INTERVIEW – In Conversation With Micah Orsie (Wildwood Down, Crashable Studios)

By Marty Mulrooney

Wildwood Down is an upcoming point-and-click adventure set in Wildwood, New Jersey. It features innovative visuals that combine 2D pixel art with 3D environments, and the protagonist is based on the developers’ childhood friend Daniel, who has Down syndrome – he not only voices the main character but also helped write the game’s dialogue. This comical, story-driven murder mystery looks like one of the most promising adventures of the year, and Alternative Magazine Online is therefore proud to present an exclusive online interview with developer Micah Orsie, co-owner of Crashable Studios!

Hi, Micah. Thank you for your time, and welcome to Alternative Magazine Online! Can you tell our readers a little bit about yourself?

Hi! Yeah, my name is Micah, and I am one of five brothers. I have been happily married for nine years and have two dogs, Penny and Pongo. I love the arts in almost all media, and I consider myself a creative type for better or worse. Haha.

Who else works with you at Crashable Studios?

So, along with me is my older brother, Luke. Besides creating all of the in-game assets – the 3D models, 2D sprites, animations, etc. – he also helps by listening to me ramble on and on about all of my game design and story ideas, and he’s crucial in that I have someone challenging my ideas so we land somewhere greater in the final product.

Wildwood Down looks fantastic! Where did the idea for the game come from?

The idea originated from a beach trip we took to Wildwood, New Jersey, which is a great boardwalk with tons of action, a beautiful beach and a killer dog park. The ‘we’ is me, my brother, Luke, my wife, Liz, and Daniel – the hero of our story.

As we arrived in Wildwood for a weekend getaway, we quickly realised it was Senior Week: the week that all the high school graduates party at the boardwalk to celebrate graduating. So, as we walked the bustling boardwalk and sat on the beach, we just had so many comical interactions with the high schoolers – and saw so many funny events – that my wife said: ‘I feel like we’re in a real-life point-and-click adventure game.’

And from that statement, we sat on the beach and started chatting about what a puzzle could be, what a storyline could be, who the main character would be, and so on… Now, two to three years later, the game is coming out in August. Crazy.

Your childhood friend Daniel inspired the main character and will also be voicing him. What made Daniel the perfect person to build this adventure around?

Daniel is basically a sixth brother to me and my brothers. He has Down syndrome, and we grew up right alongside him from diapers to now. My parents made friends with his mom when we were kids, and she was always hanging out at our house. Dan would be there at all of our birthday parties and ball games and whatever else was going on, up to the point they moved to the West Coast, and he’d fly back to Maryland and stay at our house for the entire summer.

Dan is just an amazing friend, and he is a big ham. He comes to life when a camera is on him and loves all the attention he can get. So with his amazing sense of humour and beautiful view on life, we knew it would be a blast for him, us and everyone else to have him be the protagonist of our game.

Is it true that he has also been helping with writing the dialogue?

For a lot of the game, as I was writing the dialogue and story, Daniel was sitting in the same room behind me playing Mortal Kombat or something, and I’d ask him: ‘Dan, picture this… A cop is saying you are guilty of blowing up this concession stand. What would you say to him?’ And a lot of times, I’d write his response straight into the game. ‘No way, officer. My hands are clean!’

And besides that, a lot of times when recording the actual audio lines Dan is just an off-the-cuff kinda guy, so he kind of improved the line I would feed him – adding his little flair of humour – and we changed the dialogue text in the game to the audio clip of what he actually said while recording.

He seems like such an extraordinary person to be friends with and to have in your life – what does working on this game with him mean to you and the rest of the team?

Just approaching this question, I can feel my heart getting choked up haha. Dan has just been a constant friend and reminder of the simplicity and beauty of life. Through different seasons of hardships and things, Dan’s always been there for a big morning hug that only Danny boy could give.

I won’t dig super deep into it, but Dan has recently (a couple of months ago) been diagnosed with cancer, and we’ve been with him in the hospital as he undergoes chemo treatment. His health went from he might die within the week (the first month of discovering the cancer), to now the doctors are very hopeful he’ll have a full life with good health and strength.

In some miraculous way, fans of the game and other voice actors included in the game have all been praying and sending Dan letters in the mail and videos that I was watching with Dan in the hospital – encouraging Dan and helping us laugh – and it’s really been humbling to receive all this love from so many people. If you go back through our game’s Discord channel and see it all as it unfolded, you’ll just be a sobbing ball by the end, haha. So anyway… Yeah, we’re really stoked he’s doing better and praying for his full recovery. We’re also that much more thankful that we’ve had the opportunity to make this game around him.

The game’s art style – combining 2D pixel art with 3D environments – looks fantastic! What engine are you using to build Wildwood Down?

Thank you! We are building the game in Unity and have had a blast getting the look and feel that we wanted to express with this game. We are big fans of retro games and hand-drawn pixel art, as we grew up playing a lot of adventure games ourselves. (Imagine the oldest of us five boys playing Monkey Island or Day of the Tentacle and all of us watching, laughing and thinking intently while throwing out our ideas of how to solve the puzzles.)

So, we kept the 2D pixel art-style characters while bringing them into a 3D space so the lighting and camera work could give a fresh perspective and new cinematic feel to the genre. We believe it’s visually very fun to experience and the perfect balance of new and old. Kinda like Wildwood, NJ, itself!

Aside from the boardwalk in Wildwood, New Jersey, what other locations can players look forward to visiting?

We gave our imaginations a lot of leeway. So, as fantastical as the true Wildwood boardwalk is, we also have the player going to quirky offshoots of Wildwood like ‘under the boardwalk’ where the real party is happening, and there is a massive underground wrestling circuit that takes place down there. Or like going to the boardwalk Aquarium, where you might get locked in a cage and fed to a shark. Or the Cape May Lighthouse, the arcade, the local bar, etc. We purposely included lots of colourful, different locations to keep the gameplay and world fresh throughout the story.

What is your favourite point-and-click adventure game of all time?

It depends on what day you ask me, but I come back to Full Throttle a lot of times because I love the story, being both very serious and very comical. I think that bled into Wildwood Down a bit in that there truly is a murder and an evil villain, but also you are playing as Daniel and stumbling into saving the day. Other than Full Throttle, I think Monkey Island, of course, and Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness are up there for me.

Wildwood Down will be released on PC and Mac in August 2025. What other platforms are you planning to launch on?

We plan to release it on PC on August 7th, 2025, and have many people play it so we can catch and fix any lingering bugs and have a super-solid build. Then, we plan to approach porting to consoles. We hope to have Xbox and Switch versions released by the year’s end.

Thank you for your time, and good luck with the final month of development – I can’t wait to play the finished game!

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Thanks for reading – and don’t forget to add Wildwood Down to your Wishlist on Steam!