probably only take an hour or so.

Second one.
You're uniquely placed to do actual developer commentary on design choices and such.

 

[V_K]

Assuming you're trying to sell me the game, my personal preference would be vertical slice gameplay, no commentary, with clear chapter markers indicating combat sequence, story sequence, inventory screen, etc. In case you don't know how chapter markers work, look at this Youtube video, hover over the progress bar to see which chapter you're in, and note the clickable chapter markers in the description. When shopping for games, I like to flip around in preview videos and find the stuff that interests me in that moment. "Combat looks neat (but I don't want to watch 9 more minutes of it); I wonder what the dialogue system looks like."

This.

 

[MicoSelva]

Second option would be the best, IMO.

 

[MRY]

In response to @Zombra’s question, I guess it’s not really to sell (I don’t like selling) in any aggressive sense. I just haven’t done a dev update in forever, the game is largely feature complete (though missing a fair amount of content, testing, etc.), so I think it’s ready to just show people how it plays. But I don’t want to spend a long time trying to make a slick, well edited gameplay trailer. I just want to do something relatively quick and easy for those already interested in the game and perhaps annoyed or skeptical about its development status.

The easiest thing to do is just to record myself playing it and hope it’s an interesting run. The question is whether my explanatory commentary would add (answer seems yes) and whether it would be good to do it on a livestream where there would be audience interaction (answer seems no).

The one thing I’d say is that FG isn’t really amenable to a vertical slice (which is why development has been so tricky), nor does it really have delineated features in the way you describe. Pretty much everything funnels into events, combat, and moving across the world map. And event the latter is only meaningful in the context of events and combat.

 

[Zombra]

Thanks. If it's more of a "developer diary" or "state of the game" type of thing, then I agree with the rest that option 2, gameplay + commentary, makes good sense.

 

[MRY]

While I still hope to get a gameplay video up soon (basically have been too puzzled by how to present one well), we plan to start having testers play the game once we drop in some new content in early May.

In anticipation of that, I put together a manual for the demo, which you can download here. It serves as a kind of feature list, I guess, so while it's not exactly a gameplay video, it's a pretty decent description of what gameplay entails, written in a practical way rather than as a marketing narrative.

 

[Quantomas]

Interesting, it seems FG has already a fairly sizeable array of rules that are known, plus many more from items and events to be discovered. Well, we did know this already, but browsing the rules gives one a sound understanding of the scope of the game. The space to explore. Chances are that many people will like FG for its rules already. It's also good to see an old fashioned manual again! Have to finish it, but reading up to exploration is already fun and entices prospective players to look forward to FG.

 

[MRY]

Thanks!

 

[buffalo bill]

we plan to start having testers play the game once we drop in some new content in early May

Do you have specific testers yet? I can't remember if there was a way to opt into an alpha/beta.

 

[MRY]

No specific testers yet. I imagine a few rascals from here would be involved.

 

[agris]

While I still hope to get a gameplay video up soon (basically have been too puzzled by how to present one well), we plan to start having testers play the game once we drop in some new content in early May.

In anticipation of that, I put together a manual for the demo, which you can download here. It serves as a kind of feature list, I guess, so while it's not exactly a gameplay video, it's a pretty decent description of what gameplay entails, written in a practical way rather than as a marketing narrative.

Thanks for posting this, I think it's actually better (for me) than a gameplay video.

Few assorted comments/questions/notes:

notes

• "proasic" should be prosaic (PDF pg4)
• Is the map randomized each new game? It's heavily implied, would be helpful to outright state it or not, here and in game landing pages
• Are your fallen god's stats, skills, and fetches randomly assigned when you start a new game, or player selected? same as above, being explicit would be helpful
• Portrait options?
• Under "Statistics", maybe list "Happiness. Follower Only. Description". It's not good layout to have a section dedicated to stats and have a new stat and description buried elsewhere.
• Why are some stats hidden? As one of the three types of exploration is listed as "exploring the lore and mechanics over many sessions", providing insight into all relevant stats helps achieve that goal to my mind (i.e. UI displaying them all). Speed is especially odd to not show up front, since it is posted over combatants in combat encounters afaik.
• What are the general range of stats? Are we talking 1 - 10, 5 - 20, etc? You list one range, happiness I believe. You should give us an idea of them whether it is "3 is abysmal, 5 is average," or just a numerical listing.
• Similar to the above re: stat ranges, you mention how blessings/curses give +/- 1 to rolls. What are the general range of rolls? Is it a d10 vs your stats which never go over 10, i.e. +/-10%? As it is now, informing the player of a +/-1 is information in a vacuum. Knowledge without wisdom.
• Dungeons: any consideration to increasing the type? Fallen ruins, desecrated shrine, abandoned town, etc. Dungeons being just caves and marshes feels.. limited? Well, not feels, but reads. Also, all marshes are 7 stacks but caves are variable - are these decisions the result of having to stop expanding features and going with what you have so that the game will be released this decade? No judgment if so, but these read as kinda limited/arbitrary and not reinforcing the core rogue-lite meta loop of replaying many times.
• Auto-resolve combat icon looks an *awful* lot like the pause combat button. I was reading the manual on my phone and actually didn't notice the difference until I pulled it up on my desktop to reference while writing this. I know it is less evocative, but maybe change it to a computer - or a gear, alluding to mechanical computational devices since this is "automatic" resolution.
  
• Your lawyer-mind likes to list in-line ala 1) and 2) and then 3). I've generally found that people comprehend lists better when bulleted out, although like your double spaces after each period, I expect you feel strongly about this

Sorry for the poor (non-existent) ordering of my thoughts.

 

[MRY]

• "proasic" should be prosaic (PDF pg4)

• Is the map randomized each new game? It's heavily implied, would be helpful to outright state it or not, here and in game landing pages

Yes. You're right. This should be explicitly stated. I think it's less urgent on the Steam page as I've never heard of a rogue-lite that was not random world gen.

• Are your fallen god's stats, skills, and fetches randomly assigned when you start a new game, or player selected? same as above, being explicit would be helpful

Randomly assigned.

• Portrait options?

No.

• Under "Statistics", maybe list "Happiness. Follower Only. Description". It's not good layout to have a section dedicated to stats and have a new stat and description buried elsewhere.

Hmmmmmm. I will think about this. It's a different kind of stat from the other ones, so it doesn't bother me that much having it in a different place, but perhaps you're right.

• Why are some stats hidden? As one of the three types of exploration is listed as "exploring the lore and mechanics over many sessions", providing insight into all relevant stats helps achieve that goal to my mind (i.e. UI displaying them all). Speed is especially odd to not show up front, since it is posted over combatants in combat encounters afaik.

A few reasons. The first is historical (the game had two stats at the start, the UI is built around them). The second is that these stats are different from the others. I would say that they are more like ability (?) scores vs. attributes. Speech is just your wits score, plus one if you have a skald. Threats is just your might score, plus one if you have a berserk. So it would be a lot of redundant information. Third, FG is basically anti-numbers. I know some people love numbers, but the entire ethos of the game has been to move away from incrementalism, and adding in a bunch of basically trash stats would be counter to that goal. But not saying anything about them in the manual would be confusing. Perhaps the better way to do it would be to not call these stats at all, and simply to address them in the Events section in describing what it means when the game says "You call on your threats..." etc.

• What are the general range of stats? Are we talking 1 - 10, 5 - 20, etc? You list one range, happiness I believe. You should give us an idea of them whether it is "3 is abysmal, 5 is average," or just a numerical listing.

Good point. Generally speaking, single digit.

• Similar to the above re: stat ranges, you mention how blessings/curses give +/- 1 to rolls. What are the general range of rolls? Is it a d10 vs your stats which never go over 10, i.e. +/-10%? As it is now, informing the player of a +/-1 is information in a vacuum. Knowledge without wisdom.

Maybe I should not define the +/- as a number, then. It's a little more complicated than just a d10 or whatever.

• Dungeons: any consideration to increasing the type? Fallen ruins, desecrated shrine, abandoned town, etc. Dungeons being just caves and marshes feels.. limited? Well, not feels, but reads. Also, all marshes are 7 stacks but caves are variable - are these decisions the result of having to stop expanding features and going with what you have so that the game will be released this decade? No judgment if so, but these read as kinda limited/arbitrary and not reinforcing the core rogue-lite meta loop of replaying many times.

First, it's basically a product of the setting concept. You don't have a lot of AD&D-style dungeons in the myths and folklore that inspired FG. Second, it is incredibly time consuming to write events, so the goal is to keep them interchangeable as much as possible. At the same time, if you have highly specific dungeon types (e.g., a desecrated shrine), it would actually feel weirder to have them showing up in every run. Let's say, to avoid that, I did five "special" kinds of dungeons (abandoned town, ancient ruins, gigantic barrow, haunted forest, whatever). Even if I made each of those just four-depth dungeons, in order to have variation among the events, I'd have to do at least seven events and two culminating events for each. So that would be something like 45 events -- just to have a unique four-depth dungeon on the map. 45 events is probably a year or more of added development time (each requiring its own illustration, VO, scripting, writing).

I guess I would say also that FG is very un-rogue-like in the narrowness of its content. You can see that in the enemy types, the item limits, the number of skills, etc. It's really more about trying to have each piece of content that we put in offer a lot of variation within it. I can't promise it'll be good, but there's really no getting around it.

• Auto-resolve combat icon looks an *awful* lot like the pause combat button. I was reading the manual on my phone and actually didn't notice the difference until I pulled it up on my desktop to reference while writing this. I know it is less evocative, but maybe change it to a computer - or a gear, alluding to mechanical computational devices since this is "automatic" resolution.

Yes, I know, it's irritating. :D I'm not going to make it something mechanical though, that sort of breaks theme. An absurd amount of time was spent unsuccessfully trying to solve this one...

• Your lawyer-mind likes to list in-line ala 1) and 2) and then 3). I've generally found that people comprehend lists better when bulleted out, although like your double spaces after each period, I expect you feel strongly about this

I think I was more just trying to save vertical space, but I could probably change this.

 

[MRY]

(Comments were super helpful by the way.)

 

[MRY]

One more quick note re: dungeons. Many of the things you threw out as dungeon ideas really fall more into the category of settlement quests or locations. There actually is an abandoned town, it’s just not a dungeon. And an apostate shrine, also not a dungeon. And a ruined farm. These are just framed a single events rather than event stacks, in part because they can’t sustain multiple events worth of content.

 

[agris]

I’m actually all for a “hide the numbers” approach - I love that Fallout never gave you dialogue options for which you didn’t have the skill threshold. If you had it, *poof* it appeared and was an option. If your skill/ability was too low, then it just wasn’t there. The thresholds were not listed next to the dialogue options either, unlike modern games.

It does strike me though that the anti numbers perspective is a bit at odds with the rogue-lite replayability factor. People that like those type of games generally enjoy stat engineering. I guess it comes down to execution and setting expectations. If you do remove some of the documentation re: +/- values and just keep it at a nebulous “bonus/malus”, I do think that is more aligned with your design philosophy and avoids some of the mechanical minutiae you want to steer players away from. Like working out your challenge rolls.

Switching gears, that makes sense re: dungeons. You get into a combinatorial content creation quagmire. Glad to hear there will be more varied event settings though.

What about marshes having a fixed number of stacks vs caves variable, what’s going on there?

Finally, for those that beat the game have you considered unlocking the ability to specify your fallen gods starting stats/abilities/familiar? Or lock the ability to specify one fourth of the possible options behind each of thr 4 unique ways to ascend to godhood / take Orm’s kingdom? Could add more life to the replayability, akin to FTL unlocking new ships after certain event outcomes achieved during a given run.

*************************

Glad they were helpful!


edit: what about crossed swords for auto resolve? Breaks up the parallelism that makes the icons look so similar.

 

[MRY]

> marshes

Basically, I couldn’t come up with enough marsh content. Enough for one big dungeon per session with a lot of variety. But not enough for more.

> auto

Yeah, what I will try is just flipping the icon—have the crossed swords be the default rather than parallel swords. There’s really no good reason to auto battle so I doubt it will get used much anyway.

 

[MRY]

> meta-progression

It has long been on the wish list. But the thing is, there is tension between content unlocks and maximizing variety out of the box. For instance, we could have different god builds unlock but then the vanilla runs would be less varied. Might have some very eccentric things like an all wits or all might god. Dunno.

Honestly, a lot of unlock-based rogue-like design, while addictive to consume, is based around Skinner box methods that I am philosophically opposed to. I’d rather people replay because the loop is fun and they keep finding new content than because killing 100 trolls unlocks a slightly different god build. (To be clear, I find meta-progression entrancing as a player, so I see why designers do it, but I have certain quirky design taboos.)