-Fixed an issue with lamplight bot being clickable.
-Fixed an issue with 3 translations and dialog options not being respected.

An insane amount of thanks to Ed from WEG discord for finding these issues instead of patching Fallout 4, so here's a breakdown.

-Fixed an issue with mouse being turned off in Gospel.
-Fixed a disparity with translations and Gospel.
-Fixed an issue where saving and loading uis could be brought up inside the Gospel.

As 2025 begins, we wanted to take a moment to express our gratitude for all the incredible support we've received this year -- a big thank you to our amazing friends, fans, players, testers, translators, and teammates! Your enthusiasm and dedication have been crucial to everything we've accomplished. Here's a quick overview of some of our major achievements this year:

Primordia

The big update for 2024 was Marauder Film exercising the option we signed years ago, which gives Marauder the right to produce a Primordia movie. While this doesn't guarantee the film will get made, it's an exciting development! At the outset, I was very hesitant about agreeing to an adaptation of Primordia, as the world, characters, and story are so near and dear to my heart. Still, after seeing my teammates' enthusiasm and Bastiaan’s evident excitement for the project, I was persuaded. It's going to be interesting to see someone else's story and take on our creation, and the Marauder team seems excellent.

Meanwhile, James has continued to polish and support the game, the proverbial Man the All-Builder returning to perfect his creation, with a number of small bug fixes and improvements.

Strangeland

Late in 2024, the lead on Strangeland's Turkish translation reached out to me and James to let us know that he had gone back through and revised it, line by line, because he wanted the translation to do the game justice. He sent us a touching note, explaining how much video games had meant to him growing up, and adding:

This perspective is what makes meeting individuals like you such a joy for me. Learning about your journey as developers and reading about the experiences that shaped your creative vision has been profoundly moving. It’s clear that your work isn’t just about making games but about creating meaningful art that resonates with people on a deeper level.

These kinds of messages mean so much... as I've said for years, the connections our creations make with our players is like calling out into the void and hearing a friendly voice answer back. Knowing that something we poured ourselves into matters to someone else is the whole reason for creating indie games.

Strangeland also got a first pass at a Spanish translation right at the end of the year, and we're hoping a final, integrated version will be ready by May.

These translations spring from the incredible generosity of our fans. I've enjoyed working with the translators on both Primordia and Strangeland to make sure the "voice," themes, and wordplay come through as much as possible -- a daunting task. There's always a fair bit of technical work for James in implementing them, and given this time commitment, these may be the last translations we do for a while. Still, it's satisfying to look back at the many translators and translations we've had the pleasure to work with and on over the past decade!

Fallen Gods

This year marked a significant milestone for Fallen Gods, our longest-running project, now approaching its 11th year! While we're not quite there yet, we're in spitting distance. The core content and engine are firmly in place, meaning 2024 was about refining and adding the finishing touches. That included features such as the tutorial, ending slides, world map, quest log, scoreboard, and run summaries. Art-wise, we completed a major UI overhaul; refined, replaced, or added dozens of illustrations; and added pixel art for new combat animations, diagonal movement sprites, and map details. On top of that, we expanded the game with more events, music tracks, sound effects, and voice-over nodes, while enhancing the ambient soundscape.

There's still a bit to go, but we're committed to ensuring Fallen Gods is as polished as possible before we cross the finish line. One nice thing about the development of the project is that we're not beholden to any timetable.

Website Overhaul

In collaboration with Nicolas Dekaise (developer of Enoch: Children of Fate) and superfan James Boehme, we finally gave our website, https://www.WormwoodStudios.com, a much-needed overhaul. I'm not sure how much traffic developer websites even get these days, but we wanted to present our games in a cleaner, more attractive way.

Sundries

Finally, in Wormwood-adjacent news, the amazing Carbonflesh (which James has been working on forever) got its reveal and a demo, as did Infinity, the very first commercial game I ever worked on as a writer/designer (a quarter century ago!). And Iron Tower's Colony Ship, which I had the pleasure to consult on, had its final content patch, the culmination of many years of development. As anyone who's been through it knows, RPGs take a long, long time to make. I just hope that when Fallen Gods finally crosses the finish line, it's as great as these three games are!

- Mark

- Primordia no longer autosaves during the intro part [to avoid players accidentally overwritting their saves]
- Few italian translation fixes.
- OSX now has an arm 64/intel executable [thus no longer requiring the installation of Rosetta 2]
- Added a failsafe to avoid crispin sounds from happening when crispin is not moving.

-Fixed an issue with the gospel music getting stuck.

This is an infamous bug, I've seen it happen only twice in the span of 11 years or so, and finally found it and squashed it.

Finally after long testing we've managed to fix a bug that while random has happened to a few people over the years.

-Fixed a crash bug with wiring UI. [if you know, you know, otherwise spoiler free]
-Fixed a repetition of a quip in the same UI to avoid annoying players.

Tiny patch:
-Ed a wonderful user on the WEG discord, reported a bug in regards to a music track not playing in a specific point in the game, on specific circumstances, cannot explain further cause that'd be a spoiler.

Early today, Marauder Film exercised its option to purchase the rights to make a cinematic adaptation of Primordia! It’s another major step forward, even if the final destination is still a good ways off.

This journey started five years ago with an email from Bastiaan Koch (head of Marauder Film) to Mark Yohalem (Primordia’s writer/designer) asking about the possibility of adapting Primordia. Bastiaan is a movie-industry veteran with decades of experience on films like Pacific Rim, Rango, and Ready Player One.

Given the overwhelming enthusiasm from co-creators James Spanos (Primordia’s coder) and Victor Pflug (Primordia’s artist)—and after meeting with Bastiaan in person and seeing how enthusiastic he was—Mark got over his uncertainties, and we all signed an option with Marauder Film. It seemed like an impossible dream, but bit by bit, Bastiaan worked to turn that dream into reality. He enlisted Walker McKnight, Winner of the Academy’s Nicholl Fellowship screenwriting award, to write a treatment and then a screenplay, and brought in his team of artists to develop the project’s look.

Over the years of that development process, Bastiaan spent hours talking with each of us about what Primordia meant to us. When he shared Walker’s draft script in January 2023, we each responded in our own style. Mark told Bastiaan about his “Aunt Virginia, whose poem ‘The Inheritors’ was so inspirational for Primordia,” explaining that in another poem, she imagined undergoing a sea-change that would bring new joy to others: “Shape me and shine me into a sea prize / Found by a boy’s / Quick eyes in glad surprise. / Sea, sky and sand, / Let me one day / A small child’s happy summer memory.” Vic invoked the film franchise that inspired his artwork on Primordia: “This is just fantastic in every way. It feels a bit like the sequel to Aliens to me—punchier and more action oriented than the original, but told in the same universe and the same world, with the same vision at its core.” James was simple and direct: “Exciting!”


As you can see from the poster, and as we’ve talked about before, this is a Marauder Film project, not a Wormwood Studios one. Our game is a jumping-off point, but Marauder is not simply making a non-interactive version of Mark’s story with an HD version of Vic’s graphics. Cinema has its own imperatives and strengths, and Bastiaan’s team members have their own distinctive talents as storytellers and artists, even if they don’t have a coder like James!

We hope Marauder Film brings new players to the game we made so many years ago, and it’s fascinating to watch another team explore and build upon our creation. We’ll keep you posted as we learn more.

Happy birthday to Primordia! Today marks 11 years since its release!! And we have worked on a big patch. A list of specific follows below, but I'd like to prefacing it by saying, that we love your support and your encouraging words over the years. Myself and Mark have constantly put work into Primordia primarily to reward the players for their faith in us and in the game, inherently. I hope everyone has a wonderful time playing the game during the holiday season, that's almost upon us. Thank you so much, I can't stress that enough!! We love you!


Primordia Patch Notes:
----------------------

1) Ctrl-G now switches between MOUSE/KEYBOARD to skip speech and MOUSE/SPACE.
Essentially this means when the only keyboard key that will work is space and any mouse click will also skip
the dialog/speech lines
2) Re-arranged options/settings in the OPTIONS/SETTINGS UI, so that they make more sense.
3) Added OPTIONS/SETTINGS on the Main Menu Screen [bottom right, there's a cog/gear]
4) Added an extra option that defines whether mouse/keyboard/time is how dialog/speech progresses
or mouse/keyboard meaning it will remain till the player clicks or hits a key.
5) Added an extra option for text, which is Voice Only. Any voiced lines that are difficult to read
or like boops or bleeps, will still appear on screen, but this essentially allows players to play the
game, without text visually appearing on the screen.
6) The game has been upgraded to 3.6.0.50 version of the engine, saves will not break to our testing,
but in case they do end up breaking, you can revert to the previous version of the engine.
The reason why we change to this version, is because it fixes a lot of visual issues and compatibility issues
with input devices [mice and keyboard]. It also allows the game to run at more likely a desired and proper
resolution for the player.
7) Fixed the infamous issue with the "Three Musketeers" and "We're all in this together" achievements.
8) Fixed an issue with Crispin disappearing.
9) Now settings persist through saves [meaning your settings will now be the same for all your saves]



- If you want to revert to the older Primordia, opt into beta channel "351primordia"/"Primordia AGS 3.5.1",
password is "olderprimordia".

Here's a small guide.
1) Right click on Primordia, go to PROPERTIES.
2) Properties
3) Betas
4) typing in that text input box "olderprimordia" 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.

As I've mentioned before, a couple years ago we were approached by Bastiaan Koch of Marauder Film about adapting Primordia into TV or film. Bastiaan is an acclaimed VFX artist able to push the visuals to the next level, and he has had a longstanding interest in post-apocalyptic settings and robots, making him a great match to our game. (Just to hit a few of the highlights: Bastiaan is a VFX Supervisor at FuseFX and a veteran of LucasFilm, and he's been a part of three Oscar-winning and five Oscar-nominated VFX teams.)

As anyone who has worked in the industry knows, it's a lot easier to express interest in adapting a game than to actually adapt one, particularly when the game wasn't trying to be "cinematic" at the outset (the way modern AAA action games are, for instance). But Bastiaan has stuck with the project doggedly -- through a pandemic, no less -- and, along with others (including Walker McKnight), has put together an initial screenplay and outline for a Primordia movie. Walker is himself the winner of the Academy's prestigious Nicholl Fellowship for screenwriting.

What they've crafted is not "Primordia the game in a screenplay format." Instead, Bastiaan and Walker found the elements of the game that resonated with them most, and as well as the elements that go best in the cinematic medium, and then they added a great deal of themselves and their own vision into the project. That's how it has to be. The thought of folks creating something out of Primordia without putting their own souls into it would be terrible! A theme of Primordia is humanity's inheritors taking responsibility for building a new world rather than mechanistically sticking to their programming in a context where it no longer made sense! So too with this: if Marauder manages to pull this off (and so far, Bastiaan has proven indefatigable), they will bring forth a new world of Primordia, rooted in the old one to be sure, but suited to new creators in a new context.

As a jumping off point, here are some thoughts from Bastiaan:


And if you're curious, here's a look at one of Bastiaan's original projects, which has been picked up by Netflix:


All of that is to say: exciting times! I'm hopeful that we'll be able to share more concrete elements with you as the project goes on, but either way, we're proud that our little game has inspired such an undertaking.

Mark, Vic, James