Beyond the Western Deep

Aaah, petty and petulant canid patrol leader, we hardly knew ye! I swear, it’s a good thing we’ve got the likes of Sigrid and Cain to balance things out because our heroes just seem to wind up in conflict against some of the nastiest sorts of the canid army.

Of course, General Tosch no doubt has his fervent loyalists scattered throughout the Four Kingdoms, so it stands to reason he’d call upon them first–the ones who see all of Sunsgrove as do-nothing hangers-on to the greatness of Aisling, and every ermehn as a criminal in dire need of a blade to the throat.

But see, here’s the part where canid hubris and bluster don’t really help; as treewalkers don’t really understand the nuance of either thing. Really all they see are tiny little appetizers making funny noises down on the forest floor. On ITS forest floor.

Needless to say, things won’t be going well for anyone in this particular part of the Deep. Except the treewalkers, maybe!

Speaking of things going well, we just debuted War of the Western Deep at the Adventure Game Fan Fair in Tacoma, Washington–and the reception was fantastic!

As you can see, the table setup here is a little different than what we’d do for a comic convention! For one, we have a new BANNER (which is hard to see at the angle above, admittedly). The new game-focused banner features incredible artwork by one of our favorite Western Deep collaborators, Gluma.

We absolutely love Gluma’s take on Mirren and the extended cast of War of the Western Deep, including some canid soldiers, bandits, and a mysterious lutren ally we can expect to show up in the game!

The show was our first opportunity to share the game with new players–mostly folks who didn’t know a thing about the world of Western Deep, and the response was nothing short of fantastic.

We got some brilliant feedback for quality of life issues and minor bugs we can look at before our next big show (PAX West in Seattle, coming August 30th!) and also got to meet some industry luminaries working on their own incredible adventure games.

The best part of the show for me was tabling right across the expo floor from Lori and Corey Cole, whose Quest for Glory series at Sierra not only inspired much of War of the Western Deep‘s core gameplay aesthetics but also helped inspire me to get into game development as a career.

They were there promoting their new series of games, which take place in the HERO-U universe. Or, the HERO-Universe, if you will. Basically “What if fantasy heroes had their own Hogwarts-style university”, the series kicked off with their incredibly fun clockwork adventure RPG “Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption“, and then spun out into visual novel territory with the most recent being the breezy fantasy “Summer Daze: Tilly’s Tale.”

The show itself was amazing, with the aforementioned adventure game developers showing off their upcoming works, panels with Sierra developers talking their craft and the history of their incredibly influential company, signing TONS of stuff (I made sure to have Ken and Roberta Williams sign my personal copy of King’s Quest 5, the Coles sign my copy of Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness, and Mark Crowe sign my copy of Space Quest 4).

There was also a whole room dedicated to running period-appropriate computer hardware, with classics like Roberta Williams’ Mystery House running on an Apple II, MYST running on an iMac, and everything in between.

A “making of” video series from the golden age of Sierra was playing on a loop on that amazing wood grain CRT–and in the back there, you can make out a little of the “big box PC” collection, which included a pristine fold-out Dune box (which folds out into a papercraft Shai Hulud) and even the rare original big box of Inherit the Earth, which had a slight inspiration on Western Deep as well.

All in all, I’d say the Adventure Game Fan Fair was an incredible success, and we can’t wait for the next one!

Our next show will be PAX West, where we’ll be located at booth 662 in the main Arch Building, across the skybridge and towards the far wall.

We’ll have pretty much the same setup going there that we had at the AGFF, so we can’t wait to see how folks respond to our updated demo.

ALSO, it’ll be one of the rare shows that features me (Alex) AND Rachel in attendance, along with War of the Western Deep’s technical director, Mike Smith. It’ll be quite the show, and we can’t wait for August 30th!