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!

Guessing What Is Going To Kill Me, Pt. 2

Last week, I started to ponder what could put Spiderweb Software (and, by extension, any small Indie like us) out of business. Pretty fun recession chit-chat, huh? This week, I continue my litany of pessimism.

What could grievously wound, or even kill, our business?

The Rise of the Netbook - Netbooks, those cheapo little laptops for web browsing and other undemanding activities, are taking off like crazy. Every one of those that sells removes a possible customer, who likely would have otherwise bought a more expensive (but not actually expensive) machine that could run my games. This wouldn't be fatal, but it is a constant shrinking of the possible customer base.

And that's not even addressing the fact that many of those machines run Linux. Supporting three platforms would overtax my feeble brain.

Likelihood - It's already happened. When I released Geneforge 5: Overthrow for Windows, I received constant cries of woe from Netbook owners who couldn't handle its extremely low system requirements.

But I'll swallow it. People who like games generally still buy machines that can play games, and there are no Netbooks on the Mac side. Also, a lot of Netbooks can run my games. So I doubt it'll be a real problem, but only because my hardware needs are still very low.

It is still frustrating to get chewed out by someone who is ticked because his $250 machine can't run games. Well, yeah!

Piracy Becomes So Trivially Easy and the Recession Becomes So Intense That Hardly Anybody Buys Games Anymore - Pretty self-explanatory.

Likelihood - Again, this has already happened. Recent estimates put the PC piracy rate at around 80-90%. Even I am not cynical enough to believe that the percentage of honest people around here will drop below ten percent. And yet, that tiny minority of virtuous people is enough to keep me in business.

Once, I actually worried about something like this would happen. And then it did. And yet, business is strong. I think this shows that even nightmare scenarios can be surprisingly survivable. In other words, predict and prepare, but don't panic.

I Go Insane Or Burn Out - When you work alone creating for a very long time, you can get awfully eccentric. Or even crazy. Or you can just burn out or get terminal writer's block. It happens all the time. I have dreaded it every day that I've run this business.

Likelihood - Sadly, high. It's only a matter of time. The Internet is robust. The software industry is robust. That couple pounds of fat and electrical impulses I carry around in my skull? Sometimes, it feels very fragile indeed. I never know when I'm going to come downstairs, sit down, stare at the blank screen, and go, "I got nothin'." And that is the end.

But that's not the thing that really keeps me awake at night. This is ...

I Write a Bad Game - Next year, I'm going to make a whole new series, with a new game engine and IP. This is always risky. I might sink a bunch of money and time in it, and it will fail. Remember, anything new will make you lose a chunk of that reliable customer base that keeps you alive. If I don't replace what we lose? We have a pretty good cash and sales cushion here, but it will never be enough to survive one big flop.

Likelihood - Inevitable.

I've had a pretty good record with my games. None of them have set the world on fire, but they have almost always at least broke even. I've only ever written one game that didn't sell enough to make it worth the time. And, when I followed it with a game with mediocre sales, we almost went under. It happened once, and it will happen again, and worse. Everybody produces a real stinker eventually. And, when that happens, it will very likely be the end. It's something that every small developer has to face. Either get absorbed by someone bigger, a company that can survive some shocks, or face the fact that the wolves will catch you eventually.

Everyone and everything ends. Might as well make your peace with it now.

And that is the litany of doom, from paranoid delusions to an honest assessment of my own mortality. I hope this has been a vaguely interesting peek into small-business world.

Oh, and I just finished Plants vs. Zombies. I have a lot to say about that, next week.