Get Wildermyth on Steam here!
After each chapter in Wildermyth, the map grows and opens up new lands for your heroes to explore. And after years of development and months of beta, we're finally ready to let the heroes loose on Steam!
Huge thanks to our Discord and all of the beta players who have helped bang this game into shape over the last year. Hearing the crazy stories about the characters you've made and your experiences in the Yondering Lands—it's what this whole endeavor is all about. <3
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And if you're actually on the blog here, you get the honor of listening to our artist spout off a bit longer. Imagine her sitting in an armchair next to the window, maybe swirling a glass of wine and gesticulating a lot.
(We don't have an armchair in the office. And she doesn't have any wine right now. But she does gesticulate a lot.)
For our twitter, I was doing a series of "Before & After" images, showing the first round of things like heroes, environments, & comics vs. how they ended up today, near the end of 2019. As I sifted through the blog for "Before" images, two major things struck me:
First, we thought we were really close to release back in like 2015.
"The pace of development is very good right now, and I think I'm well positioned to finish the core feature set in the next 3 months. After that, it will be all about content, polish, and growing our audience."
Feast your eyes upon that 2015 hotness.
HA. HAHA. HAHAHAHAHA. You sweet summer children, you had no idea what the next four years were going to hold.
Second, every time we'd post about a new feature, or some in-game art, we were proud of it. Even back when our heroes had no shading and doofy haircuts and our UI was placeholder and our environments were visually just... all over the place. We thought it was looking pretty baller.
This realization is both terrifying and inspiring.
Terrifying because right now, again, we think things are looking pretty baller. I mean, the UI could use a visual pass, but you know, that'll come eventually. And so, are we going to look back on 2019-Wildermyth and be just as embarrassed by its appearance as we are of 2015-Wildermyth's?
(I kinda hope so, because it means the game was successful enough that we worked on it for another four years.)
And of course, it's inspiring because we have been making it better. Constantly. You don't realize how far you've come in the day-to-day grind until you look back and go "Holy crap, our comic editor from 2 years ago was noooottthiiinnng compared to what it can do today."
That's how you build big things, I guess. One day at a time. One Trello card at a time. Nate admitted that if he had known back in 2014 how much work this game was going to take, he probably wouldn't have done it. I don't know if I would have.
But we did.
For some indie games, time is the enemy. You've gotta release quickly, you've gotta jump on that new technology before everyone else does. We're absurdly lucky enough to not have a project like that. We have a project about hand-drawn art and lovingly-crafted stories and details that stack so deep on top of each other that we've had a really hard time describing the game succinctly in interviews and stuff. We wanted to generate characters that surprised and delighted us with every playthrough, and I still message the team on Slack when I get something particularly good out of our hero-name-generator.
