Development Update #2
Welcome to another quarterly update from Something Wicked Games!
Since our last update, we’ve added five more game developers, bringing us up to 35 people actively building Wyrdsong. Or recent hires round out both our design and engineering departments with exciting talent we’ll be revealing over the next few months.
Our “Beautiful Corner” is now nearly complete and features actual gameplay. Drawing inspiration from medieval Portuguese architecture and our surreal concept art, it follows the story of a templar zealot who comes upon a church desecrated in a pagan ritual. Her decisions throughout this small slice of the game radically alter her life path as she uncovers what the church was hiding deep below. In addition, we’re fleshing out both our combat and systemic AI systems, our conversation and quest tool, and other juicy bits we’re not ready to pull the veil back on just yet.
We’re thrilled to be wrapping up this significant milestone only nine months since we kicked off the studio. The video of the Beautiful Corner is breathtaking and a testament to the amazing, veteran creative talent we have on our team. While we would love to release it, we’re still very early in development and many things can and will change along the way.
Nearly our entire team, 29 folks, were able to meet up with us in Santa Fe, New Mexico for our first team retreat. Many of us have never met in person, so this event was quite special. While full remote work has gone quite well for us, our face-to-face time gives us a foundation for our online relationships. We held several collaborative meetings going through our game story, systems, custom-crafted AI, and aforementioned narrative tools.
We also spent over half of our time exploring Santa Fe. It’s an amazing city, full of natural beauty, a thriving art community, and surrounded by Indigenous American architecture and artifacts dating back over 11,000 years. We traveled down the unpaved roads less traveled in 4×4 vehicles and hiked Bandelier National Park, exploring the Kivas and Petroglyphs. We also visited Meow Wolf and the “House of Eternal Return”, a huge, mind-bending explorable art experience. This 20,000-square-foot installation was built in an old bowling alley and heralds George R.R. Martin as an investor. Sadly, we didn’t meet him, though several of us were suspicious of a security guard that looked very familiar…
I’ll leave you with some photographs of the trip, including several with us exploring Meow Wolf. If you’re ever in the area, we couldn’t recommend it enough. Good art is inspirational, even art from mediums outside of gaming. As we’re crafting a game about exploring our reality, questioning our perceptions and beliefs, we couldn’t imagine a more inspiring place to visit. Yet what was most inspiring was the team we have assembled. Everyone at Something Wicked Games is kind, inquisitive, and supportive in both building Wyrdsong and championing one another in our craft and careers.
It’s been an amazing journey – and it’s only just begun.
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Thank you,
Jeff Gardiner
CEO & Founder
