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.
FIRST!
ReplyDeleteI've loved watching the game unfold. It has been a gruesome amount of work for your whole family, but what's coming out of it is something few on this earth can accomplish. I'm looking forward to playing the latest version. I hope you kept the ability to create love triangles!
Just found this game on Steam last night and so far, I LOVE IT! I just finished my first playthru and my poor party was just tore up by the end of the intro campaign. One gal lost her leg in a battle only to have it coincidentally replaced later by a gem and stone leg! Oh, and the gemstone coincidentally replaced one of her eyes too! A-MAZING! :D
ReplyDeleteMy top 3 asks of the game devs thus far would be: 1) To have the option to pass replaced equipment down to other characters, then convert it to materials if it still goes unused. It seems weird that the equipment once replaced would just be scrapped without seeing if someone else could use it. 2) After the initial campaign was over when I could craft gear, it was unclear what the point of naming/describing gear was? It doesn't look like there's any other way to specialize the gear so you're just naming a basic sword something different than basic sword. Could we get some customization on those weapons beyond naming so they feel more important? 3) Just keep bringing on more customization options for characters: gear, faces, hair, events, relationships, etc. Maybe even persistent afflictions like lycanthropy or undeath (if that's not already in there)?
I can't wait to get back to the game and play it some more this weekend!
1) gets a bit tricky balance wise, and we wanted to avoid having a ton of inventory management, but maybe there's something we can do. We kind of look at gear as being "owned by" the heroes themselves, or just "soulbound" in WoW terms.
ReplyDelete2) more weapon customization - good feedback, thanks
3) yeah. we're here for you. We have a bunch of transformations in now, and we want more.
Glad you like it!
so I just finished the first campaign and the tutorial gorgons; games amazing. this is EXACTLY what I was looking for recently and the only other thing that's similarly close for that character advancement is darkest dungeon and kingdom death, but this has the focus on their *story* that I was looking for! anyways, just a couple things I wanted to comment/ask about (and forgive me if some of this is planned/already in!);
ReplyDelete1) I had the wolf transformation occur on a character and after the event it just looked like they were wearing a Halloween mask; you could still see everything was human from the neck down, made me laugh a bit.
2) as I was finishing up the campaign I had the thought of what if heroes could become villains eventually (accidentally create an antagonist :P)? Or side with the villains and change the story arcs?
3) Class variety/specialization; pretty simple I saw a few things pop up repeatedly on choices but I assume that'll just get naturally expanded on.
4) im disappointed in myself for not finding this game sooner, pls forgive me.
Awesome, glad you're liking it
Delete1) yeah it's a bit sudden isn't it hehe
2) It would be hard to do this in a generic way, but we do have several stories that let you make pretty grey/dark decisions, either a single hero or your whole group, and it would be fun to explore this more. Also a great area for mods to explore.
3) Adding another rig (pose) would be a ton of work, but, lots of modders are interested is making custom classes, etc., so once we have good support for that we expect we might see a lot of activity, which is really exciting.
4) Nah, we haven't done much advertising or anything. We're getting better at it though.