New video game set in Wyoming wilderness

Entertainment • "Firewatch" centers around park rangers.

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Laramie, Wyo. • Two former Wyoming residents have created a videogame that centers around a park ranger stationed in a watchtower in the Shoshone National Forest wilderness with plot and dialogue based on real places within the state.

"Firewatch" is the first video game to be released by a small game developer in San Francisco called Campo Santo. The game is the creation of designer and programmer Nels Anderson and designer and writer Sean Vanaman. They hope to release it in mid-2015.

Anderson was born and raised in Jackson. Vanaman spent some of his youth in Cody. Their experience includes work on big-name video games like "The Walking Dead" and "Mark of the Ninja."

Vanaman said his time in Wyoming inspired "Firewatch."

"I like to be alone a lot, and Wyoming's a really good place for that. You can just go five minutes from your house, or sometimes just right outside your front door depending on where you live and be, like, really by yourself," Vanaman told KUWR radio. "And that's the feeling that I think has been sort of internalized in a lot of my work maybe. I mean it's something I feel I always bring to it, I'm always pulling from it."

"Firewatch" is what's called a first-person exploratory adventure game with a focus on plot and dialogue. What sets it apart from many video games is that there are no aliens, zombies, or monsters.