Incline Strangeland - new adventure game from Wormwood Studios

[Verylittlefishes]

These VO sessions are the cutest thing of this year.

 

[MRY]

February release, I think.

 

[Infinitron]

Wadjet regular Ivy Dupler joins the Strangeland cast as a trio of creepy skulls!

 

[Infinitron]

Brittany Lauda takes on the role of the "Young Masquette" in the game Strangeland. Here we try two different reads of the same character.

 

[Infinitron]

Wadjet newcomer Mike Ciporkin plays a sinister machine in Strangeland! Watch us as I get gaslit by a weird clicking sound, my daughter almost replaces Mike as the character, and we spend wayyyy to much time trying to nail the nuance of one small line.

 

[Infinitron]

Tom Schalk voices a pathetic, self-loathing creature named Rotta in Strangeland!

 

[MF]

I don't write with an actor in mind unless the actor is cast. For instance, we cast Abe halfway through Primordia's development (or maybe 2/3 through) when I was still writing lines (I believe... although that seems hard to fathom in retrospect). So I'm pretty sure I started writing Crispin with Abe's voice in mind. [EDIT: "Started" in the sense of, "for the last parts of the script, I began to..." not that I was writing with Abe in mind from the outset.] And on Fallen Gods, I now write with Jamie Campbell's skald narrator in mind. The voice actor becomes a character after he voices the character; but before then, I can't picture it.

I don't have a very audio-oriented brain -- I learn by listening, but I can't hum or whistle a tune, identify a note, or say, "Do a voice like so-and-so's." For that reason, I wouldn't say that I have any articulable voice in mind, though I always read the lines aloud to consider their meter, rhythm, and general euphony. That's true even for things that are not voiced (like when I write a legal brief). But clearly at some level of my brain, there is a voice because once I start hearing auditions, I can immediately say "Yes, no, yes, yes, no, NO!" as to whether an actor is right or wrong. It's just like there is something between my "hear-and-processs" portion of my brain and my "process-and-articulate" portion of my brain, so that it is very hard for me to put into words what I am hearing or what I am expecting to hear. This is, of course, quite unfair for voice actors and directors, but the world is sadly full of such injustices, and why shouldn't I be entitled to add my fair share?

By the way, the reality is, once a character is voiced, it is very hard (IMO) to differentiate the writing from the acting. Or, I should say, the acting almost predominates over the writing. I can't tell you if Raziel and Kain are well written or not; but they certainly seem well written to me because of the VO! Put the exact some dialogue in some amateur's mouth and I bet the lines would seem godawful. This isn't to disclaim responsibility; if you engineer the airplane badly enough, no pilot can keep it from crashing (or even get it off the ground). But I bet if you love the lines, it will be because you love the actors.

Somehow missed your reply, but it's interesting how you seem locked into your own voice for audiation but still recognize it when something feels right or wrong outside of that.

That's what it's called, by the way, that portion between 'hear-and-process' and 'process-and-articulate', it's called audiation. It's a mental snapshot, or a buffer in your short term memory if you will, of audio used to parse it into words and the meaning they represent. It's also what gives us the ability to internally realize music. Coined by a musicologist named Edwin Gordon and later adopted by some linguists to cover the intermediate process between hearing and perception, even though it's still mostly used in the domain of music. You can train its passive use, but its active use is mostly a natural aptitude and correlates to some forms of musical talent and how well you can do impersonations or adopt accents.

Love that you consider how euphonic your writing is when doing a legal brief, although I suppose it's an oral rhetorical strategy that is just as important on paper precisely because of what we discussed here.

Anyway, that's all widely off topic. All sounds great, February it is! Looking forward to it.

 

[MRY]

Snippets from today's testing notes to Dualnames. Mild spoilers, but makes me laugh. What a morbid game.

Spoiler

• When I loaded my autosave from last night, the oil covered bird reverted to being under glass and still with its head
• In the sequence where the arthropods eat the woman, could we shorten the pause between when all the bugs run up to her and when they go up her legs?
  
• If the snake is dripping poison when Ego Scribe starts talking, it causes the snake to snap back to idle frame. The result is pretty jarring. I know why it’s doing this (to prevent poison dropping on Scribe while he’s talking), but I’m not sure it’s the correct way to solve this.
  
• “universe goes cold” -> “universe grows cold” b/c of VA misreading line
  
• The *squeal* VO from Abe for the homunculus when you stab it is 1000% percent terrible. I think we just need a sound effect there rather than VO from Abe.

Truly, testing a game is something.

 

[HorribleHombre]

February release, I think.

Any updates on this?

 

[MRY]

Probably not February. We'll see. I've been insanely busy at work, which has stopped me from doing the comprehensive VO audit that we need to get the thing over the finish line. It's absurdly close.

 

[MRY]

Despite my being a lazy good-for-nothing, we're at least now in a wider beta process. Meanwhile, Dualnames keeps adding visual flair the likes of which no AGS game has ever had. I swear, if I just refused to vet the last few lines of voice over for another year, he'd probably program world peace out of boredom.

 

[R@tmaster]

This game's depressing. All adventures are silly or depressing nowadays. Where have all irony gone? I totally can use some irony.

 

[MRY]

7 years, 21 posts -- and one for Strangeland! I count myself lucky!

I think the game is melancholy, not depressing (which is also my take on Primordia). The distinction I draw is that both moods involve a bad situation, but a depressing work uses the bad situation for the purpose of degrading the human spirit while a melancholy work uses a bad situation for showing the strength of the human spirit. If one plays Strangeland and comes away thinking, "Everything is horrific and there's no hope of anything better," then I will have failed. If they come away thinking, "So much is horrific, we have to look for what is beautiful and cherish it," then I will consider the game a success.

The word "irony" always makes me anxious because in my middlebrow education, some number of teachers would say we were using the word incorrectly (an issue I vaguely recall coming up in connection with the Alanis Morissette song. As others tend to fear the pronoun "me," so do I fear the word "irony." That being said, I think both Primordia and Strangeland contain irony in several senses (dramatic irony, verbal irony, situational irony). Whether that's the sense you mean, who can say? How ironic!

 

[Maxie]

Lotta words about a game you've yet to release

 

[MRY]

 

[R@tmaster]

If one plays Strangeland and comes away thinking, "Everything is horrific and there's no hope of anything better," then I will have failed.

"A Dog's Heart" and "Idiot" are also depressing, but still remaining classic. It isn't a bad thing, it's just not what I want to see nowadays.
By irony I meant Ironic Worldview, where subject reflects world, people living in it and his own life with a grain of salt. The other meaning, beside verbal, I never have been able grasp . For instance in Resonance there is a scene where two characters stand on top of something high and one of them says " Isn't it ironic something" (referring to current situation) and the other replies "I don't think that's what irony means" or something like that. I don't understand what they talked about.

 

[Verylittlefishes]

If one plays Strangeland and comes away thinking, "Everything is horrific and there's no hope of anything better," then I will have failed.

"A Dog's Heart" and "Idiot" are also depressing, but still remaining classic. It isn't a bad thing, it's just not what I want to see nowadays.
By irony I meant Ironic Worldview, where subject reflects world, people living in it and his own life with a grain of salt. The other meaning, beside verbal, I never have been able grasp . For instance in Resonance there is a scene where two characters stand on top of something high and one of them says " Isn't it ironic something" (referring to current situation) and the other replies "I don't think that's what irony means" or something like that. I don't understand what they talked about.

I don't know, pal. If the first couple of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novels were clearly ironic, the latter ones (especially fifth) were depressive to my taste. It's a thin line.

Spoiler

 

[Heroic Liberator]

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Obviously, you can find "irony" even in the most dramatic and depressing conditions:

It can be borderline with sarcams or cynicism tough.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Gallows humor is a thing after all.

 

[MRY]

By irony I meant Ironic Worldview, where subject reflects world, people living in it and his own life with a grain of salt.

Ah. What adventure games do you think fit the mold?

I think our abandoned (perhaps some day to be returned to) project Cloudscape might have had what you're looking for. I was going to pursue an explicit Jack Vancian tone -- I guess I would call it like "wry stoicism." The setting was still pretty dark but the protagonist enjoyed her adventure and viewed the adversity she faced as faintly ridiculous.

 

[MRY]

Not sure what the citation is needed for, but here was the post about Cloudscape if that's what you're asking for. The large painting of the protagonist is totally off. It was done by an artist Vic liked, but the painting makes her look way too old and and just generally not what I envisioned, other than some of the gear and perhaps the optimism:

Spoiler

Primordia ate up a huge amount of my time, energy, and passion for two years, but at the end, there it was, our baby! Unfortunately, the follow-up to Primordia—a project called Cloudscape—also ate up a huge amount of my time, energy, and passion, for almost a year. At the end, there's really nothing to show for it.

Originally this was going to be a postmortem, trying to understand what went wrong with our ambitious, beautiful, doomed project, but candidly I don't see any point in that exercise. Instead, I want to share with you guys some of what it would have been.

* * *


On Perebor, a world of seething clouds and strange wind-borne creatures, the La civilization flourished and faded, leaving behind mysterious towers to be picked clean by treasure-hunters, archaeologists, and profiteers. Now, the scavengers’ boom years have passed. What remains is a decadent world, nominally run by the Amarant Corporation but in fact ruled by a ruthless criminal known as the Headman. For decades, no starships have passed through this backwater, but an unexpected visitor has suddenly arrived: Dahlia Hein, a messenger from the Interstellar Courier Service, coming to claim a bequest left by a certain “Angelo Nemo.” The trouble is, no such person seems to exist . . . .




When people ask about Primordia sequels—and about unanswered questions in the game, such as why the War of the Four Cities began or what happened to the Choir in Civitas—my answer tends to be that Primordia's universe only seems big and elaborate. The peripheral things, however neat they may have sounded, were really just there as ideas not as fully realized content: for example, the War of the Four Cities just represents war for no good reason to no good end; it's not a particular fictitious geopolitical conflict spawned from social and economic considerations.

With Cloudscape, however—ambitiously imagined as the first game in a trilogy—I wanted to build a universe that could actually sustain more than a stage-production scale. As preparation, I spent years gorging myself on space opera and planetary romances, and I fell particularly in love with the works of the late, great Jack Vance.

To the extent Cloudscape's "universe"—as opposed to the particular planet on which the game takes place—has a single strongest inspiration, it is the Oikumene of Vance's The Demon Princes series: a decadent but not depressing faster-than-light human civilization that serves as a fun-house mirror to our present-day virtues, flaws, and foibles.

But I didn't just want to create a big setting for the game(s): I wanted to have both the big setting and a content that was basically about "ideas" just like Primordia's smaller content was. So there's this elaborate backstory that sets up a sociopolitical history and fictitious universe for the game, but also operates as a bunch of symbols and allusions.

For example, "Perebor," the world on which the game was to be set, takes its name from a Russian word that is both a Russian Orthodox funereal bell-striking ritual and a nerd slang term for a problem that lacks an elegant solution. The planet was colonized by a Russian corporation (Amarant ZAO), although by the start of the game's timeline, most of the Russians were long since gone from the planet. (Unlike Primordia, Cloudscape would take place in a "real world future.") Russian cultural allusions, from Tchaikovsky's Snow Maiden (a leitmotif, puzzle solution, and parallel to the game's story) to prison slang, were woven through the setting. (Tchaikovsky, of course, was a double allusion, the second one to Loom, one of my favorite games.) Other cultures flitted around: Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist thought, Saami traditions, Romantic poetry, Conway's game of life, Gold Rush-era prospecting, analog technology, and so on and so forth.

Thematically, the game was about the breakdown of families, death rites and rebirth, and captivity. Crows were integral—in the imagery, in the themes, and in Pereborian culture (they served as a primary meal item, sometimes passed off as "black squab"; another key staple was "small mutton," the euphemistic term for rat).



As with Primordia, I spent an inordinate amount of time on language and wordplay. I agonized over names—like Moeder Veer (actually, Vic's inspired adaptation of my "Mother Feather"), the cult leader; Anton Walzer, the Headman's brutal enforcer; Jules Barba, a fossicker who served as an informant for the Amarant Security Office. Sometimes I tried to create a kind of echo in different names.

Perebor:



Teratorn:




Terebinth:




One of the things I'm proudest about regarding the design is the way in which image, idea, and setting were fitted together, such that we could have an awesome creature like the teratorn or a tortured tree like the terebinth actually make sense as organic elements of Perebor, rather than just part of a quilt of striking but unrelated elements.

Because one of the important characters—an "off-screen" character, since he's long-dead by the time the game starts—was a Pereborian poet, I found myself dusting off the old Primer playbook and writing a variety of poem-based puzzles. One of the more clever ones IMHO (I'll avoid spoiling the puzzle) worked off of this poem:

The Sum of Man

The seven sins are all man’s worth,
a fitting match to seas of earth,
the churning, teeming devil’s brew
from which evolved those sinning two,
whose lust ten generations bore
until the One could take no more.
He rent the firmament asunder,
sending forty days of thunder
to drown his murd'ring, grasping brood,
who, still abiding, grew more shrewd
and so connived fourscore more arks
to spray their seed across the dark.
A thousand worlds were claimed by man,
new bowers where he’d breed his clan,
and thus a star-crossed race would sire,
unsmiteable by flood or fire.

Setting aside the poem's dubious merits as a work of art, it did manage to cram in some of the game's background lore (namely, the project of seeding different worlds with humans) and a puzzle, so there's that. Plus, a shout out to Days of Thunder? That's worth something, right?

I wanted to retain the eccentricity that we had in Primordia—even build upon it—while still having the characters come across as human. Primordia's robots provided a good excuse for monomania; it's a bit harder with real people. Still, I was pleased with the roster of knights errant, mad poets, rusting AIs, bumbling tycoons, plucky urchins, longsuffering priests, gas-choked miners, touring freaks, and the like. With Vic at the wheel and Cory Webster riding shotgun, our designs were great.




Perebor, like the world of Primordia, is a dying world: in fact, it's dying for the second time. Humans are scavenging the planet, but they've held on too long and are being pulled under by the very corpse they're clutching. That message was sometimes delivered by the game with a light touch, but sometimes (as in the case of the slaughter of Perebor's "whales"), with a heavier hand.


The graphical quality we could hit arose from a few things (aside from Vic's genius): a built-from-scratch engine by coder Steve Poulton; additional concept work from Cory Webster, and fantastic sprite work from Ben Chandler. (Below, Dahlia Hein, the game's protagonist.)

It all actually came together in a working, high-res build with ambient sound, music, dialogue built using our new editor, and so on. (I'll save the screenshot for a later post.)

So, what happened?

There's no great explanation. It was a very ambitious project that could succeed only with all of us pulling together in the traces, and that never seemed to happen. For the months we spent on it, most of what I have is hundreds of pages of design, ten thousand emails, a few dozen pictures, a lot of music, and a few invoices. Ultimately, several different things coincided in Vic's life to create additional challenges, and for a three-month span, I didn't hear from him at all. (I hear from him occasionally now; he's mostly doing murals.)

The truth is, independent game making is a tricky thing under the best of circumstances. We probably would've been wiser to aim smaller—perhaps with that sequel to Primordia I always refuse to contemplate. But I hope that someday I'll be able to dust off what I did on Cloudscape and make something of it. If not our beautiful, ambitious adventure game, perhaps at least some kind of a sourcebook for other people to pick over.

The Storm

I dreamed a new behemoth,
of wing and eye and claw,
a creature wreathed in seething mist
that poured out from its maw.

The thing I dreamed regarded me
with sneering awful mirth,
as I in youth once viewed alike
my fellow sons of Earth.

In fear I tried to rouse myself,
to flee its burning gaze.
Yet then I knew I was awake,
and stared at naught but haze.

The vision was an eidolon,
a pipe dream, nothing more.
But the pipe is just a boatman,
and the night has awful shores.

* * *

Anyway, all is not lost: as it happens, the despair left by Cloudscape's untimely death eventually turned into a surge of energy propelling me to my next project, which I hope to announce very soon.

 

[Maxie]

is Fallen Gods real

 

[lightbane]

Less words and more game releases. And no accepting Epic's bribes, ever.

 

[Tom Selleck]

Don't listen to these weirdo sads who want clown games for tweens. (Deponia is just over there --> for you lot) Just let me buy a deluxe edition already.