Beyond the Western Deep

The Western Deep team is proud to announce that in just two weeks, on January 15th, we’ll be releasing our very first adventure game set in the world of Beyond the Western Deep.

Wintersdawn in the Deep puts players in control of Quinlan several years before the events of the main series as he finds himself effectively exiled to a dangerous part of the Western Deep for his very first patrol on his favorite festival day of the year.

Whether or not he succeeds in completing his patrol is completely up to you!

As our first foray into indie game development, one of our core goals with Wintersdawn in the Deep was to keep the scale relatively small. Development began shortly into November and we’re still putting the finishing touches on the audio presentation for the final release, with Neil Schultz (whose distinctive pixel art has graced this site a few times in the past) handling all art duties and me (this is Alex writing this–hello!) handling the writing, design, and implementation.

The title also features music composed by Nolan Markey and sound design by Lucas Fehring–two names our Kickstarter V2 patrons may already be familiar with!

It’s a short game, clocking in at around 30 minutes, so we’ll be offering it via the fabulous itch.io game store for the potentially low-low price of PAY WHATEVER YOU WANT! We know that not all of our readers have the means to support projects like this, but we still want them to be able to experience them whenever possible, so if you want to download the title for free, you absolutely can!

We’ll also be looking at offering a bundle version with some additional goodies, like book PDFs and music, for a flat $5-10, but that’s still up in the air.

I’ve been making games professionally since 2007, but this is actually the very first time I’ve headed one up by myself, so this is actually a pretty huge milestone for me and I’m really excited for our readers to be able to experience the world of Beyond the Western Deep in a whole new way.

Growing up, I was primarily a Nintendo kid–so I didn’t really get a lot of story-rich experiences until Final Fantasy IV‘s North American release in 1991 (confusingly as Final Fantasy II). It wasn’t until around 1992-93 when my mom got us a computer that I discovered story-rich adventure games weren’t only a thing… they were a BIG thing. There were a TON of them!

I became a Sierra and LucasArts fan overnight, thanks to series like Space Quest, King’s Quest, Sam & Max, Monkey Island, and my personal favorite of the bunch, Lori and Corey Cole’s Quest for Glory series.

There’s something about those garish, chunky, pixelated EGA graphics that really brings me back. Of course by the time I got into these games, they had mostly moved on to VGA, so the color palette was much broader (256 vs 16 colors)

Wintersdawn in the Deep sits somewhere between these two styles, with EGA’s chunky pixels and VGA’s less eye-melting palette, along with a bunch of modern-day tricks like parallax-scrolling background and foreground objects. It’s a fun little mix of old and new!

Next week, our Wintersdawn festivities will continue as the prequel prose short story The Lost Wintersdawn is posted up, filling in the gaps just prior to the events of the game.

And then, on January 15th, we’ll be launching the game on itch.io!

From all of us here on the Western Deep creative team, we hope you have a wonderful New Year. Here’s to a successful 2021 for all of us!