Notwithstanding the continuing lack of any new games, 2015 has been an amazing year for Wormwood Studios for a couple reasons. 

First, Primordia sold about 50% more copies in its third year than it did in its second, received a beautiful French translation, and rose into the top 15 user-rated games on Steam.  It also crossed a significant threshold: over 100,000 copies sold.

Second, I fulfilled an adolescent dream of being able to work on the closest thing to a second Planescape: Torment — namely, Torment: Tides of Numenera.  It’s been a humbling experience to be just one of many writers, with only a small part to play in the greater scheme, but all the same, the 70,000-odd words I’ve poured in so far seem to me to be among the best I’ve written.  As I’ve said many times, Primordia was heavily inspired by the original Torment, so this feels like closing a circle.

While life has a way of going awry, next year looks to be even more exciting.  Primordia will be getting a Spanish translation (currently about two thirds complete) and — if Wadjet Eye Games can clear its pipeline — an iOS release. There are also Polish and German translations, and a new Russian translation, although I am not especially confident that these will be finished anytime soon.

More importantly, we have three games in the works, which I’ll list in order of my confidence that they’ll be done in 2016.

First, James Spanos — Primordia‘s coder — will be releasing Until I Have You, an action game that is rather tricky to classify.  It has elements of Canabalt, Ninja Gaiden, and Hotline: Miami, but is absolutely its own distinct creature.  I’ve had some peripheral involvement in revising the writing, but otherwise this show belongs to James and his artistic collaborator, Andrea Ferrara.  UIHY has been in development for over a year and it’s fully playable, with about 90% of the content in place.  This kind of game requires a huge amount of testing and honing, but I can’t see any way that James doesn’t get it over the finish line.

Second, Victor Pflug — Primordia‘s artist — is developing Trenchmouth, a point-and-click adventure game similar in spirit and style to Primordia.  Trenchmouth is about a world not unlike ours, where a Great War grinds on without end.  This has a certain superficial similarity to the background of Iron Storm, but things diverge dramatically because Trenchmouth‘s setting cannot be untangled from Vic’s techno-magical realism.  Despite his endless efforts to ground his creations in real technology, there is a dreamlike quality, and at the end of the day Trenchmouth is not going to be a “What if?” alternate history but a nightmare whose symbolism is rooted in a dark historical reality.  Vic and I have chatted a bit about the story, and I think it’s shaping up nicely.

This runestone serves as the main menu (options not visible) and part of the opening cinematic.

I then launched into a massive project to hybridize these games with Weird Worlds, a procedural “coffee break” game.  The game was called Star Captain.  I read about 100 space opera novels, watched hours of space opera TV and movies, studied a ton of space opera P&P games, and churned out a 250-page design document.  I was very close to signing a contract with S2 Games to co-develop the title (at the time, I was doing writing for them), but it fell through, and I switched gears to make Primordia.  Then I discovered that Mass Effect had largely preempted my narrative concept (cannibalizing the space opera canon) and a slew of games, most prominently FTL, had seized on the same gameplay structure.  Well, shit.

Around the time Cloudscape died, I was reading Beowulf to my kids and The Long Ships to myself, and fell in love with Anglo-Saxon language and Norse fatalism.  I embarked on a long reading journey, which took me through most of the Icelandic sagas, the eddas, the Tain, the Exeter Book, and lots of history books.  So immersed, I realized that I could take Star Captain back closer to its Barbarian Prince roots, and thus Fallen Gods was born.

Here are just a few of the missing tiles, and sprites that replace the ! icons.

The basic gist of the game is that the player is one of the eponymous “Fallen Gods,” who must win his way back to the Cloudlands — our Asgard — by hook or crook.  I don’t want to spoil too much at this point, but basically it is a bleak game that blends Norse mythology and Icelandic folklore (and European folklore more generally) with a rather bleak worldview that fell upon me when reading a series of books about the aftermath of various revolutions (Russian, French, Bolivarian, and anti-colonial wars of liberation in Africa).  The current pantheon of Fallen Gods successfully overthrew the indifferent, and even cruel, primordial gods who ruled before them (a blend of titans and animistic prehistorical gods).  Despite this signal and perhaps noble victory, the new gods, led by Orm the Trickster, have proven fairly inept as divinities and catastrophe has befallen the world: political, ecological (I was also reading, among other things, The Earth Without Us and The Sixth Extinction), and spiritual.

Anyway, the “hero” — more anti-hero, or let us just say, player character — has a fixed number of days to make his way back to the Cloudlands, lest he become mortal forever.  The game plays out through three systems: the world map (depicted above), events (which are still coming together from an interface standpoint), and combat (which is still in the mockup stage).

Here’s a look at some of the combat art:

A bogwight in its native environment.

A troll.  In theory, at least, the far background will be contextual to the map.

It’s a shame that I don’t have a great pic of the warband facing off against some of these foes.  I can only say that the artist — Daniel Miller — is simply amazing.  These are true pixel art, drawn dot by dot, each frame drawn from scratch.

Finally, here are a few examples of events:

So this is a look at how they actually work: text with options.

A draug in “The Dead Hand.” (How the images look as standalones.)

“The Lights of Skyhold”

Some still worship the old gods.

The corpse of Karringar, one of the defeated Firstborn.