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


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.


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!


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!

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.

We are humbled by, and grateful for, the support that you have all given Primordia over the past nine years -- from driving Primordia through Greenlight faster than any other game ever, to giving it reviews that for years kept us in the top 20 games on Steam, to creating fan translations, fan art, cosplay costumes and more. We have tried to repay that generosity by supporting the game ourselves, patching it constantly to keep up with evolving hardware, implementing translations and quality of life adjustments, providing technical support and hints, and responding to every review, post, and piece of fan work.

With this nine-year history shared among us, we'd ask that you consider nominating Primordia in the Labor of Love for the Steam Awards -- a recognition that would belong as much to you as players as it would to us as developers.

The likelihood of our little engine-that-could winning a Steam award is very slight, but we might as well give it a shot!

"Come on, boss, you don't really think this is going to work, do you?"
"No, Crispin, but as Michael Scottbuilt once wrote, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take."

-Fixed an issue with speech set from lucas arts to sierra style in Metropol

After many years, we are very pleased to finally release a native MacOS and Linux versions of Primordia. The Windows version has had nine years for us to squash bugs, while the Mac and Linux releases are fresh out of the oven, so if you hit any snags, please let us know as a comment to this post or on the message board, and we will work quickly to address them. In the meanwhile, we hope new players will enjoy playing the game natively!

Every Steam sale we have the pleasure of having new players discover and explore Primordia. Happily, most of those players come away very satisfied, but some of them are disappointed. In hopes of minimizing the latter category, I wanted to share a few notes about the game for new players:

(1) There are no dead-ends and you cannot die. Some of your choices may change the course of the game a bit, but nothing closes off "good" (or "bad") endings altogether. So playing should be a low-stress experience.

(2) If you are unfamiliar with old school (1990s) adventure games, a few tips. You can interact with (left click) and examine (right click) many points of interest in a room. You can pick up, use, and combine many items. Horatio is scavenger and a mechanic, so a considerable aspect of the game is salvaging, building, and repairing machines.

(3) If you ever get stuck, you can ask Crispin for help by left clicking on him. If the hint doesn't help, wait a couple seconds and click on him again for another hint. These are designed to get "stronger" (i.e., more direct) if you continue to pester him while stuck at the same spot. If Crispin isn't sufficient help, you can always consult an FAQ or a walkthrough, though I recommend using that as a last resort and Crispin as a first resort.

(4) Many players think that you are required to take handwritten notes. You are not. The game automatically records all necessary information (and some unnecessary information) in the datapouch, accessible by the toolbar or by pressing D.

(5) Many puzzles in the game have multiple solutions or are optional. One puzzle in particular (involving an information kiosk) often stumps players. It is an optional puzzle

(6) If you want to try a demo, you can find one on the Wadjet Eye Games website, though it's from an older build: http://www.wadjeteyegames.com/games/primordia/ If you want a taste of the setting, you can check out our story "Fallen" for free: http://primordia-game.com/fallen.html

I hope you play and enjoy the game! But if you encounter any technical snags and need assistance, come away unsatisfied, or just want to drop a line, feel free to email me at mark at wormwoodstudios dot com, message me on Steam, or leave a post in the forum. The game's coder and I check these things pretty frequently and will try to make sure that you're taken care of!

Finally, if you enjoy Primordia, check out our recent release Strangeland. It's also an adventure game, but with very different themes (and higher resolution graphics).

Eight and a half years after we released Primordia, we at long last are ready to share our second adventure game, Strangeland. We are grateful beyond words for the support and encouragement we've received over the years for Primordia, and we are hopeful that Strangeland will be a welcome addition.

If you're interested, please consider wishlisting: it helps raise the game's profile in Steam's sorting algorithm, and the success of a game on launch makes a big difference for whether it ever gets its legs.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1369520/Strangeland/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1369520/Strangeland/
Wormwood Studios is delighted to announce that the Steam page for our second adventure game, Strangeland, has now gone live!



You awake in a nightmarish carnival and watch a golden-haired woman hurl herself down a bottomless well for your sake. You seek clues and help from jeering ravens, an eyeless scribe, a living furnace, a mismade mermaid, and many more who dwell within the park. All the while, a shadow shrieks from atop a towering roller-coaster, and you know that until you destroy this Dark Thing, the woman will keep jumping, falling, and dying, over and over again....

On May 25, 2020, Arnold Hendrick, the creator of the revolutionary board game Barbarian Prince and the revolutionary computer game Darklands, was taken by cancer, just shy of the three-score-and-ten years the Psalmist allots us. “It is too soon cut off, and we fly away.”

I never met him; I know next to nothing of his life story. But all the same, Mr. Hendrick had a direct and significant impact upon me. Our upcoming game Fallen Gods is inspired by both Barbarian Prince and Darklands. Both games are marvelously inventive and brilliantly realized. Sometimes works of fantasy are called “escapism.” To “escape” literally means to shed one’s cloak. (One can ponder the age of brigandage when slipping a robber’s clutches in that manner was frequent enough to coin this expression and put it in common currency.) Mr. Hendrick’s games were the opposite—the player does not shed his cloak so much as garb himself in another’s clothes. Contrary to the genre’s name, most RPGs do not achieve this effect. The player’s role is not that of a hero, but that of a hedge fund analyst, crunching numbers, maximizing upside and minimizing downside. But in Barbarian Prince and Darklands, the player is immersed in the characters and the setting. For a while, he sees a different world through different eyes. A person is greatly enriched by such an experience, while merely shedding a cloak—in contrast—leaves one a little poorer, even if we sometimes need to escape to survive.

When I began designing and developing Fallen Gods years ago, I tracked down Mr. Hendrick’s email address. When our game was ready, I wanted to show it to him as tangible evidence of the impact and inspiration of his work. But I kept delaying the email because I wanted to make sure Fallen Gods was worth his time. Now there is no time left.

So I must end where I started: I never met Arnold Hendrick; I know him only through his published games and articles about game design. To me, all of them bespoke an abiding curiosity, a creative vision, and an overflowing generosity toward his players. The man put 136 saints in Darklands. May they speed him to his Maker.

Every Steam sale we have the pleasure of having new players discover and explore Primordia. Happily, most of those players come away very satisfied, but some of them are disappointed. In hopes of minimizing the latter category, I wanted to share a few notes about the game for new players:

(1) There are no dead-ends and you cannot die. Some of your choices may change the course of the game a bit, but nothing closes off "good" (or "bad") endings altogether. So playing should be a low-stress experience.

(2) If you are unfamiliar with old school (1990s) adventure games, a few tips. You can interact with (left click) and examine (right click) many points of interest in a room. You can pick up, use, and combine many items. Horatio is scavenger and a mechanic, so a considerable aspect of the game is salvaging, building, and repairing machines.

(3) If you ever get stuck, you can ask Crispin for help by left clicking on him. If the hint doesn't help, wait a couple seconds and click on him again for another hint. These are designed to get "stronger" (i.e., more direct) if you continue to pester him while stuck at the same spot. If Crispin isn't sufficient help, you can always consult an FAQ or a walkthrough, though I recommend using that as a last resort and Crispin as a first resort.

(4) Many players think that you are required to take handwritten notes. You are not. The game automatically records all necessary information (and some unnecessary information) in the datapouch, accessible by the toolbar or by pressing D.

(5) Many puzzles in the game have multiple solutions or are optional. One puzzle in particular (involving an information kiosk) often stumps players. It is an optional puzzle

(6) If you want to try a demo, you can find one on the Wadjet Eye Games website, though it's from an older build: http://www.wadjeteyegames.com/games/primordia/ If you want a taste of the setting, you can check out our story "Fallen" for free: http://primordia-game.com/fallen.html

I hope you play and enjoy the game! But if you encounter any technical snags and need assistance, come away unsatisfied, or just want to drop a line, feel free to email me at mark at wormwoodstudios dot com, message me on Steam, or leave a post in the forum. The game's coder and I check these things pretty frequently and will try to make sure that you're taken care of!