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

[MRY]

Hope this works -- figured I'd showcase some of our new stuff by showing a very short run.

Spoiler

(Not sure what that weird blue/white line at the top of all these images is... maybe an Imgur thing.)

New logo, new main menu screen, new loading effect (the runestone's images emboss as the world generation happens), loading lore tooltips.

New UI. New item icons. New game start: you now begin with a warband; in this case I got a skald. This affects your gold/food allotment, too. We also have a new "outcome line" when you reach the end of the event, here showing the food, gold, and soul you have to start. New shader effect to desaturate the background when an event is happening.

New animated fog of war effect. New camera swoop as you walk to a location. New fog on swamps. New tooltip frame.

New character sheet. New UI tooltips. (The cursor disappears when I take screenshots, but it's hovering over the heart.)

New event UI.

New dice rolling effect. (We are probably going to wind up using Arabic numerals (despite pips being better verisimilitude) because on a 10-sided die, the pips can be pretty hard to read.) New limited re-rolls (3 per run; likely to be disabled on hard mode).

New shader effect for when it turns to night (e.g., from resting). There is no "day/night cycle"; this is just done to denote nighttime events and resiting.

New quip bubble. Small thing but the game forewarns you now when you can't flee; here it does no good since I've got no way to avoid this fight anyway. (My raven fetch did her best to save me, but as you'll see, it was very dumb to spend the night with a wizard.)

New combat UI.

New balance for reviving options.

Anyway, this is a small fraction of stuff, but I thought it might be nice to at least throw something up while I'm working on proper Steam screenshots. Maybe we can do an LP or something too.

[Edit: Accidentally left one shot out.]

 

[Tyranicon]

I really like the aesthetics. My only complaint is that the more stylized fonts might be hard to read, but it's difficult to tell unless you're actually in-game.

Best of luck!

 

[MRY]

Some more stuff -- a few things are more WIP here.

Spoiler

New ability to zoom way out to see the whole map. Glowing map icons for POIs to be added soon. (Incidentally, here is another starting warband: a priest and his flock. Note that you start with three souls here because of their faith.) New road logic which generates fewer loops and shies away from unpleasant terrains. This incentives the plain to go off-road for shortcuts, though there are downsides (getting lost in woods, consuming double food in wasteland, being unable to rest in swamps, traveling more slowly over hills).

New sailing interface where your location and selected destination light up on a minimap. You can now see where on the map you'll go; before you had to check the map and then enter town knowing what destination you were interested in. New docks as map locations where you can embark/debark, allowing sailing to be a more effective mode of rapid transit. Not picture, you can now pay for sailing with hacksilver (an item) instead of gold, making hacksilver more useful. The map icons are placeholders, but not too bad.

New Songstone illustration (and map icon) with an arrow indicating which gate you're at. These arrows on the map icons help you quickly tell which Songstone is which for planning out your journey, as Songstones let you teleport instantly (for one soul). This is a good way of moving quickly through the map's interior, since most towns and docks are located along the coast or (at best) rivers.

Similar new interface for Songstones.

Some adjustments to how swamp dungeons look at work, though nothing major shown here. The entry to each dungeon hints at what the dungeon contains, and followers sometimes elaborate. Here its' pretty obvious: this is a heathen-haven.

An example of some of the new "generic" dungeon interior illustrations used for "generic flavor" (i.e., non-encounter) events or sometimes used mid-event when you've cleared enemies out of your way.

Some tweaks to how you can receive information about POIs around the map, including the ability to give you information about the location of Amarok, one of the bosses. (I skipped over the events by which my warband was killed, my soul hoard was depleted, and my god was poisoned. I was in a hurry!)

A new minimap to show where the POI is located. It used to pan over to the POI, which was a weird effect since the event window occupied most of the screen, and since the warband wasn't moving. This works better.

A new portrait for the god in between full HP and low HP. Another new illustration for a dungeon culminating event (I skipped a lot en route, including a troll crippling me). One thing you can get from this event is the Soultrap (which was being used to drain your brother, the skald-god Eluf).

A new feature for when you break the Soultrap. Depending on how much soul-strength is stored inside (from the prior screenshot you can see it had 5 -- normally it starts with 1, but in this case, it had been draining Eluf for a long time, so it came preloaded), you have to fight a different configuration of shades. One is always a shade of the god himself, but his warband depends on the total score. This creates a balancing act where the more you load the Soultrap, the harder it becomes to harvest those souls. This was one step we took to help balance the soul-gathering victory path, which could be a bit too easy when you got the Soultrap.

As you can see, it was foolish to break the Soultrap with a crippled weakling god and no warband. You might also notice that as the day counter goes from 90 to 0, the color shifts from blue to red. This is one a variety of new features designed to call attention to conditional changes (e.g., leveling up a follower, gaining souls, spending gold, getting crippled, what have you).

 

[Bulo]

 

[Monolith]

Damn good stuff. Only the total worldmap seems small, with it being an Island. Is that screenshot representative of the final scale? Also no idea how dense the map is content wise, so may be just right.

 

[MRY]

Yes, it's representative; to some extent Iceland was the conceptual model here.

It would certainly be too small for a game like Darklands, where you have an open-ended campaign that spans ~100 hours of playing time and potentially years of the characters' lives. But it's around the same number of hexes as Barbarian Prince (fittingly also by Arnold Hendrick), one of the game's key inspirations.

As with Barbarian Prince, a run represents 90 days of your character's life. The island is a good size for that (I think) -- small enough that you can get anywhere, big enough that it's hard to go everywhere without luck/strategy. The length of a FG run in playing time depends on factors like whether you lose midway or not, whether you're reading the text, skimming, or skipping, etc., and how much time you spend thinking about choices. It's hard for me to know how long a normal player will take, since I always skip the text, barely read the buttons, and make snap decisions. My best guess is 30-120 minutes per run (the low end being how long it takes me, the high end being if you're reading carefully, thinking about all your choices).

 

[Monolith]

Thanks. Sounds a little like Roadwarden, with actual combat and more replayability. Still day 1 purchase right there.

 

[MRY]

Yeah -- when Roadwarden came out, it sounded strikingly similar, and I gave it a go. At a keyword level, the two align. In execution, they are about as different as those keywords permit. In RW you only very seldom get out of the menu-driven text adventure mode, whereas in FG, you are often walking across the map and fighting combats. That is, I'd say FG has discontinuous episodes, whereas RW has a continuous narrative. Within the menu-driven segments, the two take different approaches. RW feels more like a typical visual novel to me (recursive menus with lots of incremental choices, often cosmetic/used for delivering narrative), while FG is designed to be more like the Lone Wolf game books (propulsive menus with a few forking choices, almost always used to send the event in a new direction).

If anything, I'd say FG is more like FTL; indeed, if not for FTL, I would've gone forward with Star Captain, the original incarnation of Fallen Gods (dating back to '09).

 

[Tyranicon]

Roadwarden is woefully overrated.

 

[MRY]

We're going to be doing introductions to the current dev team over the next few weeks. Here's the first one about illustrator G. Pawlick. I can't figure out an easy way to copy-paste it over here, alas.

 

[MRY]

And updated our screenshots, thanks to my teammates finally putting me out of my misery and making them for me.

 

[HoboForEternity]

I am playing roadwarden rn and i quite enjoying it. So FG is kinda like that, with actual combat and procedurally generated world and events?

 

[MRY]

Like I said, the two have a certain conceptual similarity, but the execution is so different that I'm not sure that liking one (or disliking one) will be that predictive of the other.

A LP of Roadwarden shows that it takes some 30+ minutes to get through the initial event (the camp you show up in), with dozens and dozens of nodes of text and micro-choices along the way. The single largest, most climactic event in Fallen Gods probably would take five minutes (setting aside the combat, which can go very quickly too, depending) and would involve something like five choices.

The games have rather different tones, too. And the visuals are very different. So I really don't know.

 

[Abu Antar]

Looks cozy.

https://twitter.com/WWSGames/status/1763972538806546870
When you seek tidings in steadings, sometimes you hear of hidden things, and sometimes you get only tall tales.(I was hoping to learn something about the marsh off to the northwest, but it looks like I'll have to find out the hard way.)

 

[Infinitron]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1641190/view/4161959930701120810

Team Introductions: Anders Hedenholm

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

[Feyd Rautha]

 

[Dualnames]

It's been a pleasure to be working with Mark on this behemoth of a project, there's so much happening at the same time, but it's been a fascinating project so far.

 

[MRY]

Next team member intro, Cleopatra Motzel.

 

[MRY]

Maciej Bogucki.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Strap yourselves in, boys:

https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/lets-play-fallen-gods.149914/

 

[Tyranicon]

From what I've seen, the writing so far is already better than 99% of modern games. Well done, MRY

 

[duskvile]

Strap yourselves in, boys:

https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/lets-play-fallen-gods.149914/

Can you give us the gameplay video ?

 

[Darth Roxor]

no because i don't cater to zoomers

 

[MRY]

Hope the LP is successful, and thanks for the kind words.

Meanwhile, belatedly, James Spanos.

 

[MRY]

Dan Miller, who joined me at the Wasteland 2 launch party in days of yore (not longer after we'd started on Fallen Gods) on the Codex's tickets.