Invasion from the Unknown

Long after the Fall, the last forest elves are forced to abandon their safe valley and find themselves resorting to the dark means of necromancy in order to survive the perils and challenges of this new harsh world.

History

Around September 2007, I commenced development of an ambitious unofficial sequel (codename Armageddon) to the campaign Under the Burning Suns, one of my favorite mainline Wesnoth campaigns along with The Rise of Wesnoth and Descent into Darkness. At the time, I did not expect my little project to succeed, and much less to have such an impact on my life later on.

Even though I had but a thin grasp of the English language and no previous experience with storytelling, I managed to complete Invasion from the Unknown and publish version 1.0 by the first quarter of 2008, with two episodes spanning over 24 playable scenarios.

  • Episode I: Seeking the Light
  • Episode II: Armageddon

I abandoned maintenace of the campaign in March 2010, in order to focus on completing its (even more ambitious) sequel, After the Storm, which was still in development back then.

Naturally, being my first published campaign or game-related content at all, IftU is no shortage of flaws — in fact, at this point it almost seems like IftU and AtS were written by completely different people! Because of this, after completing AtS in 2013, I resolved to begin an extensive rewrite (codename Reconstruction) to address numerous longstanding design issues, including prose, pacing, programming, and art that had not been ported from AtS yet. The Reconstruction effort was completed in December 2015.

Downloads

Both episodes are provided in a single package which may be obtained from the Wesnoth 1.12.x add-ons server, along with the optional music add-on, imaginatively titled “Invasion from the Unknown Music” (“IftU Music”). You may either point Wesnoth to the respective entries in add-ons.wesnoth.org, or if you are unable to download with the in-game client, use your web browser to fetch the tarball versions from the following location:

Feedback

Repository

The complete source code history and the latest bleeding-edge changes can be found in the public Git repository hosted on GitHub. This is not recommended for first-time players! The campaign is in constant change between published releases, and there might be incomplete or unstable features that might negatively impact gameplay!

On the other hand, this being Git, you also have the option to clone the repository exclusively to track release tags without having to download from the add-ons server or web every time.

Bug reports for unreleased versions are welcome! You may either drop me a message on my IRC channel, or (if you have a GitHub account) file an issue to the campaign’s issue tracker. If you feel so inclined, you may even fork the campaign and submit a pull request with patches to fix issues!

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See also