Fallen Gods

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• Announcements·28 May 2026Official

  Three Books that Helped Inspire Fallen Gods

  As we get closer to the finish line, I wanted to do a short post about three of the many books that helped shape Fallen Gods.I’ve always loved books, so it’s no surprise that my game stories and designs draw heavily from such sources: on Primordia, the books that influenced me most were science fiction like The Road (McCarthy), A Canticle for Leibowitz (Miller), City (Simak), and Cyberiad (Lem), along with my great-aunt’s poem “The Inheritors”; on Strangeland, the influences were more non-fiction and weird tales, like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for Hat (Sacks), The Emperor of All Maladies (Mukherjee), Titus Groan (Peake), and The October Country (Bradbury). But for Fallen Gods, I had to read broadly and deeply to capture the folkloric, mythological, and historical aspects of the setting. If I were to do a full-on “Appendix N” for Fallen Gods, it would have hundreds of entries—dozens of sagas, the Eddas, Heimskringla, collections of folk and fairy tales, Anglo-Saxon lexicons, the poems of the Exter Book, collections of riddles from northern Europe, numerous histories by Neil Price and others, five different renderings of the Norse myths (for my taste, Kevin Crossley-Holland’s is the best, though there’s something to be said for Gaiman’s), historical novels by the handful (like the incomparable Kristin Lavransdatter, and who doesn’t like Bernard Cornwell?), well… this could become a long post.Instead, I wanted to pick out just three works that had very different effects on the game. Lone Wolf: Flight from the Dark“You must make haste for you sense it is not safe to linger by the smoking remains of the ruined monastery. The black-winged beasts could return at any moment.” The first is Lone Wolf: Flight from the Dark by Joe Deaver (illustrated by Gary Chalk). Fair to say that when I first pulled a Lone Wolf gamebook out of a used book box at a school bookfair, it was a life-changing experience. It was the 1980s, and the main “interactive adventures” in my life were th...
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• Announcements·25 May 2026Official

  Five Years in a Strangeland

  Five years have past; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! - William Wordsworth Sometimes it feels like just yesterday that we were making Strangeland (maybe because James and I were actually working on it last week!) and sometimes it feels like a lifetime ago. All of our games are intensely personal: we poured ourselves in Primordia and Fallen Gods no less than into Strangeland. But there was something especially personal about Strangeland, where we didn’t just weave an adventure out of the works and people that had inspired us, but also mourned the loss of those inspirations. I think that was true for each of us on the team; from talking through the many characters he would voice with Abe, I know that he, too, drew from such depths.Players have talked about Strangeland as a part of their “journey through grief”; they have written to me about playing or thinking about it year after year. They have said it helped them in their darkest days. There aren’t words to say how much that means. For me, the project began with the loss of my grandparents, trying to give a form to the shapeless feelings and thoughts that grew in the hole they left behind. In the end, I felt lighter for having gone through that darkness—especially having gone through it with my friends as we built another game together.“Together” as an indie developer doesn’t just mean your teammates; it means the players, too. My Aunt Virginia, whose poetry inspired me so much on Primordia, once wrote: “Then, as now, a poem might tell a story, create and transmit a mood, emotion, idea, a private or world view; it can do one, or some, or all of these things. But whatever it does, it must, first engage the reader as a participant in an event. And when this happens, a great poem, like a great love, leaves an ineradicable mark, forever changing the man or woman who experiences it.” Even more than a poem, a game must engage the player as a participant. And for your participation in Strangeland and Pr...
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• Announcements·31 Dec 2025Official

  Looking forward to 2026!

  As the Earth completes another orbit (15 of them since Primordia got underway), we look back happily at all the love our games have gotten from fans and, somewhat more ruefully, at the sweat and effort that went into those games in the past twelve months.Fallen GodsOur foremost effort has been on Fallen Gods, which is nearing completion! (Not a bad time to wishlist it!) The team poured thousands of hours into its development this year, and the additions are too numerous to list. Significantly, we finished the game's hundreds of illustrations, hundreds of events (comprising tens of thousands of nodes), and hours of voice-over. We added tons of new animations, interfaces, sound effects, and other pixel art. Here's a peek at some of the new stuff!New Backgrounds and Combat AnimationsSeed Menu (for replaying recent maps or trying seeds recommended by friends)Difficulty levelsZoomable world mapScoreboard and achievementsTutorial and integrated pop-up tipsDynamic ending slides and after-action sagaPrimordia and Strangeland We still found hundreds of hours to put into our never-ending work on Primordia and Strangeland (both 70% off in the current Steam sale), fielding player questions, patching bugs, keeping the games compatible on modern systems, and working on translations and ports.Primordia got three patches; Strangeland got two patches and was upgraded to a newer version of Adventure Game Studio. Having ported Primordia to the Switch a few years ago, James has been working ever since on getting Strangeland onto the Switch as well, and now has a working version that's playable start to finish. Strangeland also hit some big milestones as it approaches its five-year anniversary of release: 800 reviews (the best thing you can do to support indie devs is leave reviews!) and 50,000 copies sold. We're also still plugging away on the Spanish translation for Strangeland.All told, it's been a great 2025, and we're looking forward to an exciting 2026, hopefully with the release ...
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• Announcements·25 Jul 2025Official

  Rest in Infinities, Julian LeFay

  I learned today of the passing of Julian LeFay, the polymath developer at Bethesda who was project lead on Daggerfall. Bethesda credited him as "the driving force in the creation of The Elder Scrolls." Such worlds are the works of many hands, but LeFay's fingerprints were all over that series and Daggerfall in particular. It was an awesome game in the most fundamental sense of the world: from its engaging intro cinematic to its vast scope to the endless approaches one could take to character creation, my friends and I could only gawp as we attempted to wrap our minds around it. LeFay was not only project lead but also a lead programmer, creative director, and voice actor, which means much of those wonders came directly from him.There are titles from which I can trace a direct inspiration to my own game development, and developers whose names I knew even as a kid. That isn't true of Daggerfall or LeFay. But Daggerfall opened broad vistas of possibility not only within itself but as to game development in general: nothing was beyond reach. Like all games, Daggerfall must have begun as a dream, and it filled me with dreams of my own. Godspeed, Julian LeFay.
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• Announcements·12 Feb 2025Official

  Remembering Joe Dever

  Today would have been the 69th birthday of Joe Dever, 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; not once, but twice, it had an important influence on me as a game designer. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/40734231/7f339cddba211bc9fca1f6dcdd8898c8e46ffb60.jpg 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 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. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/40734231/7fb3940ad356d610ffcc6003e7e1562f76df74c9.png 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 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. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}...
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