Thanks

With the first couple launch weeks behind us, the whole team can look back with immense gratitude for everyone who has played Strangeland and supported our work. That support came in many forms: Twitch streams (a novelty since Primordias launch); social media chatter; reviews with generous praise and others with thoughtful criticism and most with some of both; detailed bug reports; and, most of all, your mere presence. To know that Strangeland has found an audience means the world to us. So, thank you, thank you, thank you to each and every one of youand to those who were disappointed, our apologies on top of our thanks. If you ever have any issues with Strangeland, or want to contact us for other reasons (even just to say hi), feel free to shoot an email to mark@wormwoodstudios.com (except that key requests are handled by the PR person hired by Wadjet Eye Games, so we cannot help on that). We try to respond to everything we get because, as the prior development diary said, the relationship between player and developer is an extremely important one to us. With that said, though were all a little bleary-eyed with lack of sleep and frazzled from the stress of the games launch, we are now able to look ahead to the next steps for Strangeland and Wormwood Studios.

Translations

Strangeland has been blessed with a bunch of volunteer, passionate, brilliant translators who want to tackle the challenges of localizing its wordplay, metaphors, allusions, bad jokes, and tricky riddles. We were lucky enough to work with fan translators on Primordia too, and with them we were able to shepherd official Spanish, French, and German translations (and applaud an unofficial Russian translation). The translations for Strangeland are actually much more ambitious. Currently on the table, in order of progress, are: Hungarian; German; Russian; French; Spanish; Vietnamese; and Japanese. Translating a game is a complicated process, however, and our experience with Primordia is that most translations that got started did not get finished. We are hopeful about these, but some of the languages involved (in particular Japanese) pose new technical challenges that we havent handled before. And, regardless, Strangelands script is a tricky one to translate. Thus, we cant predict any release date(s), but we will keep you apprised as these move along. Translations are incredibly important to me personally. I think it is fair to say that whatever is lost in translation, I found myself in translationsof books, games, movies, music, poems, and more, at every age of my life, from Babar to The Nose, from Dragon Warrior to The Lives of Others, from Los ngeles Azules to The Divine Comedy, translated works are inseparable from my identity. So we are committed to helping those who want to translate our own games, even if it takes a ton of work and isnt necessarily a money-making proposition.

Ports

While we will always be PC developers first and foremost, we want our games to reach the widest audience possible, so where it is possible to develop a faithful, enjoyable port of the game, we would like to do so. These ports also take timenot just to create, but to carefully test. Right now, we have an initial working Linux build of Strangeland, and we are looking at other ports as well. We hope to be able to announce these soon.

Future Projects

Im not sure whether Fallen Gods, the RPG Ive been developing for about a decade, constitutes a past project or a future project. But it continues to move forward, and now has a Steam page. James Spanos, the coder of Primordia and Strangeland (coder really understates his integral role and leadership) and developer of Until I Have You, is working on a project called Carbon Flesh. Nothing to show on it yet. Finally, Vic, James, and I also hope to collaborate on another project, but it is much earlier in the process.

Conclusion

None of this would be possible without you, the players. Strangeland was created through a partnership among Vic, James, and me; but its meaning comes from a partnership between us and you. So wed like to end where we started: with thanks.

[ 2021-06-15 18:50:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

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....

Strangeland is a classic point-and-click adventure that integrates a compelling narrative with engaging puzzles. For almost a decade, we've been working on a worthy successor to the fan-acclaimed Primordia, and we are proud, at long last, to share our second game.

Strangeland is a place like no other. Even in the real world, carnivals occupy a twilight territory between the fantastic and the mundane, the alien and the familiar. In their funhouse mirrors, their freaks, and their frauds, we see hideous and haunting reflections of ourselves, and we witness the wonder and horror of humanity in just a few frayed tents, peeling circus wagons, dingy booths, and run-down rides. Strangeland, of course, is most definitely not the real world. Indeed, unraveling the connections between this nightmare and the real world is the game's central mystery, and finding a way out is its central challenge.

As you explore Strangeland, you will need to gather otherworldly tools and win strange allies to overcome a daunting array of obstacles. Forge a blade from iron stolen from the jaws of a ravenous hound and hone it with wrath and grief; charm the eye out of a ten-legged teratoma; and ride a giant cicada to the edge of oblivion.... Amidst such madness, death itself has no grip on you, and you will wield that slippery immortality to gain an edge over your foes.

Navigating this domain of monsters and metaphors will require understanding its denizens and its enigmas. Unlike many adventure games that offer a linear experience and single-solution puzzles, Strangeland lets you pick your own way, your own approach, and your own meaning—one player might win a carnival game with sharpshooting, another by electrical engineering; one player might unravel a strange prophet's wordplay while another gathers visual clues scattered throughout the environment. Ultimately, Strangeland's story will be your story. You are not the audience; you are the player.

• Approximately five hours of gameplay, replayable thanks to different choices, different puzzle solutions, and different endings
  
• Breathtaking pixel art in twice Primordia's resolution (640x360—party like it's 1999!)
  
• Dozens of rooms to explore, with variant versions as the carnival grows ever more twisted
  
• An eccentric cast, including a sideshow freak, a telepathic starfish, an animatronic fortune-teller, and a trio of masqueraders
  
• Full, professional voice over and hours of original music
  
• A rich, thematic story about identity, loss, self-doubt, and redemption
  
• Integrated, in-character hint system (optional, of course)
  
• Hours of developer commentary and an "annotation mode" (providing on-screen explanations for the references woven throughout the game)

At Wormwood Studios, we make games out of love—love for the games we've spent our lifetimes playing, love for the games we ourselves create, and love for the players who have made all of those games possible. We know that players invest not just their money and time in the games they play, but also their hope and enthusiasm. And we want to make sure that players receive a rich return on that investment by creating games that provide not only a fun, challenging diversion for a few hours, but also lasting memories to keep for years.

We think the best way to achieve that with Strangeland is to adhere to the genius of the adventure genre: the marriage of challenging puzzles and thrilling exploration, on the one hand, with an engaging narrative, on the other. At the same time, we've tried to remove the punitive aspects of adventure games (deaths, dead ends, illogical puzzles, pixel hunting, backtracking, etc.). Within this framework, we add uncanny visuals, memorable characters, and thought-provoking themes. The result for Primordia was a game that has received thousands of positive player reviews, and we have refined our approach further with Strangeland. We hope it will not disappoint the players who have given us such great support and encouragement over the years! And we hope that it will find a place in the hearts of new players as well.