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:
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.
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.
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!
Website Overhaul
In collaboration with Nicolas Dekaise (developer of Enoch: Children of Fate) and superfan James Boehme, we finally gave our website, 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