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 Primordia’s 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 you—and 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 [email protected] (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 we’re all a little bleary-eyed with lack of sleep and frazzled from the stress of the game’s 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 haven’t handled before. And, regardless, Strangeland’s script is a tricky one to translate. Thus, we can’t 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 translations—of 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 Ángeles 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 isn’t 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 time—not 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
I’m not sure whether Fallen Gods, the RPG I’ve 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 we’d like to end where we started: with thanks.