Lyrical Ballads
A truly dynamic story is a goal game designers have strived toward for decades.
Worldwalker Games’Wildermythgets closer to that goal than most.
Wildermyth is an inspired example of narrative design, with some nifty tactical combat to boot.
“And we love the stories that are generated.
But we wanted a lot more detail about the soldiers.”
But two things happened that began to shift the emphasis of Wildermyth.
Firstly, the Austins realised that tying story events to character deaths and injuries had some unintended side effects.
Doug had a particular vision for the kind of stories he wanted Wildermyth to tell.
But there were some practical hurdles to him achieving this.
Doug, meanwhile was fresh out of college and figuring out what he wanted to do with his life.
“There wasn’t a job to give me,” he says.
“So I was just like, ‘what’s my actual career going to be?'”
Doug left the project and wouldnt return to Wildermyth for another two years.
We can’t animate a bow drawing with that.
And they’re all gonna have different outfits."
But it also raised a question over how the developers would represent the game’s tactical combat.
“What do you do when you’re a little guy in a boardgame and attack?”
Annie says, before miming using one boardgame piece to knock down another.
The writing, however, was much harder to define.
“We had to go on a big journey to learn about what that actually was.”
A crucial stepping-stone in that journey was Doug’s return to the project.
“I wanted to bring a certain lyricism into fantasy writing,” he says.
Doug also wanted the characters to have “a casual tone” around the stranger elements of their world.
Tone was also tricky to pin down.
“We wanted to treat the world with reverence,” Doug says.
“Not undermining the seriousness of all the life and magic and beauty that we’re implying.”
For starters, thinking about story and character helped give the tactical side of the game more shape.
You really need teamwork, and a lot of that is about positioning."
That’s how the first Gorgon villain came about," Doug says.
But connecting the two together was a problem they still hadn’t solved, and arguably never did.
It works well enough, but Nate believes it could be better.
“The original stuff was much more simulationist.
This map had systems like populations that grew and shrank, and dynamic threats made travelling more risky.
But all those systems made it difficult for players to understand where to go and what to do.
It’s still not the part of the game that anybody gets excited about,” he adds.
But they didn’t have a read on how other people would react to it.
“We were taking it around to conventions for a while,” Nate says.
But when the game launched into early access, it far surpassed their expectations.
“We were very pleased and happy and surprised by the response.
It was awesome.”
Since that early access launch, Wildermyth has gone from strength to strength.
It saw its official 1.0 release in July last year, launching with five bespoke campaigns to rapturous reviews.
The last twelve months have been mainly about post-release support, which will continue for the foreseeable future.
“We can just keep cramming stuff in,” Doug jokes.
“Make every decision.
Don’t have hit points because games have hit points,” Nate concludes.
Correction:An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that Annie Austin had also worked at Riot Games.
This has been corrected.
