Invasion from the Unknown
- Abbreviation
- IftU
- Project codenames
- Armageddon (v0.0.1–v1.90.7)
Reconstruction (v1.99.0–present) - Development time
- 8 months to v1.0
- Campaign length
- 24 scenarios
- Programming languages
- WML, Lua
Long after the Fall, the last forest elves on the Great Continent are forced to abandon their secluded home and forge an unprecedented alliance in hopes of retaliating against the great evil that has befallen Irdya. But even then, they will require more than one ancient power to aid them in their quest...
Summary
Invasion from the Unknown follows the elves of the Valley of Elynia as they survive the invasion of the legions of Inferno and brave the perils of the post-apocalyptic barrens of Irdya. With the aid of an unlikely ally, they head towards the Heart Mountains in search of two figures of legends said to hold the key to vanquishing the demonic hordes: the Master of Darkness, and the Lady of Light.
The campaign takes place a few centuries after the events of Under the Burning Suns, and to this day remains considered one of the most influential fan-made sequels to it. The player controls both Elves and Undead from the Default Era, and primarily fights against units created for the Chaos faction of Extended Era (Wesnoth 1.3.x version), as well as an assortment of original units including demons and Shaxthals.
Most code is written in WML, although there is also a large amount of custom WML tags and auxiliary logic written in Lua.
Development history
Around September 2007, I commenced development of an ambitious unofficial sequel (codenamed 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.
Despite my — at the time — poor grasp of the English language and lack of experience with storytelling, I completed and published version 1.0 of Invasion from the Unknown by the first quarter of 2008, with two episodes spanning over 24 playable scenarios.
I abandoned maintenance of the campaign in March 2010 in order to focus on development of its sequel, After the Storm. Once the latter was completed, I resolved to begin an extensive rewrite of IftU (codenamed Reconstruction) with the intention of solving various design incoherencies resulting from my lack of experience during its initial development. The Reconstruction project was completed in December 2015 and version 2.0.0 released in June 2016 after a lengthy beta phase.
Since 2017, both IftU and AtS are considered part of Project Ethea’s phase 1 campaign line-up.
Downloads
Invasion from the Unknown can be found on the official Wesnoth add-ons server for Wesnoth 1.16.
Feedback and resources
- Campaign development thread (version 2.0 and later)
- Repository on GitHub