Today would have been the 69th birthday of Joe Dever[en.wikipedia.org], the late amazing writer and creator of the Lone Wolf series of game books (among other things). Anyone who has followed the long development of Fallen Gods knows that Lone Wolf was one of its core inspirations[mythicbattles-scenarios.com]; not once, but twice, it had an important influence on me as a game designer.

I first discovered Lone Wolf in the 1980s when I was a kid, and I was enthralled. Dever’s writing and Gary Chalk’s art[garychalkfantasyprints.bigcartel.com] brought the world to life with spare, vigorous prose and evocative ink drawings.

As an avid consumer of all things fantasy, the books could have held me if they were nothing more than novels. But what really sank the hook was that they were structured somewhere between a Choose Your Own Adventure (which I loved) and Dungeons & Dragons (which I had struggled to connect with). If you haven’t played these gamebooks, you should because they have a particularly special quality seldom captured in computer games: the options you don’t take—whether the Kai Disciplines (super powers) or gear you forgo at the start, or the choices you opt not to take as the adventure progress—are as evocative as the ones you do take. Even after you’ve “won” a book it’s impossible not to pick it up and play it again and again. Over time, the character sheet was shredded from erasures, the spine broken, and nearly every page dog-eared... in book after book.

In fact, the first game I ever designed was a dice-driven gamebook called The Road to Doom’s Castle, made using The Print Shop[en.wikipedia.org] on our Apple IIc and a borrowed thermobinder. (I imagine the clip art will be familiar to anyone of a certain age...) As homages to Lone Wolf go, it is a poor one (given the limited abilities of an 9-year-old), but it was one of my first steps on the road of game design, with Joe Dever pointing the way.

And then, video games and computer games caught up to Lone Wolf in storytelling, and I drifted away from gamebooks and into Gold Box and later Infinity Engine cRPGs, Sierra and LucasArts adventures, and every jRPG I could get my hands on. My designs and stories for Primordia, Strangeland, Infinity, and other games have their roots in those adolescent obsessions of mine. I probably never would have spared another thought for Lone Wolf, and never would have launched the great undertaking of Fallen Gods, except that Joe Dever did something else that showed what an amazing person he is.

In 1999, Dever authorized Project Aon[www.projectaon.org] to republish the Lone Wolf books, for free online. He wrote:

I would be especially pleased if my granting of the rights to distribute my books in this way was seen as my ‘millennium gift’ to all those devoted readers who have kept the Kai flag flying high, through all the good times, and the not-so-good. It would make me very proud indeed if this enterprise laid the foundations of a lasting legacy, securing the longevity of Lone Wolf by making my creation freely and readily accessible to current and future online generations.

(Gary Chalk, naturally, showed the same generosity and allowed his illustrations to be used as well.)

As a result, in 2005, the games were waiting for me to play again—without wearing out erasers or pages or spines in the process—and I consumed them avidly, enjoying that rare double-vision delight where you look through jaded and youthful eyes at the same time, and through both sets see something splendid. “Nostalgia” doesn’t explain it. The gamebooks are just damn good. The choices still have their impact. The balance remains excellent. The writing is still lean and muscular. The art is still fantastic. The world of Magnamund and the nation of Sommerlund remain as enthralling as ever.

Joe Dever’s generous heart is as much an inspiration as his creative mind—it’s one reason I’ve enjoyed releasing free games (and free content) to our fans whenever I can.

In whatever summerland his soul rests, I hope he knows that the lasting legacy of Lone Wolf left its DNA in Fallen Gods. “Blessed is the giver, richer through the giving of a gift.”

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.

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!

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

I’m pleased to continue our team introductions with two of the more recent team members—which is to say, they’ve been working on Fallen Gods for many months rather than many years. Hailing from the Czech Republic and Argentina respectively, Jan Pospíšil and Marcelo Orsi spread our team even farther across the globe!

I first crossed paths with Jan way back in 2018, not long after he began work on Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind, when he generously offered to contribute some art to Fallen Gods. Since King of Dragon Pass was one of the important inspirations for Fallen Gods, and since Jan’s art is (and was) phenomenal, it was a wonderful offer to receive! Unfortunately, conflicts on both ends kept intervening, and it wasn’t until late 2022 that we finally were able to connect, and not until late 2023 that Jan had time to dig in more. Now he’s taking on one of the critical pieces of our art: the illustrations the player sees in the game’s many different endings. He also contributed a couple of event illustrations.

Marcelo and I met on Twitter, as his striking artwork for There Is No Light and Inscryption kept catching my eye (as well as James’s). It turns out Marcelo is as much a fan of our games as we are of his art, and we were all glad to find an excuse to collaborate. (Marcelo’s also helping on Carbonflesh with James.) Very quickly, we bonded over our shared love of Borges (an Argentine author who influenced Primordia’s characters and worldbuilding) and asado. So far, Marcelo has worked on assembling a lorebook for Fallen Gods from other artists’ material—an assembly process that benefits from Marcelo’s excellent artistic skill—and we’re looking forward to sharing The World of Fallen Gods soon. We also are looking forward to additional contributions from him in the game itself, such as beautifying the items, and in its manual.

Both Jan[www.deviantart.com] and Marcelo[marceloorsiblanco.artstation.com] have amazing galleries that shouldn’t be missed!


Mark: You’re best known for your work on Six Ages, another game that is grounded in mythology, folklore, and history—but a different set of influences for each. What steps did you take to make your Fallen Gods art capture the different setting?

Jan: I played the game for a bit and looked at the existing art a lot. The overall visual language actually felt quite familiar, the challenge was mostly in adjusting my tools and process to produce similar-enough results. I definitely simplified my drawings compared to Six Ages, which was in a way quite liberating. There isn’t as much need for a ton of culture-specific details and other than the god there aren’t many recurring characters. Then it was a matter of keeping the color palette more muted than I did in Six Ages, as well as leaning into strong lighting setups rather than flat local color.

Mark: Initially, you did a pair of event illustrations for Fallen Gods before taking on the ending illustrations. Are there any differences in approach you’ve taken to the endings?

Jan: The endings definitely require more flash and drama—using both lighting and composition they need to feel impressive and final. It obviously depends on the nature of each ending, but the player should typically be feeling big emotions while looking at the painting. We meet strong important gods, prevail in battle over terrible monsters and see bright bridges of light shoot up into the heavens—the art needs to deliver that spectacle. In other cases we get just a landscape that has to communicate a certain mood, or half a character facing away from the “camera” or cut off by deliberate composition that needs to get their relationship to the god across.

In the end I think I just planned a bit better before I started and tried a little harder while I painted. ;)


Mark: What first attracted you to Fallen Gods?

Marcelo: I think the atmosphere of the game was the first thing that hooked me in. It was something beyond just “retro,” which would imply something created now that wants to emulate something old... no, this game felt as if it was actually created in the past, in a period where I think games were truly magical. The art, the music, and the narration just transported me to that awesome era.

Then, the gameplay loop sealed the deal for me: it wasn’t just the atmosphere; this thing played as a classic game, too! It wasn’t obvious; I had to figure out how to win this thing. It was like a puzzle, something I kinda miss with the standardization of mechanics these days. That’s what I mean when I say it felt from that classics era: it was fresh, as games from back then were. After a few runs, I went from being interested in it to actually loving it.

Mark: As an artist yourself, what do you look for in creating a book to showcase the diversity of illustrations within Fallen Gods?

Marcelo: Well, the first thing I looked for was an element that would help me achieve some kind of cohesion. That’s when the UI of the game came into the scene: just had to adapt it and it would give me the forms I needed to link each illustration together, as well as the type for the text. This of course had to be modified to suit the new format, but the game already has that “book” feel, so it was an easy adaptation.

Now, for actually compositing everything, I treated each page as if it were an illustration that will now include the frames and the text: it needed focal points, and a flow. And most importantly: it needed to be clear to the reader... so even if I added some effects here and there to spice things up, I always tried to keep them subtle. The illustrations and text had to do the heavy lifting, my work just needed to frame them and enhance them without getting too much attention.

After a hiatus, I’m pleased to continue the team introductions! Next up is Jamie Campbell, the narrator of Fallen Gods, is another of its longest-running contributors and another teammate who brings both amazing talent and passion to his work. When we set out to cast the narrator for Fallen Gods back in 2016, I expected a few auditions—instead, dozens upon dozens of voice actors put in, each with his or her take on the text and the speaker. (One of them, Steven Kelly, would fittingly go on to voice the scribe Fimbul Fambi in Strangeland, bringing the same skaldic personality to that role.) We ultimately chose Jamie, who not only delivered what I had heard in my head, but also drew out qualities that the written words had only hinted at.

Jamie’s distinctive delivery—sometimes wry, sometimes epic, sometimes disgusted, but always warmly, wisely human—brought the language to life, and inspired the approach I took to the many thousands of words I wrote over the next eight years. Throughout it all, he has remained a rock of reliability on the team, steadily working through the hours upon hours of voice acting. His answers testify to the thoughtfulness and sophistication with which he approaches his work.

After reading what Jamie has to say, go listen to his stuff on SoundCloud[soundcloud.com], including a fabulous reading of “The Raven” (anyone who played Strangeland knows how much I love that poem) and a performance as Kefka, a villain who left a lasting impression on me.

- Mark Y.

Mark: Within hearing just a few events’ worth of voice over, it becomes apparent that the narrator has a personality of his own. How would you describe that personality, and how did you construct it?

Jamie: One of the things that drew me to the project in the first place was that I read that one of Mark’s influences in creating Fallen Gods were the Lone Wolf game books by Joe Dever, which I collected and absolutely devoured as a kid. These were grand fantasy adventures told in the second-person, and once I understood this as an inspiration, I had that type of backdrop in mind, and I remember how my inner voice would hear those books as I read them. They were like Tolkien meets Choose Your Own Adventure.

The skald introduces every event node that the player comes across, and because the player is accompanied by his voice so often, I wanted to establish a sort of “baseline neutral” as a launching off point. Unless there’s an emotional or dramatic start to an event, the skald generally approaches it with a similar level of calm and interest in whatever’s transpiring. However, when the action is punctuated by something dramatic or unusual—an ambush or an environmental peril—I wanted to get right into it to make the player sit up and take notice so that they’re emotionally tuned in when it comes time to make their decision as to how to proceed.

The narrative takes stylistic inspiration from ancient epic poetry, and the fact that this sort of luxuriant language and poetic structure is woven into the writing presents a unique challenge, but also makes it ridiculously fun to read. (I majored in Classics, and I absolutely love this stuff.) Because of that narrative tradition, and due in large part to much of Mark’s wonderfully-paced writing, it felt natural to deliver the lines with a sort of ‘round-the-campfire, oral tradition vibe. Some of the lines are more prosaic than others, but the skald’s lines often lend themselves to a bit of a rhythmic, metered delivery, so I’ve tried to inject a bit of poetic flair and musicality into them where appropriate.

Regarding the personality of the skald, I see him as something between a conscience, a co-conspirator, and occasionally a judgmental observer, like a bemused St. Peter (or Valhalla’s equivalent) taking notes in his Big Book. At times lofty and serious, heavy with gravitas, and at times conspiratorial and sly. He’s concerned about the player-character when their life is in danger, and relieved and content when things are going well, or when some boon materializes. Because the skald spends so much of the adventure “over the shoulder” of the player and spinning their song, it strikes me as a fairly intimate relationship – with a caveat.

When I was brought on board as the skald, I remember thinking back to how much I absolutely loved John Rhys-Davies’ wonderful narration for the CD-ROM version of Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness when I was a kid. I haven’t heard that stuff in 20+ years, as I intentionally stayed away from revisiting that when developing the voice of the skald. But what stuck in my memory all these years later is a sense of what I’d call “detached intimacy.” Similarly, it feels to me like whoever the skald is, their fate is somehow intertwined with the player-character’s, as if the skald wouldn’t exist or wouldn’t serve a purpose without him. They’ll never meet face to face, but they’re close companions anyway.

The mystery of the connection that may or may not exist between them is part of the fun; the skald may truly have some stake in the wellbeing of the player, or he may just be doing his best as a storyteller. I think that this sense of mystery also colored the not-quite-discernible accent of the character. To me, he feels like a “person from nowhere,” and this unknowable, faceless voice is another element that fits right in with the ancient poetic and oral traditions to which it pays homage.

Mark: You’ve been working on Fallen Gods for almost a decade. Has your approach to the voice over, or the narrator’s personality, changed at all during that time? Has the passage of time presented any challenges?

Jamie: It became apparent early on that consistency was going to be absolutely vital so that there’s a level of comfort that the player settles into as they travel along in the adventure. This is especially true because of the non-linear, procedural nature of the game. At any given time, a player’s next encounter might be something that I recorded five years ago, or it might be something that I just finished yesterday. Thankfully, Mark and Maciej have been not only an excellent audience, but fantastically helpful collaborators with regard to choosing which takes felt most appropriate. I think that in doing so, they helped steer that consistency along.

With regard to whether the approach and personality of the skald changed over the years, I’d say that it’s been a very engaging balancing act. On the one hand, keeping the aforementioned “baseline neutral” as a bedrock to keeping consistent with what’s come before, and on the other, developing a keener sense of just how close the relationship between the skald and the player comes to feel over the course of this vast number of lines and encounters.

I mentioned earlier that a lot of the passages have the feel of ancient epic poetry. As the voice developed, it was important that even when voicing events that don’t necessitate this poetic rhythm, I wanted it to feel like that same heartbeat was there; it needed to remain buoyant and ready to move when the words next wanted to dance to Mark’s lead. After years of recording, so many brilliant passages have come in and surprised me, and there’s an ever-widening scope of just how many adventures the player goes through with the skald accompanying them. I hope that ultimately the passage of development time won’t be evident, but on the other side of the microphone, I’m always learning more about this world, and I’m just having a blast throughout.

As to the challenges of working on a project with this kind of lifespan, it’s presented one particular challenge which I’m delighted to have. Over the last few years, my wife Katya launched a successful handmade jewelry brand called GogolHaus[www.instagram.com], which she operates out of our home studio. She’s crafty enough to have also built the structure of my recording booth (Orm bless her) in the same room, so we’re often splitting work time between a jewelry workshop and a recording studio. But we’re both able to pursue our creative work in our little space, and I feel very fortunate for that.

Otherwise, it’s been great fun to be on this Fallen Gods journey for so long with such talented collaborators. Being a spoke on the wheel of this project, which is so clearly a labor of earnest love, has been hugely fulfilling, and I can’t wait to see (and hear) it in action in its final form.

Mark: In addition to the narrator, you voice any character who has direct dialogue in the events’ intro nodes. How do you go about differentiating these voices?

Jamie: It’s very common in video games and other media that take place in a pre-industrial setting to lean on British accents. It seems as though developers or creators often think that in the minds of the audience, those voices feel authentic to anything “fantasy.”

I’m not Scandinavian and wouldn’t purport to fake such an accent for hours upon hours of dialogue and narration, so we established a baseline with the Fallen Gods trailer (which also served as my audition for the role way back in 2016). Leaning into an American accent felt like it might clash with the world of the game, but I wanted something that was familiar enough to retain a lot of range and consistency. What felt right was a sort of dampened Transatlantic accent that tended toward a rhythmic mode of speech, which would lend itself to the often poetic pieces of writing that Mark provided for the events.

The flavor of the writing and visuals are suggestive of the history of a certain region of our world, but because we weren’t tied to leaning into a Scandinavian accent for the skald, it meant that there was also a lot of freedom when it came to the voices and accents of the other characters. The game isn’t reflecting a slice of history from our world; it’s its own thing. As such, I was able to play around a lot with the voices of the many characters that the player encounters throughout the adventure.

This is also a world where many of the people and creatures that the player encounters understand who the player-character is: They’re speaking to a god who’s fallen from Skyhold. The player-character isn’t someone who’s at the height of their once lofty powers, but they’re no one to be trifled with either. This often informed the development of a character’s voice and differentiated them from each other. What’s this character’s relationship to this fallen god? A wary thief who stumbles upon the player in the wilderness is going to have a very different attitude to the haughty Lord of the Mud who laughs at the very notion of the player’s supposed power.

Sometimes Mark would have a specific reference in mind that I might use as a baseline for a character, but most often I was given free rein to just reach for context clues and have fun with it. There’s a great collection of memorable characters here, and many of them were such a joy to voice. A wurm who’s trying to project the power it once had through intimidation, while being deathly ill and desperate for help from the very person it’s threatening, or an undead who finds it so hard to speak and whose mind is so addled that it vocalizes on its inhalations. There was typically some quirk to work with, which made each a singularly fun challenge.

I can’t wait for you all to enjoy the game, and to let us know what you think!

Without knowing who he was, I had seen Ivan’s work for years: his fantastic portraits are in virtually every game developed or published by Wadjet Eye Games (the publisher of our two adventures, Primordia and Strangeland), and he contributed beautiful backgrounds to Quest for Infamy, another awesome adventure game. When a couple of his scene illustrations came across my Twitter feed back in early 2021, I immediately wanted him to join the Fallen Gods team, and I reached out not even realizing the common ground and friends we shared.

Since then, I’ve discovered why everyone who works with Ivan wants to collaborate with him time and time again—he is the consummate teammate: immensely talented, committed to the common effort, and considerate of his colleagues. One thing that stands out in particular is Ivan’s ability to integrate his illustrations into the other aspects of the game (its gameplay, its sprites, etc.), so that his art enhances those elements rather than detracting or distracting from them.

Ivan's answers and some of his art are below, and you can find more his work on Twitter.

Mark: Like Wormwood Studios itself, your prior projects have been point-and-click adventures like Unavowed, The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow, and The Charnel House Trilogy. How is illustrating for Fallen Gods different from your work on those games?

Ivan: One of the trickiest aspects of creating art for games is that more often than not you’re creating small, detached parts of the whole—a floating head for a portrait, a standing sprite of a character, an empty background to be occupied later. This means you have only limited control over how your art would actually look in the end, and a lot of effort goes just into making all those disparate elements mesh together. Making illustrations for Fallen Gods was a different beast—much closer to classical book illustration, it was a welcome change in how much freedom it allowed, both in terms of interpreting the stories, and in terms of control over your compositions, color palettes, and style.

Another important difference was in the role that the illustrations play in the game—the way I see it, they are not there to create a rigid, specific game-space, but to create little windows into the imagined wider whole, to expand the possibility space and to spark the players’ imagination. And each illustrator brought their unique flavor to that shared table, which was always inspiring.

Mark: Many of the event illustrations depict followers, enemies, scenes, items, and the like that appear elsewhere in the game as sprites or backgrounds. How do you approach illustrating those elements so that they complement the pixel art?

Ivan: Drawing characters that would also appear in the game as tiny pixelated people was an interesting challenge—the small sprites stand in for entire groups of people (churls, priests, fighters, etc.), whereas the ones I illustrate are individuals involved in specific events. There’s a clear difference in the level of abstraction there, but the player should still be able to relate one to another to make informed choices. My solution for this was to always take a couple of visual cues directly from the sprites—a piece of clothing, a haircut, a particular color, but change the rest—that way you both get a sense of continuity, and get to expand and enrich the world of the game by showing a wider variety of its inhabitants. In a funny way, it was a bit like drawing fanart for a game you’re working on yourself.

Mark: One of your largest undertakings on the project is a multi-stage victory path involving first a clash between armies, then a battle between the god’s warband and the elite enemy forces, and finally a direct confrontation with a single powerful foe. How do you capture the shifting scale and focus of a long event like that?

Ivan: I wanted to make that sequence feel grand and sweeping, so it made sense for me to think about it as if directing a film, and then boiling it down to a couple of essential shots. So we start with a bird’s eye view “establishing shot” to create a sense of scale, and then go down to the ground, right into the fray. Presenting a scene from different viewpoints has its own challenges—it’s easy to go too far and end up with a disconnected collection of images, but I've tried to anchor them with repeating visual elements and recognizable topography—the fact that the battle takes place on a river helped with that a lot.

Another important part of the cinematic approach was emphasizing the passage of time. Thankfully, as an illustrator you get full control of the weather in your art, so it was only a matter of deciding how it should change to best accommodate the story we’re telling. For that I’ve turned to another film technique often used in animation—making a color script. A color script is a visual way of presenting a story simply through the change of color palettes in the scenes. In our case we move from ominous gray to orange-red, and then to red and black. You can probably tell how this story goes just from that.

Other than me, no one has worked on Fallen Gods as long as Dan, who jumped into the fray in June 2014. At the time, my ambitions from the project’s visuals were modest: I pictured simple hex tiles like in table-top campaigns and “3/4 perspective combat sprites akin to those of old school jRPGs like Breath of Fire or Ogre Battle.” Dan assured me we could do better, and sent an amazing first pass at the combat sprite for the fighter. There was no looking back.

To “animate” literally means “to breathe life into,” and Dan breathes life into his pixels—with just a few frames, he’s able to convey not only motion but also weight, momentum, and personality. We were very fortunate that when Strangeland needed a step up for some of its key animations (walk cycle, talk cycle, etc.), Dan was there to help on that game, too. So his breath will have infused two Wormwood Studios titles once Fallen Gods is released. (And in addition to doing FG’s pixel work, he has also contributed a number of illustrations to the game.)

Dan is the only Wormwood Studios collaborator I’ve met in person—we used to break bread (or slurp noodles, at any rate) at a dive pho restaurant in Los Angeles—and I just had the great pleasure of meeting up with him at a dive izakaya in Japan, which has been his home for years. Within moments of Dan ordering food for us, one artist, then three artists, had come over and engaged Dan (and, with him translating, me) in conversation. This was not an artists’ bar or Dan’s usual stomping grounds, just a testament to some inherent spark in Dan that kindles artistic communities wherever he goes. He has brought that same light and warmth to the Fallen Gods development team.

You can see more of Dan’s work (including his non-pixel art) at his portfolio[www.bydanielmiller.com] and read his answers below.

- Mark Y.

Mark: The sprites in Fallen Gods range from tiny world-map avatars just a few pixels in height to huge foes that fill a quarter of the screen, but somehow you’ve created all of this artwork pixel by pixel. What stays the same in working at these different scales and what, if anything, changes?

Dan: To me, from a drawing standpoint, quite a bit changes. In fact, I look at them completely differently.

Higher resolution digital artwork likes to masquerade as a traditional drawing or painting form, but considering the hand position, the tool shape, the floating posture, and the approach between media and substrate, I see it as closer to spray paint or airbrush. For me, that correlation holds true in the techniques that I apply at higher resolutions. There are more additive and reductive capabilities in terms of color and line, and hand movement has a more direct effect on line gesture and weight. Also, a line can be calibrated gradually by pushing back and forth between negative and positive space on either side, carving its edges with continuous gestural movement.

Smaller resolution work, on the other hand, is to me closer to actual mosaic tile or textile as a technique. There’s a greater emphasis on compositional space, tangent making, and symmetry. Also, the smaller work really emphasizes the magic that is almost unique to pixel art in the precision of color selection. When a desired line crosses a pixel, or two colors must share a single pixel—it’s never as simple as mixing the two, or determining the dominant color by percentage; in my experience it’s always a case-by-case process of experimentation based on “feel” or “impact,” and often the desired result comes in wildly unexpected ways.

Of course, a larger-scale pixel art image can be zeroed in and calibrated on a fine scale, and a smaller sprite contains gesture, but in my experience, smaller sprites can get lost in the weeds very easily, and larger sprites can get stuffy or lose their sense of life if they’re too overcooked, and so I try to preserve the unique capabilities of both.

Mark: What are some of the most challenging aspects you’ve faced in creating the pixel art for Fallen Gods?

Dan: In the animation work itself, sometimes the greatest challenges come out of nowhere. Years ago, I remember being brought to my knees by a slither cycle of a snake sprite, whereas human walk cycles (seemingly much more complex) never gave me too much trouble. More recently, I spent about an hour on a successful drawing of a hand for a cursor, and then set out to draw a second hand sprite in a slightly different position, and it took me about 5 hours. Conversely, sometimes I’ll lose confidence and think that there’s no way I’m capable of animating certain things (such as a recent animation of an eagle turning in mid-air), and I’ll spend a great deal of time agonizing over the hypothetical, but when I finally get past my emotion and start animating, things sometimes go much more smoothly than I thought.

But I think that for me, the larger challenge has been in the massive amount of work that game creation requires. The work itself is a pleasure, and I find it fascinating and massively fulfilling, but once days click over into months and years, it can be both a cause and an effect of feature creep, and this has been a huge learning process. It can be hard to watch out for which visual features are going to take months to accomplish, let alone which ones are worth it or not. And by the time a shiny new aspect is in the game and in the process of climbing that mountain, my capabilities inevitably improve, and eventually it can make the earlier work obsolete, so it’s difficult to avoid this trap of constantly redoing everything.

Another huge challenge for me is the social isolation of this work. I’ve never really felt safe in online communities, including art and gaming communities, and I’ve had some traumatic experiences, so I tend to shy away. But in my day-to-day life, especially as I take in years, the people that I can have an absorbing conversation with about video games can be few and far between, and I can count on one hand the people that would specifically be willing to spend time talking about pixel art. This makes me all the more grateful to be in contact with this incredible team, and our weekly meetings are such sweet succor, but it can be very frustrating to love an art form which for most is disposable, and of which there is little widespread understanding of the massive labor and intricate work involved.

Mark: You joined Fallen Gods just one month into its now decade-long development cycle. Has anything changed about your approach to the game over the years?

Dan: Before FG, I had spent a few years doing throwaway work for throwaway mobile games, where I would give sprites and then have no input or involvement in the back and forth of their implementation. I came to FG with a lot of big, blustery ideas about what pixel art “should” be. I think that in these 10 years, with all the skills and technique I’ve gained, I’ve also softened and been humbled quite a bit. I’ve experienced the sacrifice that is required to connect artwork to programming language, and I’ve gained a lot more patience and perspective. I think I’m much more willing and less emotional when a new approach or a workaround is needed, or when a nice shiny perfect idea needs to be scrapped. I’m no longer a unified pixel grid dogmatist (although I think my dogmatism might have rubbed off on Mark).

I’ve known James since 2010, when he joined the Primordia team as its coder about two weeks into development, and he was one of the “three musketeers” who started Wormwood Studios in May 2012. Alas, because he’s in Greece and I’m in the U.S., we’ve never met face-to-face, but despite that he’s a dear friend and a role model to my daughters—whom he’s known since their birth and who view him as the consummate problem-solver and as the instigator of many of the “Crispinisms” I wrote for Primordia.

There’s no one I’ve collaborated with as much in game development as James—a third of my life!—and no commercial Wormwood Studios game has ever been released without him. So when he was able to join Fallen Gods in 2022, my stress level dropped considerably.

You can follow James on Twitter and read his answers below.

- Mark Y.

Mark: You’ve coded every commercial Wormwood Studios release: Primordia, Strangeland, and your own action-platformer Until I Have You. What unique challenges has Fallen Gods presented?

James: It’s a genre in which I have little expertise for starters. While very complex, it is also uniquely fascinating to see all the inner systems of such a game come together and understand how they work.

The biggest challenge has to have been the map generation algorithm. The most difficult part has been making it stable and ensuring that while it is randomly and procedurally generating content, but at the same time is not constrained due to some technicality. Within the generation algorithm of the game, there’s a lot of inner algorithms—detecting roads, erasing weird shapes on our roads, eradicating roads that lead nowhere, placing docks properly on the map, removing rivers that make no sense as well, etc. There’s an impossible amount of small adjustments that happen as a player generates a map, allowing for the ruleset to be expandable and dynamic (if you know me, that’s my favorite word). Ultimately, I think it’s not that relevant to list all these small but yet significant adjustments and expand upon the decision making. But to summarize, the fact remains that we’ve put a lot of emphasis on generating maps that make sense and work well.

Mark: Conversely, is there anything about Fallen Gods that’s more fun, easier, or more interesting than the prior Wormwood Studios projects?

James: Pretty much about everything. It’s not just that the engine that’s different, but also the implementation is less constrained this time around. On our earlier projects, there were challenges from a fake 3rd dimension and we were limited by not getting necessary animations and backgrounds. Here, we have been able to create something more alive and fluid with fewer assets.

Mark: What aspect of your work on Fallen Gods are you proudest of so far?

James: That would easily be the way the game during its generation, places the docks on our map. Each map has four docks, in addition to towns, where you can depart or arrive on a ship, and we wanted to, one, make sure those docks are distributed in a useful way, and, two, name them Northdock, Eastdock, etc. so the player can easily identify them. All of that was hard.

First, the game determines a list of hexes that are able to have a dock and are not within a town’s reach. Even if that would seem that this would be very few hexes, it’s still about 100 of them (at the very least) on every generation. Then it splits those 100 into four significant groups based on their angle from the center of the map, and places those four groups that have a certain median angle, as close to the cardinal directions (NORTH, WEST, EAST, SOUTH) as possible. If it fails, then it attempts to find a diagonal approach or an approach that makes sense. All these steps took an insane amount of work to be coded.

After that, the docks are named. Naming the docks when they’re cardinals is easy, but naming them in the fallback diagonal approach is not as easy as you’d think it to be. But luckily I was able to get past that obstacle and now, no matter what, we always have properly placed docks and properly named docks, as the game’s algorithms for both generation and naming have been finetuned!

Maciej—a multilingual philologist, RPG aficionado, and award-winning writer—joined the Fallen Gods team in October 2014 as an editor. He quickly proved indispensable, and his role grew to include scripting events, then helping design events, then editing voice over, then implementing Unity content, then setting up combat encounters, then selecting the “deck” of events for different dungeons, then…. Well, you get the drift. “Longsuffering” barely begins to describe it.

While Maciej modestly claims not to have “made” any part of the game, the reality is that the fingerprints of his careful touch are everywhere. We’ve all benefited from his guidance, and I’ve never had anything comparable to his editorial work on any of my prior projects (even AAA RPGs with budgets in the millions of dollars). The only question is which of us will have the greater trauma from the process!

- Mark Y.

Mark: One of your principal roles on Fallen Gods is editor. How has your experience playing RPGs and adventures over the years informed your approach to the game’s text?

Maciej: To put it bluntly, my experience and preferences regarding games have made me wish for the texts simply not to waste the player’s time. Many games have very little regard to what is really communicated through their text — whether all of it is truly useful, or whether some of its parts could be removed with no loss in substance — which leads to a lot of meaningless reading that the player is compelled to sit through, just because it might hold something of value. I feel like in Fallen Gods we’ve put a number of constraints on ourselves that let us avoid this pitfall, and while in some cases the game does throw extended texts at you, I believe that each time all of it is significant.

Mark: You also serve as a sounding board and scripter for the event design—that is, the gameplay framework in which the game’s text appears. What do you look for in a good event?

Maciej: First and foremost — choices with weight. And by this I don't mean that they should all be epic in scale, but rather that they should always make you consider which one to pick. The antithesis of this is finding a desk and having choices like, “1. Open the left drawer,” “2. Open the right drawer,” “3. Look in the trash bin.” It’s empty content that brings very little to the gameplay experience and is only meant to draw it out by having you mindlessly click three buttons to get what you could have just been given at the outset with no input.

Instead, to follow the same example, I should have some knowledge of what the drawers hold, opening each should have some risk to it (the owner put a venomous snake in the left one), and I should only have enough time to open one of them safely — because the owner is about to barge through the door with a shotgun.

Obviously there are also other aspects, particularly those that pertain to replayability or obscure outcomes that require multiple “keys” to access and which are very cool to get on your nth playthrough, but I think the “weightiness” of the options presented is by far the most important one.

Mark: As one of the first team members on this project, and a de facto producer, what do you think have been its biggest challenges?

Maciej: The greatest challenges have always lain in the ebb and flow of the development cycle, primarily since everyone involved in this game isn’t doing it on a “full-time” basis, so every now and again someone may disappear for an indeterminate time. In other words, the hardest part is to keep up with the flow when everyone’s productive, and to keep it going when someone is dormant.

In the former case, considering that I have to manage and implement so many things, when I’m suddenly flooded with a lot of new UI assets, events to (re-)script, bugs to fix, VO to mix, and whatever else, it can simply get incredibly overwhelming. And given that some of these may be interconnected and require one for the other to work, it’s important to set priorities for yourself, as well as make sure you’ve noted down everything that needs doing. Because that’s the other major problem — when juggling a dozen different things, it’s easy for one to get lost somewhere, and that’s also definitely true for the project in general when you have to manage it for such a long time.

In the latter situation, during periods of slower productivity, the challenge is often to simply make sure that the development keeps rolling. It can be hard to implement new mechanics when you don’t have the UI to support them, or work on game balance when half the events are unfinished. You have to start taking shortcuts or making placeholders for everything, and these also have an uncanny propensity for taking root and staying in the game for much longer than they should. But overall, this is a small price to pay for not having to run a tight schedule where everyone is forced to work on the game, and letting them pace themselves.

Very early on in the development of Fallen Gods, while researching runestones, I had the idea of using one to tell the world’s backstory. When I found Cleo’s gallery[www.artstation.com], I found with it the one artist on earth seemingly able to execute what I described as “my dream, although I'm skeptical that it could be executed”: that the lore of the world be “depicted in a single continuous illustration, like a Norse-style carving on a runestone, but in an outward spiral from the center.” Cleo’s laconic reply: “Feasible, but really challenging.” Needless to say, Cleo rose to the challenge.

Almost a decade later, I reached out to Cleo to see if she’d be interested in writing about creating the runestone. Cleo immediately agreed but also wanted to use the skills developed in the intervening years to make Fallen Gods’ main menu screen a suitable vehicle for the original spiral carving. And, again, Cleo delivered... not only the new screen, but also the breathtaking new logo for the game.

So, without further ado, I turn the floor over to the artist.

-Mark Y.
Mark: Knotwork, runestones, and traditional Norse/Celtic art have been a focus of your work for over a decade. How did that interest begin, and what do you find most appealing about that kind of art?

Cleo: My mom is a jeweler/goldsmith and once bought a book about Celtic designs to use as patterns for jewelry. Once I got a hold of that book I was fascinated with knotwork designs at first sight.

I started out copying the designs from that book and later began doodling my own creations, which grew ever more complex over time. Eventually, they were seemingly good enough that I started to get requests for tattoo commissions online, which became the backbone in my early years of being a freelancer.

As I picked up more diverse artistic skills in my studies, and refined the ones that I already had, the kind of commissions that I am doing have now shifted away from knotwork designs towards 3D visualization and character illustration. I still get the occasional commission for Celtic or Norse knotwork art, but not nearly as much as in the beginning.

Personally, I find it somewhat meditative to draw knotwork designs. Also, I love busy ornamentation/visual noise, where your eyes have to actively go around the image to look for all the hidden details, and follow every twisted line from its origin to its end. The spiral design for the menu stone itself is a pretty good example of this.

Mark: The Fallen Gods knotwork tells the story of the game’s setting in a single widening spiral. Can you explain some of the techniques you used to weave its scenes and elements into a single unified image?

Cleo: I made the spiral in my very first year of being a freelancer. I didn’t have the best tools back then: I only had an A4 scanner, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t have my lightboard yet. So it was more complicated than if I had done it nowadays—nowadays I’d probably have made it digitally from the start. The original spiral illustration was done on five separate pieces of A4 paper that each had a part of the spiral that had to match at the seams if rotated. Those were then arranged digitally and incorporated into the runestone illustration.

Mark: Your initial rendering of the knotwork and runestone in early 2015 was part of your application portfolio to university. Almost a decade later, you came back to the project to update the runestone and craft the game’s logo and main menu. Did your approach change at all with the passage of time?

Cleo: My general approach has definitely changed since then.

Regarding the knotwork, I have better tools now that make my work easier than it used to be back then. Nowadays I’d also use different line weights in the knotwork designs to make the details pop a bit more. Also nowadays I make all sketches digitally for easy iteration; the final design is either traditional, or digital depending on what my customers need. Overall, apart from the fact that I developed a better general sense of composition since then, my approach and workflow there has largely stayed the same.

My approach and workflow have changed for everything else that isn’t knotwork designs. I’ve learned a lot in those nine years and honed my artistic skills. I offered to completely rework the background from scratch and large parts of the runestone, except for the knotwork, which I left as is. The old version of the menu screen was very lacking artistically, had the wrong aspect ratio, and terrible layer management on top of that. The new version looks a lot more professional and allows for some dynamic effects with the layers.

The logo I approached from my ornamentation-designer angle since I’ve always loved ornamental logo designs. Minimalist graphic design is not what I do, so of course there had to be at least some knot-ornaments in the logo! Of course I was also very conscious about not overdoing it too much, readability was still the primary concern here, all the while offering more to the eye than just the game’s name. I made several initial designs in different styles and colors, and we settled on the one with the more Celtic-looking uncial font.

I can’t remember who approached whom in 2016 when Anders and I first connected, but it hardly matters: he was the perfect composer for Fallen Gods. I’d been struggling over what the game’s musical soundscape should be ever since discovering “Fornnordiska Klanger,” an album of prehistoric Scandinavian music created by Prof. Cajsa Lund. I knew I wanted something with that rich history, rather than just a typical orchestral fantasy soundtrack. But how to get that? Then, from Uppsala, Sweden—the very heart of ancient Norse religion—emerged Anders, the man of the hour!

Working with him over the many years since has been a joy. Like Nathaniel Chambers on Primordia, Anders is deeply committed to the soul of the game, and that strong connection means that his music not only complements the art and narrative, but helps shape it. The rawness and beauty of his score is something I’ve aspired to match in the events accompanied by that music.

Below, you can hear some of Anders's atmospheric music for Fallen Gods and learn about the approach he takes to composing it. Then stop by his portfolio on SoundCloud[soundcloud.com] for more goodies.

- Mark Y.

Mark: We have no written, let alone recorded, instrumental music from the era that Fallen Gods draws upon, and very little even in the way of description of the music. So how did you go about creating a musical score that feels authentic to the game’s setting?

Anders: To get a sense of consistency to the music within a soundtrack, I try to set up a palette of instruments that I then lean upon. For Fallen Gods I simply tried to find instruments that sounded like they belonged in that era. I found a few that I liked—which evoked something that of course wasn’t unique, but was perhaps a little unusual—and then mixed those along with more common European instruments, like the Irish flute and bass recorder.

Now, I don't know how to play those properly at all, so they probably sound strange to someone who recognizes how they are supposed to be played. But I hope this becomes an asset for Fallen Gods, which lives in its own world, which would develop its own forms of expression.

It’s also a ravaged, undeveloped world, and their music would perhaps often be so as well. So we tend to leave the music quite unpolished even as we put it in-game, both in performance and structure—the tracks are often merely sketches that say their thing once and then fade away. With that as a base to work from, what seemed most important and inspiring to me was to convey the bleakness of the world, its abandonment, to have the music reach for something that’s both lamenting and soothing at the same time.

Mark: Fallen Gods consists of several different kinds of gameplay, including real-time combat, open-world exploration, dungeon delving, and standalone events. Each of these has a different pace, rhythm, and duration. Does your approach to the music change when you’re composing for these different segments?

Anders: A little bit. I feel most comfortable starting out with a few chords that convey something that’s fitting, or tug at my heart strings in some relevant way. And then I try to find a melody that can live beside them. But as we tried to make the different locations stand out a bit from each other musically, some locations called for starting out with certain instruments, e.g., percussion for the more lively towns, a couple of lonely bassoons for the wight-infested barrows, or a plucked lyre for the solitary little villages.

Sometimes, I try to find an instrument that can speak for a certain creature or set of characters, like the low strings—to my ears somewhat threatening but also ambiguous—for one of the Firstborn, Berkanan. And little bells—lost and mindless—for the stolen children surrounding him.

Sometimes, I just write whatever strikes my fancy and send it off to Mark and Maciej, and see if they can find a place for it. I think my favorite music placement is for an innocent little piece I thought wouldn’t fit in the game, but that they found a place for in the “Idle Tongues” event, where a few playing children suddenly meet the fallen god.

Mark: Anything interesting that you’ve learned over the eight years you’ve worked on Fallen Gods?

Anders: Eight years feels like a long time to work on one thing, and it’s been a bit of a challenge sometimes to stay consistent within the style we’ve found for the music, as my tastes change, what I listen to changes. But to a far larger extent it’s just been a blessing to have so much time to slowly get a sense of what the game is, how the music can support it and be a part of it. To be able to wait for the tracks to come to me (as life gets more and more hectic around me), not have to rush anything at all. Also, it’s just been a joy and honor to be a part of this creative thing we’re doing together, so in that sense too it’s just been a blessing for it to keep lingering in my life.