We Did Our First Kickstarter! And It Worked!

Another journey begins. A long, long journey.

For  the fifth time in 25 years of doing business, we at Spiderweb Software are making a whole new game world (and new engine to go with it). Along with the announcement of our new series, Queen's Wish, we are launching our very first Kickstarter to support it.

We've put a lot of information about the new story and a video on our Kickstarter page.

We're getting older, enough so that the end of our careers is in sight. We only have so many new stories in us now. That is why we've put a lot of work into planning Queen's Wish. I've been designing it in my head for years. It's a very personal project in a lot of ways, and I've thought a lot about what I want to say.

This long blog post is for our fans, who might care about what we're thinking.

All-new (old) graphics style. All-new art. Note that all of these screenshots are very early and will heavily change.

The Basic Game Details

The Queen's Wish series, starting with Queen's Wish: The Conquerer, will hopefully be a trilogy  for Windows, Mac, iPad, and, for the first time, the iPhone.

Our earliest games, the Exile series, had a simpler top-down graphics style. Many fans have, over the years, asked us to go back to this. We're finally doing it. I like this style a lot. It's very graphically clean, and makes it  clear what creatures are in what spaces,  which is necessary for a game like this on small screens like the iPhone.

We're trying to give the series a nice unified look and interesting graphical effects. where you can always be sure what space you are selecting and where all the creatures are. Our games will never look that fancy. We can't afford it. But we do try to improve things with each new game.

However, the indie game business is super-difficult and competitive right now. Outside of a few hits, most indie games don't make much money. At the same time, replacing all of the art in a game is very expensive. How can a small company like us make our own unique sort of game without going bankrupt?

Fortunately, the internet has provided a way ...

These brigands dared to steal a fort from Haven. Set them on fire.

To Kickstarter!

In a lot of ways, Spiderweb Software is the sort of company Kickstarter was made for. We're a tiny company. We make unusual products for a loyal niche audience, and we sometimes need help.

We're moving to Kickstarter very late. The big crowdfunding boom was years ago, and customers are rightly nervous about backing video games. A lot of careless game developers took peoples' money and gave nothing in return.

Happily, we have a very long record of shipping good games on time. We know what it takes to write a game, and we aren't going to rip anyone off.

But why support a Kickstarter to make a new indie game. Aren't there too many indie games? Isn't the turn-based RPG market totally glutted?

It's on us to prove that supporting us will create something new and worthwhile.

Collect resources, upgrade your forts, and get stronger characters. The sort of upgrades you buy improve you in different ways.

Yet Another Game About Empires

Most computer RPGs are about killing some big bad guy. There's some evil demon/wizard/monster/robot and it's totally evil and you get strong and kill it. The End. There's a lot of good games that follow this pattern, but it's not our thing.

I've always been obsessed with story, politics, power, and choices, and all my games reflect that. Every one of our games is about a huge power dominating others, and you have to find a way to survive under it. Support it. Fight it. Remake it. Destroy it.

I am obsessed with the history of Empires (successful and failed), and this comes through in the stories I write. This is appropriate. I am, after all, the citizen of an empire, and so are most of the people who play my games. I'm not ashamed of this. Sometimes Empires do good. (But often not.)

I love my country. But this doesn't keep me from thinking about my homeland and the power it holds, and what that means. These thoughts work their way through my brain, bubble and transform, and come out as game designs.

Video games are art, and art should reflect the world. The world very rarely gives us one end boss to kill to solve all our problems. The real world is much more complicated.

More Stuff About the Game

So this is another game about an Empire. But with a big difference.

You are not some peasant or bottom-rank soldier changing things from the bottom. In Queen's Wish, you are a prince or princess. You have power. You make the decisions, and you have to clean up the consequences.

You will be dealing with other nations, poor but proud, weaker than Haven but just as brave and determined. Each has its own history, beliefs, grudges and resentments. I want them to feel real, both sympathetic and infuriating, and then force you to deal with them.

People who have played my games for a long time know that I hate the idea of a Bad Guy. Whenever I introduce a faction, I let it plead its case as convincingly as possible, and I try to win some players over to their cause. If I introduce a faction and no player ever joins them, I have failed.

A Lot of Stuff About Forts

In Queen's Wish, your power comes from forts and trading posts. You will be trying to rebuild old keeps, once held by Haven. You can get permission to do so through force or diplomacy. These will increase your wealth and power and your standing with the Queen.

I love games that let you make fortresses and fill them with stuff. However, those forts seem to only rarely make a difference in the game. In Queen's Wish, you will have power to build and make decisions, and those decisions will give you noticeable power and bonuses.

Note that, if you aren't into this sort of thing, you can do the fort stuff very quickly. Just think of it as another way to train your character.

You can also make furniture and cosmetic improvements. My younger daughter told me that she wants this, so I put it in.

You can just build your shops quickly and get on with the fighting, or you can decorate your forts and make them all nice.

How the Combat Will Work

It will still be turn-based combat with hand-edited fights, like all our other games. We're working hard to make sure the fights are  fresh and don't repeat themselves.

The game system will be skill-based. There won't be character classes. You can pick your skills from four different trees, hopefully allowing for a wide variety of different builds and strategies.

Your characters are stranded deep in a hostile land, and I want the feel of combat to support this. When you leave the base and get into fights, they will wear you down. The missions won't drag you down with lots of trash fights, but each battle will exhaust you. You will have to conserve your power and choose when to use your best abilities and items to push all the way to victory.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Aaaand ... we funded.

I wrote this blog post before the Kickstarter started, planning to post it on the second day of the campaign. I genuinely didn't expect that it would have funded by now. I am humbled by your generosity and faith in us.

Barring my getting run over by a bus, we hope for Queen's Wish to be done by May, 2019. Based on the size of game we have planned and what we have done so far, this seems very doable. It's a crowded market, but I will do my best to make something surprising and unique, and I think I will succeed.

If you have more questions, feel free to post them on our Kickstarter page. We are really excited about this new story, and we are grateful for any support you can provide!

Avadon 3, Announcing New Games, and Facing Your Inadequacy.

Aaaaaand ... we're off!

We have just announced our newest game, Avadon 3: The Warborn!

It's the final game in the series! At last, you get to end the war, pick a winner, and decide who lives and who dies! (Though we are making sure that the game will still make sense and be satisfying even if you didn't play Avadon 1 and 2.)

It should be out in September, unless things go wrong. Completing this series will bring an end to five frenzied years of my professional life.

I wanted to talk about the game a little, for people who don't know about us, people who do, and people who are interesting in making games in general.

I'll try not to be boring.

If You Don't Know Who the Hell We Are ...

Hi! We're Spiderweb Software. Since 1994, we have created indie, retro, turn-based, huge, epic fantasy role-playing games. We specialize in games with intricate stories that give you a lot of interesting choices. We also like making fun game systems and varied combat with lots of unusual encounters and tactical options.

If that sounds cool, just stop reading this. Go here or here and download a big, free demo. We have always had the biggest demos in the business. If you like what you try, all of our stuff is on Steam.

If You Already Play Our Games ...

Thank you for your support!

We asked for a lot of fan feedback before we started Avadon 3, and we put a lot of it into effect. There are a ton of changes and improvements in this new game. Many long-overdue interface improvements. A lot of rebalancing and new abilities. Fewer trash fights and greater encounter variety.

I managed to generate some pretty decent screenshots this time around.

What Is Avadon About?

If you want the basic facts of the story, they are on the main game page, and I'm tired of rewriting it. (This is the sort of disciplined approach to PR that has enable me to maintain decades of consistent anonymity.)

I'm more interested in talking about the process.

In the 20+ years I've been doing this, I've always had one main habit: I write the sort of game I enjoy playing. They are always RPGs, because I am obsessed with that genre. It's a genre that allows for great variety. (And the basic, addictive elements of which have infected just about every other genre.)

Whenever I'm not sure what to do with a game, I always make the choice I would prefer if I was a player. It's a compass that has almost never steered me wrong.

When I decided to write Avadon, I'd just played Dragon Age: Origins, which is still, for my money, one of the finest RRPGs every made. It made me want to write a similar game: An epic story, full of intrigue, dark fantasy, and touch choices, set in a huge and complex world. I wanted the battles to have their own flavor, with lots of different tactical options and unexpected events, and in which movement and positioning are really important.

I think I succeeded. Kind of. I will say that I enjoy playing Avadon games more than I enjoy playing any of my other games. A lot of my fans don't care for Avadon as much, but that's ok. We write a lot of different sorts of RPGs.

Actual gameplay footage!

But I'm Ready To Move On and Feel Bad About What Has Come Before

Like many creators, I hate looking at the work I've done. Even if it's good, it still pales in comparison to the beautiful image I had in my mind when I began. Looking at the final work can be a painful process.

A painful process, but a helpful one. When you fail to do what you wanted to do, well, failure can be very educational. You just need to look hard and honest at you failures and see what you can do to correct them.

So, some things I'm unhappy with about the Avadon series.

When I was designing Avadon, I was very ambitious. Lynaeus, the continent on which the series takes place, has 5 friendly nations and six hostile nations, each of which has its own politics, history, and so on. I wanted to make a whole world.

In the end, however, I was just one designer.

There are so many factions, wings of government, conflicts, controversies ... Too much for me to keep track of, too much to fully develop. I wrote so much lore I could never find a place to fit into the game. There were so many locations I just wasn't able to give enough time to.

My eyes were bigger than my stomach on this one.

Also, i didn't put as much polish in these games as I should. Avadon 3 will have a lot of careful rebalancing and useful interface improvements. However, these changes should have been in Avadon 2. Honestly, a lot of these things should have been in Avadon 1 so I didn't have to fix them in the first place.

I have a good excuse for some of this. I'm only one person, and I'm getting older and slower. Still, a problem is a problem, and, if I'm asking people for money, I'm still responsible for flaws.

Finally, I've stuck with this particular engine, graphics style, and world style for too long. After I remaster Avernum 3 (our most popular game over the years), I'm going to do something way different. It's well past time.

Actual gameplay footage!

I Also Have Reached My Own Limits

However, the Avadon games have also reached the limits of what I am capable of holding in my single brain. They are the limit for how complex I game I can make without going mad. There's just too many characters, story threads, and so on. After a few months of keeping everything balanced and in my head and making sense, it gets exhausting.

One of the great pleasures in my job is finishing a game and being able to forget everything I've had to hold in my mind, ready for fast access. It's like putting down a heavy weight. I'm really looking forward to letting Avadon drift away. It's been like having to have a second family, only in my head. A weird, dysfunctional, non-existant family. I want it to fade away and leave a blank canvas, that I can fill with other fun stuff.

And, in Avadon's sprawling messiness, I think we made something really neat. Among all of the treasure hunting and epic battles, this is a story about running a fading Empire. You have borders to protect and unlimited power to do so. Will you be cruel or merciful? Will you be dutiful to your country, or will you focus on power for yourself?

Avadon 3 is full of choices, and your decisions will lead to a multitude of possible outcomes. No cop-out twist endings. It won't all have been a dream. We will make sure that the series caps off with a satisfying ending.

We'll be starting an all-new series soon. When we do, it will still be a big, complex game, but it will be big and complex in a different way. At the very least, there will be fewer than 11 countries for you to keep track of.

Back To Work

And that's all for now. Hope you like the screenshots and the trailer. If you're new here and like RPGs, we have 20 years of back catalog to tempt you.

Time to go write a few thousand more words of dialogue!

We Finally Released Avadon 2.

Keeping the single-player, turn-based, story-heavy flame alive.

After two years of development, we have finally released our first all-new game in three years. Avadon 2: The Corruption, the second game in the Avadon trilogy, for Mac and Windows, is now out on our site, Steam, and GOG.com.

It's another hardcore, story-heavy RPG. Cool tactical combat. In-depth story with a ton of tough choices and many different endings. (Far more than in Avadon: The Black Fortress.)

It's very much in the spirit of the older Interplay/Black Isle/Bioware games, back when Interplay and Black Isle were still going great guns and Bioware still wrote Bioware games. If you liked Avadon, you should like this one. If you didn't like Avadon, Avadon 2 is bigger, has more tough choices that make a difference, and doesn't start as slow. Maybe you'll like this one.

Don't like our business model? Allow me to phrase a retort.

I'll Take a Good Start

We've sold about 2000 copies in the first 24 hours, after pretty much zero attention in the gaming press (not that we deserve attention, I guess). Now that most indie projects are made by big teams, these numbers seem super low. For a small lean-and-mean company like ours, it's really promising.

We'll still be in business.

"But This Looks Like It Was Made In 1995!"

And that's an insult? Um, kid, haven't you heard? That's the hip style now.

Pictured: My development process.

Time Will Take Its Toll

It's been a long road. I'm in my forties and have been doing this for about 20 years, and questionable health and creeping burnout are taking their toll. I'm proud of this game, I truly am, and I think it's a lot of fun. But I can't rely on my body and brain to support my usual machine-like pace.

It'll be a while until reviews come out, but I'll spoil the surprise. 7/10, or 8/10 if the reviewer had a good day. That's how the prevailing standard of reviews go. Avadon 2 has low production values, but it's basically competently made and a lot of fun for people who like that sort of thing.

There will also be the standard cheap shots about how I should be doing different things. Even though spending my life trying to perfect my skills writing games in a beloved genre almost nobody else works in already makes me so edgy that I live out on an edge made of edges.

Anyway, there's a big demo. Hope you like it. I'm going back to bed.

Finally, I'm on twitter now. Follow me. I'm cranky and I don't want to be employable in the computer game industry, so it should end up pretty amusing.

We're In the New Humble Bundle!

Today, the newest Humble Bundle went live, and my game was in it. The Humble Bundle For Android 2 is now up, enabling you to get Avadon: The Black Fortress and four other fine indie games for whatever you decide to donate, and a portion of your contribution goes to charity.

Note that, though it's called the Android bundle, all games in it are also available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. Pay once, get it DRM-free for all four platforms.

We are hugely excited to be part of the Humble Bundle, a project that has managed a unique combination of ethics, business sense, and just general excitement. It was a great idea when it came out, and it's still a great idea.

Also, this is the first time that we've had a game out for Android and the first time in well over a decade that we had a game out for Linux. Ports of these games were done by other developers, and they did a great job. After the Humble Bundle concludes, we will make sure that the ports will continue to be for sale.

Any hypothetical questions, imagined reader?

Q: So the Linux and Android version won't disappear from the Earth after the bundle is gone?

A: Nope. Deals to distribute these versions are already in place.

Q: You didn't do the ports yourself?

A: No, they were ported by skilled third-party developers in close consultation with us. My increasingly old brain doesn't have the space to learn to develop for any new platforms. It doesn't even have space to hold everything I need to know now. The number of things I need to do for my job that I need to relearn from scratch every time I do them is already really high.

Q: Will future Spiderweb titles come out for Linux and Android?

A: Good question! I don't know!

Being able to sell something for Android and Linux is extra-exciting to me, because, after years of reading e-mails about how awesome it'll be for me when I develop for those platforms, I will get to actually see how good it is. So if you are one of the multitude that promised me up and down that you would buy anything I release on Linux/Android, I have a great opportunity for you ...

Q: What charities does this support?

A: The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child's Play, both highly worthy endeavors.

(Added 3/19/2012.)

Q: Avadon for Android is for tablets. What does this mean?

A: That the device's screen needs to be at least 1024x600.

My Two Gaming Pet Peeves For the Day

Our newest game, Avernum: Escape From the Pit, has reached Release Candidate status. This means that we've made a version that seems complete and ready to sell, and we are touching it as little as possible while beta testers spend one more week trying to break it.

This means that I have a very, very important job: Doing nothing. Don't touch the app. Hands off. Anything I change has a chance of breaking something. So I'm spending this week catching up on my game-playing.

(I also made a really spiffy trailer for Avernum. Turns out, there's this site called YouTube. Who knew?)

This has given me a precious chance to find new pet peeves to complain about. And isn't that what blogs are for?

I Need To Drop Three Pounds Of Gloves So That I Can Walk Again

Of course, like everyone else in the world, our house has Skyrim-fever. As you may have heard, it's a good game.

But, like all RPGs Bethesda makes, you spend sooooo much time sorting through items. Looting the dungeons takes ten times longer than killing the monsters within. And you can only carry so many pounds of treasure. So every item you find requires tiresome "Is this hide shield worth enough money to justify the weight. OK. It weighs eight pounds and is worth 20 coins, or 2.5 coins per pound, so that is an efficient piece of treasure to pick up and ... AHHHH. MY BRAINS!!!!!" And then you pick up one suit of armor too many and you have to drop two pounds of stuff so you go through your pack to find something top drop and ...

Does anyone ever find this fun?

This is one of those things that gets hardcore gamerz mad at me, but screw realism. In my newest games, I give the player a Junk Bag. You can put infinite items in it, their weight isn't counted, and, when you reach a store, you can push a button to sell everything in it.

This is great for people who find even the awesome Dog Takes Your Stuff Back To Town To Sell It system in Torchlight too taxing.

It's the opposite of realism, and I really don't care. When I design a game, the first thing I do is decide what I want the player to spend most of his/her time doing. Hopefully, that part is where the fun is. The second thing I do is minimize time spent doing absolutely everything else.

If I can keep even one player from spending a hour picking through his or her backpack and trying to shed those three extra pounds, I have done my good work as a citizen of the Earth.

I Did Those Jumps In 61 Seconds Instead Of 59, So I Should Totally Be Punished.

In any game with a lot of jumping on platforms, it seems like a legal requirement that there has to be at least one room with a timed sequence. You're at the bottom of some shaft with sheer walls and a tunnel at the top. You push a button. Ledges slide out of the walls. And then you hear that accursed, stress-inducing ticking that lets you know that you have to get to the top quickly, or not at all.

"Tick. Tick. Tick. TICK. TICK. TICK. TICKTICKTICKTICKTICK. [Sound of ledges sliding back into walls.] [Sound of you falling to earth, swearing all the way.]"

Is there anyone, anywhere, who pushes that button, hears the telltale ticking sound, and thinks, "This is so AWESOME!"

This isn't fun. Here is why. Gaining a heroic skill (Fighting. Leaping.) is fun. Using that skill is fun. Perfecting a skill is far less fun. Repeating a series of jumps until you can do them perfectly is even less fun than that.

There. I Feel Better.

Very therapeutic. Now I can finish my game in peace.

Also, I was going to write about how every shooter now has you go down one long corridor with no branches (or alternate paths to victory, or variety), but this design trend is contemptible enough to deserve its own post. I just need time for my blood to get more angry.

Our First Game Is Out For the iPad. Hooray!

Last week, Avadon: The Black Fortress HD for the iPad went live in the iTunes App Store. The reaction to it so far has left us stunned. Literally. Like, jaws dropped, walking around in a daze.

The genesis of the iPad version was a few months ago, when I said, "Hmmm. I have a few weeks free on my schedule. I think I'll port Avadon to the iPad. That'll be good for a laugh!" I've long known that there was a demand on the device for old school gaming, free of ads, in-game purchases, cute animals, zombies, and farming.

But, it turns out, the demand was far greater than I'd ever guessed. My fan mail since the release has been very instructive. Gamers weren't just disappointed by the lack of deeper games on the device. They were downright irked.

But that is the Magic Power of the Indie developer. Find an underserved market and serve it.

Writing and releasing my first device for iOS has been very instructive. In case anyone is interested, here's a few comments on Spiderweb Software's first game for portables.

Learning To Code For a New Platform.

Apple has done an amazing job of making developing for iPhones and iPads accessible. The sets of commands to program the device (i.e. the API, called Cocoa) are very clear and not too trying to learn. The development environment, XCode, is free. There are several good, free game engines for the devices. (I used a heavily modified version of the open source engine iPTK.)

There are also excellent books available on the topic. I leaned most heavily on Beginning iPhone 4 Development. I found iPad Application Development For Dummies to be unusually poor for a Dummies book, but its chapter on Provisioning (a tricky, vital, and neglected topic) is easily worth the cost of the book.

A Decent Port. But Just Decent.

Avadon originally came out for Windows and Mac. I was really determined not to half-ass the port to the iPad. I put a lot of thought into how to best adapt an old school, Western-style RPG to a touch screen. It's not something people have spent a lot of time doing. I think I came up with good answers to a lot of the questions, and the game overall plays really well.

However, there are a number of places where the UI could be better. This isn't because I was lazy or wanted to dump shoddy work on the market, but simply because this was my first iOS application. So have mercy. Our next game for the iPad (out, let's say, next April) will be better. It'll take some doing to modify the engine, but it'll get done.

Avadon HD is also a fairly demanding app. All of those icons eat up RAM, and the first generation iPad doesn't have a lot. It's playable, but it will be pokey from time to time. It runs great on the iPad 2, but I don't take a lot of satisfaction in that. The inconsistent performance on the iPad 1 is, simply, a failing on my part.

The Apple Approval Process.

Took a week to get my app approved. No rejections. No hassles. No complaints.

The Eternal Pain of Pricing.

It hasn't all been love and group hugs. Some of my fans have been seriously furious that we sell Avadon for Mac and Windows for $25 and the iPad version is $10. Like, "I will never be your customer again. Die in a fire." furious. I don't normally explain my decisions about pricing, but this merits a few words.

The same game is almost always priced differently on different devices. If you look at the prices charged for, say, Peggle, Plants vs. Zombies, or Angry Birds on different platforms, you'll find a huge variety. Angry Birds on the iPhone? One dollar. On the Macintosh? Five dollars. That's a five times difference!

There are a variety of reasons, all of them out of my control, for why I feel it is appropriate to charge less for the iPad version:

1. It has fewer features, due to the limitations of the device. Most notably, it is stuck at 1024x768 resolution and there are no keyboard shortcuts.
2. Since it is being sold by Apple, it is subject to the rules of their system. Most notably, there is DRM, and we can't give refunds through iTunes. Games bought directly from Spiderweb have no DRM and a Money Back Guarantee.
3. When you buy Mac/PC Avadon from us, you get a registration key that can be used to unlock an unlimited number of copies, over both Mac and Windows. A registration over iTunes isn't quite so liberal.
4. There is no ability to mod the game. This matters to more people than you might think.

But the main reason Avadon HD is $10 is, to be honest, that is the only possible price. Any more expensive, and it will cost way too much for an app. Any cheaper, and we're charging too little for what is still an old school niche product with a limited audience. If you try to look at it from our perspective, I think you will see that we didn't have a lot of options here.

One More Disappointment.

We are going to release all of our new games on the iPad. No question.

However, we currently have no plans to write games for the iPhone. After long thought, I came to realize that we just can't figure out how to write the sort of in-depth games we like to do on that screen size. Again, this is a failing on our part. I'm sure some intrepid developer will find a way to make it work. (Hear that, young Indies? That is the siren song of a market for you, all wrapped up with a big, red bow.)

Also, since most Android devices don't have a screen big enough to support our games, we are very unsure how soon we'll be supporting that platform. We are in wait-and-see mode.

Thank You.

And finally, many thanks to everyone who reads this who has supported our games. At the end of the day, I'm just a guy in a basement trying to earn a living and feed the kids. I am grateful for every sale. Plus, they make it possible for me to write more games. Lord knows, by this point, I'm too old and cranky to learn how to do real work.

Soon, we will release the first screenshots and information for Avernum: Escape From the Pit. For Windows and Macintosh. And the iPad!

Avadon: The Black Fortress Released.

On Monday, after fifteen months of work, Spiderweb Software released Avadon: The Black Fortress.

I'm writing this on Wednesday, after a week spent in a pretty continuous state of total freaking out. I am always nervous when releasing a new game. But a new game in a new world with a new system? After spending an unusual amount of time on it? I've been going kind of insane.

For those who are interested, early sales are quite strong. I'm starting to suspect that we aren't about to go out of business. And yet, most of the early sales are to die-heard fans. The question is how many new people will play it and like it. I think that it's solid, the world is cool, and the game itself is a lot of fun to play. But I might be wrong. It happens all the time.

Releasing a new game also means that I have to read my forums, which, as I have written before, is painful. Even for a solid game, most of the things that are written will be critical. It's only with time that I can get a read on how good the good parts are.

This is also when I have to take the lumps for unpopular but necessary choices I had to make. The biggest complaint is that the game has no keyboard movement. Our other big series, Avernum, takes place on a fairly simple grid, so keyboard movement is easy to implement. Avadon takes place in a larger world with no simple grid for the characters to stand on, and keyboard movement just doesn't work as well as the mouse, especially for distances that aren't very short. But some people really want keyboard movement, and I can hardly tell them they are wrong. I just have to take the criticism and hope that the game is good enough.

I've also been criticized that the game text is too small, and I'm taking that to heart. I am going to work on using a larger font for dialogue and special encounters, which should help a lot.

But now I'm rambling. Releasing a game is only the beginning of a long process. Maintenance. PR. Sequels. I hope you try it out. I hope you like it. And I hope Spiderweb gets to stay in business.

On to the Windows port (hopefully out at the end of April). And the iPad port (I have no idea when this might be ready).

Shameless Self-Promotion.

The gaming site GameBanshee was kind enough to call our newest game, Avernum 6, in their annual awards. We were runner-ups in the Independent RPG of the Year and RPG Game of the Year categories. Thank you very much!

This sort of thing is exciting to me, and not just because of the obvious self-esteem and greed motivations. The recession has been really rough on the gaming press, and, because of that, it's been rough on us. Many of the writers and editors who liked to cover us lost their jobs, and many of the small news outlets that were willing to cover humble Indie games like ours disappeared or were absorbed. It's been depressing.

The hardest part about being a small Indie is getting attention. Press coverage is oxygen. It takes the tenacity of the cockroach to eventually find editors who are willing to say, "Sure, they're small, but I believe in what they're doing. I'm going to back them up." And, when it happens (such as the recent coverage of us in PC Gamer), I'm incredibly grateful.

Red Dead: Redemption and My Failures As a Parent

Before I take a weekend-long break from writing Avadon to spend a weekend with the family in my favorite place in the world, I wanted to talk about my latest gaming obsession.

Red Dead: Redemption

Since I'm an enormous fan of Rockstar's violent, objectionable sandbox games, and the only person you will ever meet who actually played Grand Theft Auto IV all the way to the end, I'm surprised it took me so long to get around to playing this. It's Grand Theft Auto, but in the old west. So instead of stealing cars, you steal stagecoaches! Instead of killing hundreds of Mexicans in fake L.A., you kill them in real Mexico!

What was more surprising, though in retrospect it should not have been, was how instantly attached my eight year old daughter became to the game the moment she caught an unlucky glimpse of me playing it. Of course, it makes perfect sense. This is a game where you own a horse, ride your horse, take your horse out into the brush, find wild horses, capture and tame wild horses, and make one of those horses your new horse.

So she wanted to play it. A lot. But it's a Rockstar game, with all of the obscenity, gruesome violence, and graphic sexuality that entails. (Along with an unusually high frequency of rape, which I don't consider an improvement.)

So I let her play the game, but only in sandbox mode. She got stuck early on in the missions, and I haven't helped her. Thus, the things she are exposed to while questing for horses are only damaging, not totally traumatizing.

Of course, when I walked into the living room yesterday, I saw her chasing down a pack of bandits and shooting them all in the back in an admirably businesslike fashion. Also, she is trying to hunt down every animal in the game. She'll say, "Daddy! I shot a snake! And an armadillo!" And she'll bounce up and down like the happiest little girl in the world.

So I either suck at parenting or am really fantastic at it.

Two Key Differences Between Red Dead: Redemption and Grand Theft Auto

In Grand Theft Auto, when I left my car to go on some dangerous mission and returned to it later with like eighty guys chasing me and a need to get away very quickly, I never found that my car was missing because it wandered off to eat a particularly tasty clump of grass a half a mile away.

In Grand Theft Auto, when I was peacefully driving somewhere, my car was never suddenly killed by a cougar, who then ate me.

I mean, sure, sometimes gang members would shoot at me, but this was never really a problem. Gangbangers with AK-47s are a walk in the park compared to cougars. Cougars are serious business.

Oh, and Some Shameless Self-Promotion

In October, we had our 15th anniversary sale, celebrating an alarmingly long time being in the business of writing Indie role-playing games. The sale was a huge success, one of the best sales we've ever had. As a result, and as a thank you to everyone who has been nice enough to keep us in business all these years, we are resuming the most popular part of the sale: the big discount on CD bundles. For the entire month of December, all of our Game Collections on CD are 25% off.

Avernum 6 For Windows Released

We have finally released Avernum 6, the final game in the Avernum saga, for Windows. The game has been a huge success for us on the Mac end, and we're very happy to finally have it available for all of our customers. If you like huge, Indie role-playing games with a retro flair, you could do worse than to check it out.

Having worked on this storyline for fifteen years now, it feels weird to bring it to an end. And liberating, too. I am making a whole new game world, game engine, etc., and I hope to blog about the ins and outs of that process plenty in the next year.

Edit: By the way, prior experience with the Avernum games is completely unnecessary to enjoy Avernum 6. I figured out early on that sequels should always provide easy entry for new players. Especially when they have a number as high as 6 after the name.