I’ve been doing a massive deep clean, digging out and getting rid of all sorts of old business junk. Or, at least, the junk we can’t sign and hand out as Kickstarter rewards.

A lot of good memories there. Or, at least, memories. And mountains of CD-Rs that I never got close to using.

This particular post is brought to you by the Steam Spring Sale, in which all our games are for sale!

Our newest game, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory, has a really nice discount. It’s done very well and is a really solid indie, story-heavy, turn-based RPG. Our newly completed Queen’s Wish series is also super cheap.

Now on to the junk!

I found one of my MOST IMPORTANT POSSESSIONS.

About 20 years ago, I had some sort of software problem. To fix it, I needed some sort of a file. It contains a key OS file or authentication code or game component or something.

It was so vitally important than I copied it onto a floppy and labeled it "In Case of Emergency ..." and put it in a drawer. Neglecting, of course, to write exactly what was on it, because it was SO IMPORTANT I assumed I would never forget.

I found the disk 10 years later and had absolutely no recollection of what vital file was on it.

But I can never, ever, ever get rid of it! Because who knows ...

(I posted this to Twitter. Many people suggested I buy a device that can read what is on this disk. Alas, I checked, and such devices no longer exist and never will again. Ever.)

Our first games were published by a company called Fantasoft, best known for a 1994 shareware hit called Realmz. (In 1994, a "hit" meant you could buy a house. These days, an indie hit means you can buy Vermont.)

In a fit of enthusiasm, Fantasoft wanted to try to get our games sold on CDs in actual stores, like proper grown-up developers. So they worked with me to make these sexy CD prototypes with proper hand-drawn art (which is simultaneously horribly garish and kind of cool).

The exciting thing about this is that, if the plan worked out, they thought I could get as much as (cue Dr. Evil Voice) TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS. At the time, this seemed an unimaginable payoff.

Never panned out. The guy in charge of the deal flaked out. Fantasoft disappeared from the face of the earth. All that remains are 3 ancient CDs, which I carry from state to state for no particular reason.

The last known floppy of one of the games Spiderweb Software published.

In the 90s, we weren't sure what direction we wanted to take our business. But a Mac company called Ambrosia was having huge success publishing other shareware games. We had put in a huge amount of work building the infrastructure to run an online business in 1997. (My wife coded an entire web store from scratch.)

So the stage was set for us to become one of the very first businesses to fail at publishing indie games!

Two problems. First, publishing well requires a huge amount of grinding work we simply weren't well-suited to do. Second, really good games are very rare.

We published several games. Varying quality, but some were cool. They sold ok for shareware, but honestly we felt we could do better for our clients. We lost touch with the developers long long ago.

At least we didn't lose a lot of money. Which is because we never really risked anything. Which is why we failed.

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Spiderweb Software has been creating turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games since 1994. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good stories and fun.

This newsletter is free, but paying me to subscribe guilts me into writing more. If you would like to support us, you could also buy our newest game, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory, and leaving us a nice review.

So first, the news. Our Queen’s Wish Series, started in 2019, has just been finished! We have released the epilogue, Queen’s Wish: The Judgment, as free DLC for Queen’s Wish 2: The Tormentor.

If you like my games but always bounced off this series, you can give it a try knowing it properly ends. If you want some really unique turn-based RPGs, the whole series is here. (If you played Queen’s Wish 2, lost your saved games, and want to just to the epilogue, instructions are here.)

I wanted to postmortem Queen’s Wish a bit. It was a big success for us overall, yet it contained our biggest failure. While I’m super proud of it, I never want to think about it again.

What Is Queen’s Wish?

In 2019, the end of my career was slowly coming into distant view. I felt I had it in me to make one more big new series. I always make turn-based RPGs, but I wanted to make one that felt different from any other.

(I get accused sometimes of just coasting and making the same game again and again. When someone accuses me of that, I just ignore them forever.)

I wanted a new look, new graphics, new graphics engine, new game engine, new system, and a world and story that was fresh, sincere, emotional, and hopefully engaging. Also, for the first time, we would try to fund a game on Kickstarter.

The Kickstarter for Queen’s Wish: The Conqueror, succeeded far beyond our expectations. I wrote what I found to be a really fun game to play. It sold well and still sells pretty good. We were optimistic about making a whole trilogy.

So we Kickstartered Queen’s Wish 2: The Tormentor, and it BOMBED. It died like a dog.

Writing a full third game became not feasible for us, so we did a couple remasters to get the business back on a solid financial footing. Then I wrote Queen’s Wish: The Judgment, out now. It’s a several hour epilogue tucked at the end of Queen’s Wish 2 that gives the series a nice ending.

It’s a lot of pro bono work, but I can’t stand the thought of being yet another fantasy author who can’t finish stories.

What Is Unique About These Stories?

I did several things with these games that I think are really innovative and tie together as a unified whole to make Queen’s Wish a unique experience.

Royalty, Empire, and Family - In Queen’s Wish, you play a young prince or princess who is being forced to learn to administer the family’s empire. As always, I give you a ton of choice about how much you want to play along. Then I do everything I can to make you question your choices.

A lot of this game is interacting with your relatives, who I tried to make as interesting as I could. I wanted conversations in this game to be a reward and a pleasure to read. Perhaps sometimes I succeeded.

It’s a really sincere game. (Though some find this “cringe.”) Your family both loves and are eternally frustrated with each other. I have developed a huge affection for these characters over the years, and your relationships with them are the focus of the epilogue.

Intense, Mission-Based Battle Style - Raiding dungeons in my games has always been really chill. You dip into a dungeon, kill a few things, then go back to town to rest. They are at the more relaxing end of the RPG spectrum.

Queen’s Wish is inspired a lot more by X-Com and Darkest Dungeon. Most missions need to be done in one trip, which means you need to focus a lot more on tweaking your build and conserving your resources. I think it plays very well. It’s a sort of game I really like to play sometimes. It’s also not what my fans have come to expect.

Empire Simulator - In each Queen’s Wish game, you are reclaiming a lost, or neglected colony. You lead warriors to reach and rebuild your old forts. Then what you do with the forts has an immediate, considerable effect on your resources.

Most of the best equipment in the game you make yourself, which makes sense. You’re royalty in a mighty empire. You shouldn’t be rooting around in caves to get your swords. You have fine craftsmen for that, once you build up the infrastructure to support them.

But What Went Wrong?

Because everything in Queen’s Wish was so new and I’m just one guy, I really rode the ragged edge of a nervous breakdown getting it finished. Something had to give. That thing was graphics, never my strong suit to begin with.

People asked me for years and years for a simple tile game like my earliest titles. I wanted to do this too, because it also made it possible to release the games for iPhone. I thought doing an iPhone game would be fun.

I didn’t do a good job. My highly skilled freelancers did great work for me, but the game just doesn’t look good. Not even to me. All blame lays with me.

These are the games that taught me that I really needed to start focusing on giving my games a more unified appearance. I worked hard on that with Avernum 4: Greed and Glory, and I think that game looks better than anything we’ve done. Too late for Queen’s Wish, though.

Why Did Queen’s Wish 2 Fail?

Our marketer was going out of business when the game shipped, and it basically got no exposure. But I can’t really blame that.

Here is a hard truth of a long career in this business: You need to change your designs up sometimes to keep things feeling fresh. However, whenever you change anything, you will lose a bunch of fans. You need to earn new ones to make up for it. Alas, these games were launched into a phenomenal indie game glut, and new fans just were too hard for us to find. This is where the graphics problems hit us the hardest.

The Queen’s Wish games were a lot different from what we did before, and a lot of people drifted away. I failed to replace those customers. Simple as.

I do really hope people give these games another try, though. Perhaps, one day, they will think, “I wish I had another Jeff Vogel game. Those were fun. I’d even take a so-so one.” If you ever think that, try Queen’s Wish.

The Beginning of the End

I have now reached a point where I can retire with honor. I’ve been at this for 32 years. I’m ancient, and I’ve done a lot of good work.

I’m not going to retire yet. Honestly, I may never retire. What else would I do? Making games is a compulsion for me. I can’t stop. Even after all the remasters I have to do, there are a few games I could freshen up in a really satisfying way.

Anyway, Queen’s Wish is done. I celebrated by, the day after I finished it, starting a new game.

To everyone who supported me in this grand experiment, thank you! On to the next.

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Spiderweb Software has been creating turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games since 1994. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good stories and fun.

This newsletter is free, but paying me to subscribe guilts me into writing more. If you would like to support us, you could also buy a game that sold very well, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory, and leaving us a nice review.

For a change, I wanted to write about a game while it was actually still hot. So let’s talk Mewgenics. It’s the smash hit by Edmund McMillan and Tyler Glaiel, true indie dev royalty. It sold a million copies in a week. It’s a very interesting piece of work.

I have 25 hours in this game and am a little way into Act 2. It’s a long title, a serious time-eater. 25 hours is how long this game takes to clear its throat. Table stakes. Still, between this and watching a bunch of streams, I think I have the shape of the thing.

As a developer, I find so much about this title fascinating. I have a lot of guesses about how it came about and why it works as well as it does. Note I have never met either of the developers. Any guess I make is, just that, a guess.

What Is Mewgenics?

It’s two parts.

First, you have a house full of feral warrior cats. You buy supplies and furniture, and breed them with each other to make them big and strong. Or hideously inbred monsters. Or both.

Then you send them out on missions, each taking 1-2 hours. Your group of cats maneuvers down a tree of encounters and fights (like Slay the Spire, Peglin, or Monster Train). They have a series of turn-based fights on a small, square grid (like Into the Breach).

Once the fights are done, the cats return to the safety of the house and make new warriors for you by having sex with their cousins.

Mewgenics has the cheery profane aesthetic one would expect from the developers of Super Meatboy, Binding of Isaac, and The End Is Night. Works for me.

Boring Review Stuff

It’s an extremely addictive game with a phenomenal amount of polish. They really went above and beyond with the soundtrack. The design is enormous, packed with a remarkable number of game elements that interact with each other in crazy ways. The game earns its money.

One of the pleasures of indie games is that every once in a while you get to experience a pure passion project, given lavish amounts of love and attention beyond anything you would expect. UFO50 was one of those. Stardew Valley. Even if you don’t like them, you have to appreciate the hustle. After spending a bunch of time in Borderlands 4, it’s like a glass of cool water in the desert.

If you’re into game design, you really need to play the game to see just how thorough the design was. They made a battle system, and then they spent years exploring every bit of possible design space. If there is a Mewgenics 2, I suspect they will struggle with coming up with enough fresh ideas in the current system. It seems totally milked.

All that quality comes from a seriously long development period, which is fascinating in itself.

I’m a Process Guy

I love trying to figure out all the little steps and compromises that go into making a work of art. This is extra interesting with Mewgenics, a game with a notoriously long development period.

I first learned about Mewgenics around when it was first announced in 2012 (!!!). There was an ad for it at a PAX Expo I attended, back when PAX felt really fresh and new. I was all “The Super Meat Boy guys are doing a game about breeding and fighting cats? Cool!” And then 10 years later I thought, “I wonder what happened to that.”

Turns out, they couldn’t get the combat system to be fun, so they set the game aside to do other things for a few years. Fair enough.

Then, while Mewgenics was in deep freeze, other indie developers expanded the design tech available an enormous amount. When the devs went back to the game, the toolkit at their disposal was much, much larger. Into the Breach gave the perfect battle framework. Slay the Spire gave the perfect mission framework. Just assemble the parts, add a fresh new meta-progression system (cat breeding) and a phenomenal amount of music and polish, ship, and get rich.

Again, this is just my guess of roughly what happened. I’ve never met any of the people involved. Maybe they independently invented all these systems on their own. I dunno. But honestly, I HOPE this is what happened, because that’s how our art form best evolves.

We All Stand on the Shoulders of Giants

Indie developers catch a lot of justified flack for making a million clones of a good idea, but they’re also great at taking the ideas they are given and making them newly fresh and exciting.

Truly new ideas are very rare, and most of them are bad. The total design space available to game designers is finite. Unimaginably huge, but still finite. Every year, it is harder to come up with something truly fresh, and most innovation sucks.

Indie devs work in established designs all the time. (You think I invented the turn-based RPG?) The fun is in using our tools to expand what we can do. When we make 1000 copies of Vampire Survivors, we’re being lame. Except, of course, for the 3 clones that are blessed by the Muses and actually feel fresh and awesome. (Brotato!)

If I sound overly cynical about innovation, bear in mind that the part of Mewgenics that works worst is the most innovative part.

The Breeding is a Problem

Breeding cats is very important, and it’s the freshest, most innovative part of the design. I hope other devs explore it. When they do, they definitely can make their fortunes by improving it.

Since the breeding is a very new system, it should be very clean and clear. Two problems.

One, it’s very opaque. The game explains very little about how it works. I had to do a bunch of Googling.

Two, the interface is really rough. I had to spend a lot of time just to figure out where cats were and which cat had what stats and what cats to get rid of. You have to play a ton of hours to get the interface you needed. I’m not even close. Then, while I’m sorting through my cats to figure out which were useful and which were junk, they all ran around and I lost my place in the list and had to start over.

And of course you’re thinking, “Well that’s what cats are like lol lmao!” Yeah. I know. No offense to cat people, but that’s why I own a dog. It just feels to me like an interface that’s underbaked. Surprising, when everything else in this game is polished to such a fine sheen.

(As I write this, a patch with interface improvements just came out. I don’t think I’ve actually earned the features it improves yet, so maybe more serious players than me are in paradise now. I’m not sure how I feel about having to do a lot of grinding just to unlock the interface.)

Still like the game, but God is in the details.

Side Thought About Pets

The success of Mewgenics says a lot about humanity’s odd love-hate relationship with cats. Look at it this way … If this game was about dogs, it would have to be a very different game.

My Future With Mewgenics

As I said, I’m 25 hours in, which is enough to barely get started. I’ll play it a bunch more, but I don’t think I can finish it. Personally, when I finish a huge game like this, it’s usually a depression symptom.

I’m increasingly mentally dividing games between Time-Eaters and Busy-Person-Games. (Need a better term.) Some games sell a sponge that absorbs huge amounts of excess time. Other games sell a focused experience for people with busy lives. Mewgenics is very, very much the former. A valid audience. I’m just not part of it.

Also, it’s so thrilling that it’s an actual new IP. At the moment, the big excitement in AAA games is figuring out exactly what Bungie did with the exhumed, dusty corpse of Marathon, so I’m very happy to have the cat option.

This is another case where a small team of indie developers came up with a cool game that blows everyone away while the big companies are wandering aimless. Always brings a tear to my eye.

And as for me? I got really addicted to Mewgenics for a week. Then life got busy, and I was completely unable to meet its demands for a week. Now that life is calm, I could start playing it again, but doing so gives me a queasy feeling. I no longer live a life that can fit a game like this.

So I must bid Mewgenics a happy, grateful farewell and put it on my Masterpieces For Other People shelf next to Silksong. (And probably Slay the Spire 2 soon lol.) Maybe I’ll go back to Space Invaders. A game of that is 3 minutes, max. As my dad always said, it’s hell gettin’ old.

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Spiderweb Software has been creating turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games since 1994. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good stories and fun.

This newsletter is free, but paying me to subscribe guilts me into writing more. If you would like to support us, you could also buy our newest game, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory, and leaving us a nice review.

One of the things I’ve always said about the game biz is, “Never forget what product you’re selling.”

If your video game has an audience, that means it is affecting the brains of your players in a way that they like. This effect is your product. Maybe players will get tired of it, in which case you’re in trouble. Maybe they’ll keep liking it, in which case you’d better keep selling it until you come up with something better.

I recently wrote an article with a (non-exhaustive!) list of five brain effects you can profitably sell:

Product 1. Dopamine!

Product 2. Stimulation, Reflex/Adrenaline Version

Product 3. Stimulation, Thinky Version

Product 4. Art (tm)

Product 5. Devouring Time

I find these categories helpful when looking at games and figuring out why they sell, or don’t.

Practical Examples

Here are two examples of very well-known and successful action games that are selling very different products.

They are Elden Ring and Hollow Knight: Silksong. Really good games. Well-known. Huge followings and sales.

The both lean heavily into Product 2. They sell really difficult, suspenseful, engrossing battles. The sort where you have to really lock in, master tight controls, die a lot, learn the boss moves, pump out adrenaline, get frustrated, and then are finally rewarded with the blissful release of victory. Both games are REALLY good at providing this.

There’s plenty of differences, of course. Team size and budget. 2-D versus 3-D. To my eye, however, they have very different focuses on what they are selling.

Elden Ring - The Pure, Streamlined Experience

When From Software, makers of classics like Elden Ring, Dark Souls, and Bloodborne, put out a new game, you can always count on the tiresome resurrection of the difficulty debate. “Why is there no easy difficulty?”

From Software made a really tough decision when creating the Souls genre, one I can’t help but admire. They know what sort of experience they are selling, a pure, intense form of reflex testing, and they only sell that experience.

If you could play the game on Easy (or turn down the difficulty of a tough fight), you would no longer be getting the product they want to sell. To which they say, “Why would we allow that? If you don’t want what we sell, play one of the million other video games. Instead, we will stay laser-focused on making sure that, if you play our game, you will get the exact thing that we make money selling.”

Is this bravery? Cunning? Stubbornness? Sadism? Opinions vary. Considering how immensely successful Elden Ring was, you can’t argue with the results.

However, they are not cruel masters. They have made one key design change as the games have evolved: They have become far more streamlined. Farming has been reduced. Runbacks to bosses have become very short.

The product they sell is the really intense combat, so they have been gradually stripping away anything that distracts from that. As someone who dies a lot, I really appreciate it.

Silksong took a very different approach.

Silksong - Giving Your Money’s Worth, Whether You Want It Or Not

The reaction to Team Cherry’s long-awaited Silksong was not one of unmixed joy. It got great reviews and sales, but it also got lots of criticism and far fewer awards than expected. Something happened there.

The debate early on was framed as, “It’s too haaaaard!” versus “Git gud, scrub!” Not the right debate. It’s really not that hard a game. It’s tough, sure, but no more than a lot of other games that players were completely OK with. (Like Elden Ring.)

I think that the problem with Silksong is not difficulty. It’s padding. The game is full of time-consuming jobs that could effortlessly be trimmed. Long runbacks to bosses. Resource farming. General trolling, like spawn points with death traps. (Really good players won’t experience these, but many players aren’t that good.)

I played it until a ways into Act 2, and I found myself increasingly aggravated. I had to do the runback to the Last Judge, the final Act 1 boss, a lot of times. It was several minutes of fairly delicate platforming. And I got GOOD at that runback. I could fly through it in the end. However, it got tedious, and the fast, elaborate maneuvers made my old hands hurt.

But ... Time-eating is product, isn’t it? Why is it bad to make your game last longer? What I see as 10 hours of padding, someone else will see as 10 more hours of value for the price. If I get my wish of a more streamlined game, that other person is cruelly forced to cope with their life without distraction for 10 more hours.

In other words, the game is not just selling Product 2, the action. It is also selling Product 5. It is very deliberately crafted to be a time devourer. If you’re a busy guy (like me, or the sort of professional who votes for awards), padding can cause resentment. However, for a lot of players, time spent playing a game is a reward in itself.

There’s no right or wrong here. More a zero sum struggle between different factions who want to buy different products. Team Cherry got a mountain of money for Silksong, and they certainly earned it. Sometimes, however, when you make a divisive choice, it ends up being, you know, divisive.

Know What You’re Selling

There is too much advice for indie developers available out there, and most of it stinks. So I’ll make my advice very modest: Understand what makes your games appeal to players. Know what you’re selling, and try to stay aware of how long this will keep its appeal.

If you write a sequel to a successful game and it dies in the market, players just didn’t want that big a serving of whatever you were dishing up.

In the 32 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve subtly changed up what I sell a lot of times. It helps keep things fresh for me as a designer. One warning: Whenever you change what you’re selling, you will lose customers. You have to make sure to recruit more customers to replace them. Tough to do these days.

Anyway, that’s a framework I use to analyze this. It’s not meant to be a universal set of rules. (Art resists all attempts to restrain it with rules.) Just a way to look at how we make our money. Sorry for the kind of dry post, but it’s just what interested me lately. I hope someone finds it of interest.

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Spiderweb Software has been creating turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games since 1994. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good stories and fun.

This newsletter is free, but paying me to subscribe guilts me into writing more. If you would like to support us, you could also buy our newest game, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory, and leaving us a nice review.

I love digging into and picking apart fantasy and science fiction writing. Pop culture now deluges us with fantasy and science fiction that tries to be interesting. Or, at least, has the patina of interestingness. Just don’t scratch the surface too much.

So, that being said ...

1. Queen’s Wish: The Judgment Coming In March

Spiderweb Software has one unfinished story: Queen’s Wish. Queen’s Wish: The Conqueror sold well (and still does). Queen’s Wish 2: The Tormentor really did not sell well. :-(

These truly unique indie RPGs were a combination of tricky tactical combat, empire management, tough political decisions, and coping with your family. I love them and am truly proud of them.

This March, we are releasing a long epilogue: Queen’s Wish: The Judgment. This will be a free Expansion for Queen’s Wish 2: The Tormentor.

If you want to try an RPG that is really unique, Queen’s Wish 2 is 40% off on Steam this week.

Honestly, I don’t think Queen’s Wish 2 will ever sell well. Someday, I should write a post-mortem about it. However, since so many fantasy writers are incapable of giving their stories proper endings, I am determined to finish Queen’s Wish as pro bono work just to feel like a proper craftsman.

2. I Watched A Bunch Of Severance

I bought a new Macintosh for the first time in five years. The only thing about it that works well is that it came with 3 free months of AppleTV+. Thus, I was able to watch what all of our hip, urban, professional friends have been gassing about for the last few years. (Apple is now putting into making TV shows the energy they used to spend making MacOS work.)

So I started with Severance, the identity-bending show about people who work in a strange corporation full of mystery. I watched the first season and the first episode of the second.

It’s a mystery box show. In other words, it’s a show that gets much of its suspense by what it doesn’t tell you. It throws a ton of mysteries at you and each episode they make incremental progress toward solving them (or forget they exist). As a series, about half the questions are answered in a way that makes you feel deeply unsatisfied. But you get painlessly a bunch of hours toward the grave, and that’s what really counts.

This show is heavily based on the works of goated science fiction author Philip K. Dick. However, he realized that mysteries aren’t actually that interesting. Setting up a clear strange reality and showing how humans deal with it (thus showing his idea of what humans are like) is the interesting thing.

If you want to read his books, which is an awesome idea, my favorite is A Scanner Darkly. (Also the science-fictionally closest to Severance.) The Man In the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep are also excellent.

As for Severance, the cast is absolutely first rate. The production values are excellent. The time passes painlessly.

And yet, it leaves me feeling increasingly agitated and manipulated. This show isn’t about anything. No ideas, minimal plot, sketchy characters. Instead, Severance just keeps throwing random crap at my head, bap bap bap, to distract me for an hour.

Having a concrete, properly constructed story is an act of bravery. When you actually say something clearly, people can criticize you. When you make a definite ending, people can get mad. Keeping things vague and slippery makes it easier to deflect criticism, but I strongly prefer the courage to hang your ass out there and just make things happen.

(I really like the recent movie Bugonia. The ending to that movie is very divisive, but the director at least has the courage to pick a path.)

3. I Also Watched Four Episodes Of Pluribus

This is a new science fiction series from Vince Gilligan, the Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul guy. So you know the guy knows how to structure a story.

Pluribus has a very clear, very gripping, quite horrifying science fiction premise. Again, top rate acting and production values. The setting leads to some remarkable set-pieces which are really carrying it for me.

I’m enjoying it a lot. I hear it gets slow, but I’m cool with that. With episode 4, it’s a lot clearer what the show is going to be about (honestly the only thing it could be about), and the methodical way the protagonist begins her mission was great fun to watch. It’s a series about solving a huge but very well-defined puzzle, and I love it.

(Also, everyone goes on about how unhappy and unlikeable the main character is. I think she’s perfectly fine, considering the circumstances. Maybe I’m the problem.)

4. I Finally Saw Avatar: Fire and Ash

Saw Avatar: Fire and Ash. These movies make billions of dollars and yet everyone I know never watches them and hates them simultaneously.

Once again, it was a very enjoyable time and the 3 hours flew by. The movies have definite flaws, but they also have some very good qualities I find increasingly rare ...

1. No irony poisoning. These movies are very sincere, which I have been longing for like a man in the desert craves a glass of water.

2. Very emotionally heavy, in an earned way. The conflicts and the pain feel very real to me.

3. So gorgeous. A sort of beautiful, imaginative, huge scale fantasy art that reminds me of 70s fantasy paintings.

4. The movies take real joy in depicting and exploring this strange, magical fantasy world. Joy is contagious.

5. It tells a CLEAR STORY! With a BEGINNING, MIDDLE, and END! No mystery boxes. No shock twists. So refreshing.

Also, Oona Chaplin’s gleeful, diabolical performance is SO GOOD. I can see why her face is the biggest on the posters.

5. Tiny Video Game Note

I finished a game called Tingus Goose. It’s a reasonably addictive indie puzzle/idle game. The gameplay is a little wonky, but it’s fine.

What really carries this game is the insane art style and animations. This is the very rare game where I keep playing it just to see the next cutscene.

Another “Indie games can do weird stuff and are really cool” moment. I hope it makes enough money for the makers to make something else.

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Spiderweb Software has been creating turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games since 1994. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good stories and fun.

This newsletter is free, but paying me to subscribe guilts me into writing more. If you would like to support us, you could also buy our newest game, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory, and leaving us a nice review.

(Spiderweb Software has a lot of big discounts for the Steam Winter Sale. If some Holiday Money is burning a hole in your pocket and you want to support the blog …)

When one gets well into middle age, one may start wondering, “What was the point of my life? What have I achieved?”

I have spent my life writing video games and advising those who want to write them. Therefore, I have to ask, “What is the purpose of video games? What are video games FOR?”

It’s an important question for those of us who write them. After all, as I have long said, “Never lose sight of the product you want to sell.” As in, “What exactly is it about your product that makes people want it enough to give $$$, and am I still providing it?”

Well, video games are, at heart, engines for affecting the human brain. When I make a game, I am trying to affect your brain and give you emotions and physical sensations.

So I have listed below what I see as the five main Products that games can sell to pleasurably change how a player’s brain feels, thus attracting dollars. This is not meant to be a comprehensive list. After all, video games are an art form, and art will ALWAYS slip out of your puny efforts to chain it with rules.

Product 1. Dopamine!

This is the big one. Where the REAL money is.

When you complete a task in a video game (kill a foe, match 3 jewels, fill up an xp bar, pick one of three power-ups after gaining a level, get phat lewtz, etc.) your brain feels it has actually achieved something. It is a real physical feeling of satisfaction and is perhaps the most tangible, powerful, mysterious, exploitable phenomenon in the video game craft.

It’s the twisted little miracle that makes our industry run. I saw “twisted” because this sensation is a trick. It is a lie. When you get an explosion of coins in Vampire Survivors, you haven’t really achieved anything. But you FEEL like you did, and that’s nice! I’m certainly not immune to this sort of pleasure, as the number of hours I’ve spent playing Vampire Survivors will attest.

Consider “idle games.” Games that you just launch and let run, without your actions, while your numbers go up. The dopamine effect is so insanely powerful that you can feel you are achieving something just watching a game play itself!

Calling this dopamine is, of course, a shorthand way of describing this fairly complicated flow of brain chemicals. It’s a simplification, but it will do for now.

Enormous amounts of research goes into the best ways to stimulate a constant, addicting dopamine flow. Fortunes beyond the dreams of avarice have been won by inventing a newer, craftier dopamine stimulation engine. Role-playing games are extremely good at generating this response, which is how I was able to buy a house.

I’m not judging. I play games! Dopamine feels good, and I like feeling good. I’d only make two observations ...

First, if you overstimulate a brain receptor too much, its response fades. (Sometimes called The Hedonic Treadmill, or, if you want to be retro, Chasing the Dragon.) The games industry needs to continuously find new ways to stimulate this response. Playing Vampire Survivors gives me no sensations beside boredom and irritation now. For reasons I can’t explain, at some point playing Hades started to make me feel physically ill.

Second, there are also fortunes being made mixing dopamine farming, real-money gambling, and your phone. I really do not feel good about this.

If you want your dopamine game to have lasting appeal, it’s best if you also mix in some (or all) of the next four products ...

Product 2. Stimulation, Reflex/Adrenaline Version

This is the very first product video games sold, and it is evergreen.

Playing a game that requires lots of dexterity and good reflexes has a powerful effect. The player’s attention is completely consumed. The body floods with adrenaline, reacting almost as if you are in battle. This feeling of anxiety compounds as you struggle, and lose and fail.

Until, at last, you win. Your adrenaline-flooded brain suddenly feels a powerful sensation of triumph and elation. Sure, you failed a bunch of times, but that is all washed away in an instant. One win pays for all.

Product 3. Stimulation, Thinky Version

Instead of focusing on reflexes and dexterity, a game can engage the intellect more directly. A brain can get pleasure from engaging with and solving puzzles. The body doesn’t need to move. The main action happens as the brain works. It’s a far calmer sort of pleasure. Less sweaty.

Concentrated thought is its own distinct pleasure.

(Yes, there is also a nice dopamine surge from solving a puzzle or winning a deathmatch. However, I believe these two sensations are distinct and appeal to different parts of the brain, so I’m breaking them into their own categories.)

Product 4. Art (tm)

Some ambitious games actually try to be Art. Art in the old classic art sense, as in using one’s skill and life experience to communicate in some medium (story, visual, musical) and convey an idea about the human experience or make the recipient feel certain emotions.

Art is really difficult.

Games like this tend two have two approaches. One is that the game is all art with no gamer filler, with the cost that it is short. (eg Mouthwashing. Stanley Parable. Disco Elysium.) The other is that they stretch the art out by mixing it with more standard game-type content. (eg The Last of Us, Spec Ops: The Line.)

Since games like this are relatively rare and Art is difficult, this is the easiest category to ignore. All I would add is that, when going this route, the easiest path to success is to be funny. Good humor is rare and almost always sells.

Product 5. Devouring Time

This one is super important and underappreciated. In my view, it reflects the main change in how we relate to video games since I started our business in 1994.

Sometimes, in life, we find ourselves with far more time on our hands then we have useful activities to fill it. (This is itself a product of the great prosperity in which we live, but this is a huge topic so I’ll try to focus.)

If you have too much time, it is very hard to escape boredom, and boredom is extremely unpleasant. Happily, video games are an incredibly powerful anaesthetic for preventing boredom. If you need chunks of your life devoured, hours by the thousands, games will get you from point A to point B painlessly. Cheaply. No drugs. No side effects.

Games have to be “fun,” of course, and the four categories above are different sorts of “fun.” However, sometimes all a game needs to do is eat time. Grinding. Boss farming. Waiting in match queues. Boss runbacks. Sitting in a room in VRChat. Are these things “fun?” Who cares? The important thing is the time passes with enough distraction.

But most people don’t want this. Some people are busy and fit games into cracks in a crowded schedule. Time-wasting like this will, understandably, repulse people like this.

I am very protective of my limited gaming time, and the moment a game starts to feel grindy I drop it in an instant. I can spend months chipping away at a game I love (Baldur’s Gate 3 or Elden Ring, say), but only if it keeps feeling fully engaging. I require all killer, no filler. After all, I have a pile of new, short, cool, indie games waiting in my Steam library at any moment.

My games are long. Overlong, honestly. But they END. My 1990s development style has no interest in providing an infinite timesink. That’s ok. Not everyone wants that.

I think, when someone is bored, video games can address this problem very effectively. It is not my place to say whether this is good or bad. However, when fans of a game place different values on their time, friction and confusion can exist.

You get two factions: People who want a game to absorb more boredom versus people who want the game to wrap things up so they can get back to their lives. Fan factions who want a game to eat more or less time are in a zero sum contest with each other.

I’m a Practical Person

People who have read me for a long time know I have a very hard-nosed, mercenary viewpoint about these games. I’m not interested in artsy-fartsy analysis or making a perfect taxonomy of ways games can be fun. I’m interested in selling games, as I need money to live.

If you want to sell things, it helps to know what you are selling. When you get confused and lost in the weeds, it always helps to remember your overall goal. What, exactly, am I trying to do to the customer’s brain?

I find this framework makes life a little less confusing and helps me to concentrate on what I want (and don’t want) to offer. I have a few examples for how this approach helps clarify what a game is doing and why it sells well, but this is already very long so it can wait until next time.

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Spiderweb Software has been creating turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games since 1994. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good stories and fun. All of our games are on deep discount on Steam right now!

This newsletter is free, but paying me to subscribe guilts me into writing more. If you would like to support us, you could also buy our newest game, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory, and leaving us a nice review.

Another mixed bag of small topics unworthy of a 2000 word blog post.

1. Avernum 4: Greed and Glory Is Out For iPad

Our newest game, which has gotten good press and player reviews and is selling well, and has generally made us proud and happy, is now out for the iPad! You can now explore the vast underworld nation of Avernum and engage in general adventuring and mischief without being brutally chained to a computer.

The iPad release is generally the last step in our process with a game. We are winding down Avernum 4 now and starting on two (!) new projects. I spent quite a few hours this week writing dialogue for a new thing. If you know how much I hate writing dialogue, you know that this means I’m getting SERIOUS.

2. A Few Words About Borderlands 4

My wife and I love playing couch co-op games together. I wish there were more of those. For example, we have played many Borderlands games (fighting a constant, grim sense of diminishing returns) and have now put a bunch of hours into Borderlands 4.

I really try to be positive in these posts. As a rule, people like my writing more when I am positive. So. Um.

My wife and I are playing Borderlands 4.

3. Actually, Some Words About Borderlands 4

If an AI could create a functional, full-length AAA game, I suspect it would look very much like Borderlands 4.

It plays like the average of every other video game in existence, and every single element is lacking in polish.

But there’s no point in criticizing a Borderland game, right? It’s criticism-proof. They’re still eating out on the quality of Borderlands 2 and they still offer the same formula: Kill a big, spongy boss. Get bigger guns. Repeat. As long as that part of the product satisfies enough people, the series will continue.

Of course, this is fine as long as the flaws don’t interfere with the main dopamine loop. Nobody cares about the bland environments or weird storytelling. However, the relentless bugs and interface issues (we’re on Playstation) DO make it hard to appreciate the guns, and this is a problem.

Playing this game makes me so mad. But my wife and I are mad at it TOGETHER, and that is what keeps a marriage strong.

4. No Thoughts About Silksong

The section I wrote on Silksong got big enough to be its own blog post, so I cut it out.

Instead, I will comment that I’m about the watch the Game Awards, a topic I have written about at length. Summary: The Game Awards are clumsy, crass, pathetically celebrity-obsessed, and mercenary and are therefore a PERFECT representation of our industry.

And stop nagging the awards to support your personal political whatever. The ONLY point of any industry award show is to cheerlead their industry and help keep it in business, and the Game Awards do this job entirely adequately. If you are angry about game devs losing their jobs, well the Game Awards are trying to help sell games so that devs don’t lose their jobs in the future, and this is a good thing.

I will watch the awards on Twitch, as chat making fun of them is always by far the most fun part.

5. A Bit Of Positivity To Close On

Fifteen years ago, writing a hit indie game meant a huge bucket of wealth and maybe a Generational Fortune.

These days, most “hit” indie games generate a few million dollars. Enough for a tiny development team to stay in business and for a 10+ size indie team to get an obituary in Kotaku.

Yet I’ve still played some successful indie games lately that I’ve enjoyed a lot.

Necesse is another Biome game like Terraria or Crashlands or Core Keeper, but you can hire characters to do all your mining and farming for you. This delighted me. I played about 80% of it, until advancement started requiring a lot of farming. It really tickled me until then and is worth the money.

GlitchSPANKR is a very weird walking sim type game with a lot of love in it. Really strange. Quite funny. Often gross. Big Smiling Friends vibes, which is meant as a compliment. I played about 80% of it, until the parts where it tries to be a Real Video Game got too annoying. It really tickled me until then and is worth the money.

The new Katamari game is another Katamari game and will therefore be one of my favorite games of the year.

I recommended to a puzzle-loving friend last night that she play The Witness. This reminded me how much I absolutely love The Witness, a truly great game.

I have a bunch of massively popular indie hits in my Steam account that I haven’t even opened. I can’t keep up even with the A+++ titles everyone raves about. Indie games are pretty awesome, it turns out!

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Spiderweb Software has been creating turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games since 1994. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good stories and fun.

This newsletter is free, but paying me to subscribe guilts me into writing more. If you would like to support us, you could also buy our newest game, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory, and leaving us a nice review.

I got a lot of good feedback from my last article on design tips and theory, so I want to do that more.

This is my single favorite anecdote/principle of game design. Understanding it will teach you a huge amount, not just about games, but people in general.

After all, video games are the tools we use to manipulate the mental and emotional states of human brains, so it is very important that we understand how those brains work.

The World Of Warcraft Rest System

World of Warcraft was the most successful MMORPG (pronounced Mamamorpagah). The way you play is: You log into a remote server and play a fantasy dude. You kill monsters again and again. The more you do it, the stronger you get. This is called “grinding”, which is the word elite, profitable game designers use to mean “fun.”

To keep people from grinding too long in World of Warcraft (WoW for short), they designed in a fatigue mechanic. After you played two hours, you got smaller rewards for your efforts.

Early players hated this. HATED it.

So they fixed the system. They didn’t actually change anything about the numbers of the system. Just the labels. Instead of saying when you played too long you were tired, they said that if you logged out for a while you became “rested.” So the higher amount of reward you got after not playing for a while was a bonus!!!

Everyone LOVED it.

Seriously. When WoW came out, my gamer group had played a lot of its highly influential predecessor game, Everquest. That game was merciless about how much grinding it required to get anywhere. So the idea of “rest bonuses” was like a cool glass of lemonade on a hot day.

A feature got turned from hated to loved with a tiny tweak of terminology. No design. Just semantics.

Ponder this and be enlightened.

Human Beings Are Loss Averse

Human brains like gaining things. But they HATE losing things.

If I find a $10 bill in the street, I feel good. Yay. Two free coffees. But if I lose a $10 bill? I feel AWFUL. I’m such an IDIOT.

This phenomenon has been very heavily studied by economists and psychologists for obvious reasons. It’s fun reading.

Don’t look down your nose at research in psychology and economics. What they learn about the brain is the rocket fuel that gives casinos (and the iPhone app store) untold billions in profits. You may not care about the researchers, but the researchers are very interested in you.

What Does This Mean For Game Design?

If you want players to feel happy about things you give them, you have to lard it on. And you have to keep larding it on, more and more, as they get used to and bored with the rewards you have given so far. (The discussion of the Hedonic Treadmill will have to wait for another day.)

But if a player loses something? Even something seemingly small and insignificant? Instant fear and revulsion. As in, if a part of your design requires a player to give something up permanently to access it, a lot of players will never interact with that part of your design. Ever. Unless you force them. In which case they will be very stressed and angry.

The Classic Consumables Problem

The best example of this phenomenon is consumables in role-playing games. As in potions, scrolls, anything that you use once and then it’s gone.

Anyone who designs RPGs knows: Players will never use consumables unless they ABSOLUTELY have to. And when they do, they hate it.

It is pretty much expected that anyone who plays Baldur’s Gate 3 will have, at the end, a backpack bulging with hundreds of potions and scrolls. Some not useful. Some very useful. All hoarded.

When a beta tester of mine says they are stuck at a fight and have died at it a dozen times, I always ask to see their saved game. When I get and load it, I invariably find a mountain of unused powerful consumables. I suggest they try the fight again and use 2 or 3 scrolls. Invariably, I hear back that they won the fight. And then, the next day, they complain about another fight they lost ten times, and so on.

How To Mitigate This?

Suppose your game has this situation. What do you do about it? Well, the main rule is that you can’t rewire a player’s brain. You just have to work with it. So, some options ...

Option 1 - Don’t worry about it! As long as they’re having fun, who cares if they keep 500 healing potions as a security blanket.

Option 2 - Ratchet up the difficulty until they need to use their consumables. This is a solid solution, but you should reserve it for higher difficulty levels. It is reasonable to expect someone playing on Hard to engage with all parts of the game system.

Option 3 - Remove consumables entirely. In my Queen’s Wish games, you don’t craft potions. You make potion bottles that automatically refill when you get back to town. Then I balance the dungeons so you need to use them. This does not remove the loss aversion (some players hated using even refillable potions), but it does massively mitigate it.

It’s Not Really A Problem

You don’t get to design games for the brains you wish people had. You can only design games for the brains they actually have.

I get frustrated sometimes when people don’t play my games the way I want them to. I think every game designer experiences this feeling sometimes. My job, at this point, is to get over it and meet my players where they are standing.

This is the first of these basic principles articles I want to write. I really hope these simple principles inspire you to make a game of your own. Indie games these days are basically a license to print money, and you’ll be farting through silk in no time.

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Spiderweb Software has been creating turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games since 1994. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good stories and fun.

This newsletter is free, but paying me to subscribe guilts me into writing more. If you would like to support us, you could also buy our newest game, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory, and leaving us a nice review.

This signed cover of original Ultima, received from Lord British himself, is one of my prized possessions. He created the Ultima series and is my single greatest design influence. This cover has hung in my office for many years.

How I got it may not be a funny story, but it is a story.

In 1982 or so, I was 12 years old and lucky enough to go to a 2 week summer computer camp in Lake Tahoe. (This is back when home computers were very exciting but so expensive that few could obtain them. You could pay good money to let your children go and spend two weeks actually touching them.)

The counselors were all computer nerds and taught us basic stuff on Apples and Atari 800s. I didn’t yet own a computer, but I had already started writing games in little classes at the community college and they totally fascinated me.

One of the counselors was Lord British. Word soon got around that the counselor with a weird title actually wrote games that sold in stores. His next game, Ultima 2, was coming out soon, and it was rumored that he had a playable copy with him. We were excited.

He taught a class on making your own computer game. I got into it. Each student, under his direction, spent 2 weeks writing a simple text adventure game. I finished mine.

During the weekend, I went off on some stupid camp activity I have forgotten about. When I got back, I found that Lord British had already demo-ed Ultima 2 for the kids. They were all completely excited about it, and I had missed it.

Being a highly assertive, feral, annoying child, I immediately went on a crusade to get Lord British to do another Ultima 2 demo. The prospect of seeing an unreleased video game in actual development was mind-boggling exciting to me. I begged him for another demo every chance I got, even though he made it so clear even I realized that he had absolutely no interest in doing so.

Obviously, this was appalling behavior. In my limited defense, I grew up in a small town in the 70s and this was just about the first time I ever met someone even remotely like me. And who actually had a job doing it! And not only did he make money making video games, but he was a camp counselor too!!! How cool was that!? It was a brief glimmer of hope for a lonely child. I’m not even slightly proud of how I behaved, but who among us is without sin?

Anyhoo, he finally got fed up with me. He said, if I left him alone, I could instead have a signed copy of an old Ultima cover he had in his suitcase. (He literally rummaged through all his junk looking for any piece of debris that would rid him of me.) I took his highly generous offer. Best I was going to do.

Twelve years later, I started writing my first game for money. When I did, I found that Lord British had given me a far greater gift than a demo or an autograph: An enormous treasure trove of ideas from which I could steal relentlessly.

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Spiderweb Software has been creating turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games since 1994. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good stories and fun.

This newsletter is free, but paying me to subscribe guilts me into writing more. If you would like to support us, you could also buy our newest game, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory, and leaving us a nice review.

Some times I envy designers who make action games.

Suppose you want to make your action game harder. Sure, you can take the numbers-go-up route. More health, more damage. But you can also make the target smaller. Or faster. Or move in an unpredictable way. Or take cover. So many levers to pull.

But I write turn-based RPGs. In these games, you and your opponent control blobs of numbers. I throw my numbers at your numbers, and you throw your numbers back at me. Eventually one of us runs out of numbers and loses.

Since it’s all math with no reflexes, there are fewer levers I can pull to make fights harder or more suspenseful.

But there are a few reliable ways to make your turn-based game more interesting. I use all of these in varying amounts in every game, and I have made pretty much every possible mistake several times.

(I use all of them in our newest RPG, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory, which is doing really well for us.)

The key is to do these things the right amount. The dose makes the poison. Some helps a lot, but lean too much into one, and your game will be worse. Where is the balance? Well, that’s where the art is, isn’t it?

I. Resistances

Suppose your RPG has three sorts of magic damage: Fire, Cold, and Electricity. It is possible to get super strong by only focusing on Fire. It may be tempting to force this player to diversify and explore more of the system by having an area where everything resists fire.

This will really mess up anyone who only focused on fire up until this point. However you can have enemies with a smaller amount of fire resistance earlier on to signal to the player that diversification is good.

A general design principle: It is bad to introduce elements that make large sections of the design irrelevant. If you worked hard on a cool Fire skill tree and then have enemies with 100% fire resistance, you have erased 1/3 of your own design.

BUT. This argument cuts both way. If Fire is so awesome and nobody uses Cold or Lightning, you have 100% erased 2/3 of your design. Also bad.

So resistances can be really good, if they are signaled early and encourage players to explore more of the design. Just don’t rugpull someone near the ending by making their whole build useless. The dose makes the poison.

ProTip: Have resistances come in gradually and, for stubborn people who refuse to diversify, have them cap out at 50%. Requiring paying attention to resistances should be reserved for higher difficulty levels.

II. An Advantage Plus A Disadvantage

Suppose you make a really strong magic item. You might be tempted to give it disadvantages to make the player think about whether to use it or how to work around it.

The classic card game Slay the Spire did this really well. After killing the first boss, you can pick an artifact that lets you play an extra card each turn. (VERY strong.) However, it comes with a disadvantage you must play around the entire game. You get a necessary power boost, but then you must shape your play around it from then on. But it’s worth it. Good way to do it.

One of my favorite games, Brotato, has you buy upgrades each round. However, many of the upgrades come with a teeny tiny penalty to something else. (e.g. +10% to Attack Speed, -2% to Damage.) These penalties are so small as to be trivial. They are static. Some people are pleased by the patina of complexity they create, but I think they should be removed unless they have a real effect.

Humans are loss-averse. They tend to love the dopamine hit from upgrades and be annoyed and stressed by items that make things worse. If the upgrade is really strong and the downside makes you think about how you play and evolve your strategy, that is great.

If you aren’t doing that, maybe remove all penalties that aren’t necessary.

ProTip: If you hit the player with an explicit penalty, you should be able to finish this sentence: “This penalty is necessary or makes the game more interesting because ...”

III. Lots Of Little Bonuses

All game designers in 2025 are drug dealers, leaning hard into the dopamine business. You can dose your client more effectively with many small doses than one big one. Giving a 5% damage bonus five times is more satisfying than giving a 25% bonus once.

To get the full satisfaction effect, the bonus should be clear, and the player should be able to FEEL it. Maybe only a tiny bit, a soft feeling, but it’s there.

Brotato, Vampire Survivors, and Megabonk are great at this, which is why they are hits. They’re the good drugs.

However, it is very easy to slice the pastry too thin here. For example, I’m playing Borderlands 4 and seeing lots of bonuses that are both small AND conditional. 5% to damage when using one limited sort of weapon. 7% to critical hit damage when in your special form. I’m not going to do homework for a 5% damage bonus. Borderlands can get away with this by occasionally giving you a clear upgrade item and then you can just throw away a lot of trash.

Diablo 4 had a far worse problem with this. So, so many small bonuses with conditional requirements: Bonuses but only to base attack. Or distant enemies. Or a bonus to damage while healthy. I would look at my stack of new items and not be sure if any of them were good.

If you take a small bonus and limit it further, you lose the excitement. Some people do get turned on by doing a lot of math homework for a build, but do it too much and your game ends up neglected. Like Diablo 4.

ProTip: A good bonus should be strong enough to be felt but weak enough you are hungry for more. Like a good drug.

IV. More Or Fewer Turns

The most important effect in a turn-based game is extra turns. This is why Haste and Summon effects are always the most powerful ones in an RPG. (Bonus game trivia: In original D&D, they balanced the Haste spell by making it age each character a year. LOL.)

Similarly, enemy effects that make the player lose turns are the most devastating. Everyone, everywhere, always, hates losing turns.

And yet, sometimes you have to do it. I have released games where the enemies had too many crowd control effects, and it wasn’t good. But I do like to have fights where, each round, you can’t be 100% sure which characters will get turns. It instantly adds a layer of complexity and suspense on the whole thing.

Just don’t overdo it, or it’s infuriating.

(Darkest Dungeon handles stunning effects, for both players and monsters, very well.)

ProTip: Give the player lots of ways to get bonus turns and take away enemy turns. Lots of fun. Also put the player at a risk of losing turns, but a little goes a long way.

Game Design Is A Young Field

I honestly wonder what gets taught in the Game Design classes that now pepper our colleges. The idea of game design as a discipline is well under a century old. (I personally date it to the publishing of the first edition of Monopoly, but that’s just me.) Video game design is even younger.

But whether or not it is art, it is definitely a craft. There are tricks and techniques aplenty. New tools are being discovered constantly. We have so much to learn about what tools to use, when, and how much.

Video games are art, and good art has an effect on the brains of those who experience it. Balance these factors badly, and player will wander away. Get the balance just right, and you can get rich!

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Spiderweb Software creates turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good story and fun. Our new game, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory, is out! Take a look!

This newsletter is free. However, the existence of paid subscribers makes me feel guilty if I don’t update it enough, which results in more posts.

Before I start blogging, please forgive me a brief advertisement about a new electronic entertainment I am very proud of ...

[Begin PR Copy]

The day is here! At last, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory has been released! It is now out for Windows & Macintosh, with the iPad version coming soon.

Started in 1994, the cult-classic Avernum series is one of the great video game sagas. In this new, epic fantasy role-playing adventure, you explore and save (or betray?) an enormous underworld nation. Avernum has finally won its freedom, and seekers of fame and fortune have flooded in. However, the need for peace with old rivals and the assault of waves of horrifying monsters threaten to undo everything the people of the depths have achieved. Can you save them? And get your own bits of fame and fortune along the way?

Battle through huge dungeons, fight unique and cunning foes, collect, create, and bless hundreds of different artifacts, and enjoy a really cool story. Avernum 4: Greed and Glory is a remaster of Avernum 4, which came out way back in 2005. The entire game has been redone, with improved art, tons of new quests, characters, and other material, and an engaging tale of survival and alien diplomacy in the underworld. We are really proud of this game, and we hope you like it!

[End PR Copy]

Back? OK!

Avernum 4: Greed and Glory is the remaster of Avernum 4, a game that came out in 2005 that I was never that happy with. I have written two posts already (here and here) about what went wrong. Now I’ll say how I fixed it.

Avernum 4 had two big problems. First, I hadn’t really figured out the overall arc of what the second trilogy of Avernum games was going to be about. Second, the project was so big and exhausting that it left me too drained to write all the story the game merited.

So when I went into Avernum 4: Greed and Glory, I had two goals.

Goal 1: More Stuff!

Original Avernum 4 was full of underdone bits. Fan favorite characters that only got tiny scraps of dialogue. Major characters who said very little. Major plot quests that were very quick and almost boilerplate. Empty areas. Don’t get me wrong ... it was a huge game with tons of stuff. But only the skeleton was there. It needed flesh.

So I added stuff. Thanks to Kickstarter backers, I was able to add over 20 (!!!) new quest lines, plus four new major locations and piles of new characters. Every major character has enough new dialogue to make them seem alive. I added traveling envoys from the Empire you could do diplomacy with all through the game.

Plus, I redrew the entire world. I added many new terrain types and then reworked every location to make it seem more real, and used environmental storytelling to give a better idea of what being in Avernum actually felt like. I played with light a lot more than I usually do to give the caves a claustrophobic, spooky feel.

Months went into all of this content. Making this game ended up being almost as exhausting as the original. And honestly? I wish there was more. (But isn’t that always the case?) There are some really cool late game locations that just didn’t get as many new quests and options as I had hoped. When I work on a game long enough, I just run out of time, ideas, and energy. I apologize to everyone, including myself.

And yet there is SO MUCH now! In my mind, the Avernum of Avernum 4 just feels real. I can picture it in my head. It feels organic and makes sense in a way this world never did before. It is really cool, and I take great satisfaction from it.

Goal 2: An Actual Theme

Avernum 3: Ruined World had an ending that was, if not a cliffhanger, cliffhanger-adjacent. Avernum was trying to share the underworld with a race of creatures that was entirely alien and had recently been at war with them. This had to be resolved. That was the easiest thing about making the story of Avernum 4. I had so much unfinished business to resolve.

But what else was going on?

The first Avernum trilogy was about survival and winning freedom. At the beginning of Avernum 4, Avernum was its own nation. But what sort of nation would it be?

I see it as being the frontier. A place to explore and win fame and wealth. The place young peasant farmers dream of going to win a new life. Dangerous and terrifying? Of course. But when in our own human history has that scared explorers away? If humans here dream of going to the moon or Mars, why can’t people in my fantasy world yearn for the depths?

So that previous paragraph? When I first started planning the Avernum 4 remaster, that was what came into my mind almost immediately. That was the theme. The one idea that powered everything.

In original Avernum 4, you always start as soldiers. Privates in the Avernum army, waiting to take orders. YAWN!

In new Avernum 4, you pick one of four backgrounds, two from the surface and two from the underworld. This has an effect on the game, but not a huge one. You get different stat bonuses, and the choice changes what sorts of quests you have to do to get a good ending. It makes the right level of difference. You feel it, but it doesn’t detract from what is, after all, the main story.

This is a great theme for the game because it fuels a lot of story and dialogue. The underworld is full of Empire fortune seekers. This causes friction with the native Avernites. This enabled lots of fun dialogue and player choices. I added official Empire envoys to express their own opinions and ask their own questions.

This change also lets the player have more stakes. The main story is vital, but in a sense it’s also off to the side. When you’re not actively being a hero, you get to choose your own goal and chase after it. Some of the goals lead to some really wild endings. I had some dramatic ideas, and they made it into the game. You can, if you play your cards right, own some spectacular bits of Avernite real estate.

Did I do as much as I wanted? Of course not. I wrote tons of new dialogue, but time, energy, and ideas always run out eventually. I have to hope I made enough.

I’m very happy with the end result, though.

I Hope You Like It

And that’s the story of Avernum 4, which is now done done done. I will patch the bugs. I will make the iPad version. And then I will forget everything about it and start the next project.

Maybe I’ll fit in a little rest.

I hope you try out the game (there’s a demo on our web site), and I hope you like it! Thanks for reading, and next time I’ll hopefully and happily start writing non-PR blog posts.

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Spiderweb Software creates turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good story and fun. Our new game, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory, is out! Take a look!

This newsletter is free. However, the existence of paid subscribers makes me feel guilty if I don’t update it enough, which results in more posts.

It’s Substack self-promotion time, and we have news! The demo of Avernum 4: Greed and Glory is out! For Steam Next Fest, you can play the start of the next chapter of our cult classic indie rpg epic for free. The full game is out on October 22nd.

If you’d like to see me play our new game and answer all your questions, I will be streaming twice for Steam Next Fest. (Currently 2901 demos. Yikes.) Once on Wednesday, October 15 and once on Sunday, October 19. 4 PM PST for both streams. Go to the game’s Steam page to watch. Hope someone can come by!

A Recent Interview

IT.mk is a Macedonian news outlet that likes to interview indie developers, and they asked me a few questions. It always feels good to give something back to our Macedonian supporters. I thought some of the answers turned out to be interesting, so here is the interview, in English.

I wrote this a few weeks ago, and I have added a few parenthetical comments to try to add some interest to all this basicness.

1. The Avernum saga started back in 1994. What was the original inspiration for creating this subterranean world, and how has that initial vision evolved over the last three decades?

Avernum came out of our very first game, Exile: Escape From the Pit, which we made in 1994. Avernum is the remaster name for Exile. Originally, it was a very simple game in a lot of ways. All of the storytelling basics we have expanded on in 31 years following are firmly in place.

Avernum is an underground nation. The whole game takes place in a subterranean fairyland of tunnels, caverns, and fungal forests. In the first game, it was a prison. The harsh Empire on the surface sent malcontents and petty criminals there. You played prisoners of Avernum, fighting for survival.

There were lots of little inspirations for this setting. Old D&D modules. A short story by Robert Silverberg. The books of Julian May. But mostly I wanted to recreate the joy I felt playing the oldest of old school RPGs in the 1980s.

(Saying I was mainly inspired by books makes me feel very old. Julian May is largely forgotten. I think some people still remember Silverberg, one of the unquestioned greats of science fiction. My games had too much reading 20 years ago. Now? Sigh.)

2. What were the biggest technical challenges in modernizing a game originally released in 2005? Did you have to rebuild it from the ground up, or were you able to use parts of the original engine?

Our games almost always use evolved versions of the same engine we have been using for decades. Each iteration is smoother, has better performance, better interface, better visuals. We only rarely totally remake the engine, and it’s always an enormous trial when we do.

The original game in 2005 was a real technical challenge for us. An enormous, multi-layered seamless world. A full scripting engine. Some pretty fancy stuff at the time. However, once we did it once, it was very easy to do it again.

(It was not, in retrospect, very easy. I am getting old, and writing video games mostly by oneself requires a monumental amount of concentration and is very draining. I am so glad Avernum 4 is almost out. I am gassed.)

3. Were there any original features, quests, or characters from the 2005 version that you decided to cut or significantly alter for this remaster? If so, what was the reasoning behind those changes?

We didn’t cut anything. We added A LOT.

The main problem with Avernum 4 from 2005 was that writing the engine was such a technical slog that I wasn’t left enough time for story. The dialogue and quests were underdeveloped. So the main change now is that I put in a ton of time adding quests and cities and factions and branching storylines. I really wanted to flesh out the world and make it feel more detailed and real.

(I am really pleased with the new quests in this game. They are very cool. Some of the credit goes to the Kickstarter backers, who gave some really weird and wild ideas to play with.)

4. Could you talk a bit about the creative process behind developing its unique lore, history, and inhabitants? Also, how do you balance grim, serious questlines with dark humour? Is it challenging to get that tonal balance right?

I have a lifelong fascination with civics, politics, and military history. When I write a story, a lot of it is thinking, “What do the people here want? What are they doing to get it? How will the player be involved? Will it work?” The game then falls out of the answers to these questions.

The tone of any area comes from these questions and their answers. Sometimes the answers are surreal. Sometimes funny. Sometimes tragic. The story will tell me what its tone should be.

(This answer is, basically, “Be a good writer.” Art is tricky. Even if I could fully explain my process, it would do you no good. If you want to write, the only way is finding your own path.)

5. Looking back at the entire development process for this remaster, what is one decision you made that you are particularly proud of?

When we started doing Kickstarters 5 games ago, we let high-end backers create characters, magic items, and quest outlines for us. This has continued to be an enormously successful experiment.

The limitations of having to use frameworks given to me do a ton to juice my creativity. Some of the funnest, most intriguing parts of the new game come from my getting these unique stories from backers, and then molding and shaping them into something that fits into my peculiar world.

(Again, the backers ideas experiment is one of the best ideas I ever had.)

6. Conversely, what was the most unexpected challenge or setback you encountered, and what did you learn from it?

The biggest problem was simple exhaustion. I’m an old guy. Life only gets more tiring. Writing the original Avernum 4 was intensely draining. All of the work we did on this remaster made this one draining too.

Almost all of the work in this game was done by just me. I’m a lone wolf developer, which has its advantages and disadvantages. I do the best I can with the limited time and energy I have.

(I hate being a whiner. Boo hoo! I sit at a desk, make toys, and make pretty solid money. I have no right to complain. And yet, my brain is a physical part of my body. Like my muscles, I can only ask so much of it before it stops working correctly.)

7. For aspiring indie developers who want to create their own epic RPGs, what is the single most important piece of advice you would give them?

Consume media. Play every RPG you can get your hands on and carefully analyze what works and what doesn’t. But then READ. Read fiction. Read non-fiction. Read stories. Learn what makes a good, clear, satisfying story. Learn what peculiar, marvelous creatures humans are and how best to describe them.

There are many media in which to tell great stories, but the preparation for doing so doesn’t change.

(This is as good an idea as I can give. If you want to make art, experience art outside your comfort zone. Watch classic movies. Read Moby Dick. Read Dostoyevsky.)

8. After decades of working on this series, what continues to motivate and excite you about developing games in the world of Avernum?

As I always say when asked this question, fear of losing one’s house does wonders to focus the mind.

I’m an old campaigner, a professional, a hardened mercenary. I’m trying to earn money to support my family and retire.

And yet, I’m still a games obsessive. I’ve been fascinated by games and puzzles since I was in Kindergarten, drawing mazes alone in my room when I got home from school. Doing this is a compulsion. Compulsions aren’t fun, but they can be satisfying. I was kind of made to do this work.

(I have the next 9 years until retirement all planned out. I have a list of what I need to do to be content with my career. I suspect I will be churning out remasters long past when anyone has ceased to care.)

Anyhoo, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory is FINALLY playable. I am genuinely proud of it. I hope you like it. Full game out soon.

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Spiderweb Software creates turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good story and fun. Our next game, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory, comes October 22nd! Wishlists are greatly appreciated.

This newsletter is free. However, the existence of paid subscribers makes me feel guilty if I don’t update it enough, which results in more posts.

Once again, a variety of odds and ends. A nice break from preparing the release of our next game in just three short weeks ...

Avernum 4: Greed And Glory Coming October 22!

We’re almost ready to fling another game into the thresher that is the indie games business in 2025. We have a release date for our next Avernum game!

Started in 1994, our cult classic Avernum series is one of the great video game sagas. On October 22, we return to our unique underworld nation with Avernum 4: Greed and Glory for Windows and Mac. The iPad version will come soon after.

You can see an Avernum 4 trailer, screenshots, and plenty of information on our web site or on our Steam page. If you are interested, please wishlist the game on Steam. It helps a lot!

Spiderweb Software In The Steam Sale

There’s a big Steam sale. This is when Steam is kind enough to give gamers permission to actually buy games. Anyway, all of our games are on sale for deep discounts. Geneforge 2: Infestation and Queen’s Wish 2: The Tormentor are unusually cheap.

Megabonk, An Indie Game That Managed To Make Money!

I’ve been joking that some indie dev will get rich by writing a good Vampire Survivors clone in 2035. But Megabonk is doing well far earlier. I’ve been playing it. It’s pretty good.

It’s like Vampire Survivors but balanced to be much more interesting. You run around and automatically shoot monsters near you. Then you get a choice of three random upgrades. You try to get picks that make you strong enough to survive the level, and you earn money that can be spent after you die to put better items in the random reward pool.

There are only a few monster types and only two levels, and the whole thing feels kind of thrown together. Yet the game is effective enough at generating dopamine hits to entrance a bunch of popular streamers and earn solid sales.

I think Vampire Survivors, while it earned all its money, suffers from being the breakthrough hit in the genre. There is a lot about its design that doesn’t work well in the long run. My problem with it was that you eventually buy your characters enough power that levels get kind of dull and samey. Its clones figured out ways for you to buy power that makes the general design more varied and suspenseful.

Progressing by permanently making your character stronger is dull and hard to balance. Progressing by unlocking more interesting and powerful drops in the game (but you still start weak) is a far more effective design. It also works this way in Brotato, easily my favorite game in the genre.

So I’m still playing it. It is addicting. However, it is way harder than Vampire Survivors, and farming currency for upgrades takes kind of forever. So I’ll have fun with it until I suddenly crash out and delete it in a huff.

I Haven’t Played Silksong

My daughter told me that she wants to watch me play Silksong by Team Cherry, when she is back home during a holiday break. So that spares me from jumping into that thresher before the most annoying elements have been nerfed a bit. Phew!

Silksong generated a brief, intense debate about game difficulty. This was amusing viewed from the outside. It soon became clear that, while Silksong is a tough game, difficulty wasn’t the actual problem. The problem was that they included some game elements (like long boss runbacks, eternal arena events and need to farm resources) that have been judged so annoying and outdated that even Fromsoft doesn’t use them anymore.

Team Cherry has been tucked safely away in a cocoon of wealth and comfort for years, chilling and following their dreams. They haven’t experienced real criticism in quite some time. I wonder how they’re coping, and I can’t wait to see what design choices they roll back.

Every game has flaws and room for improvement, even if you’re so rich that you’re never actually forced to change anything.

Split Fiction

My wife and I love playing couch co-op games together. One of the best games like this is It Takes Two by Hazelight Studios, which I enthused about at length in the past.

We were really looking forward to the very similar follow-up game by the same studio, Split Fiction. It’s taken me a long time to write about it because it took us a long time to finish it. Honestly, it was kind of a struggle to get through it.

What makes these games work is that they are a series of many short games. Every time you start getting used to what is happening, the game completely changes (platformer to puzzle to action RPG and so on). It is a game that consumes mountains of ideas and designs like fuel. But that requires a limitless fountain of good ideas/designs.

I think this is a really interesting title from a design/business perspective. It’s an example of a bunch of developers making games of a certain style who are kind of running out of gas. I felt like Split Fiction was struggling to come up with cool ideas. There were some great segments (e.g. pinball, two-headed worm), but a lot of it felt a little warmed over.

Part of me wants to really break down what happened here, but I don’t enjoy writing long, negative posts. It’s still a pretty fun game, so play it if you’ve already finished It Takes Two. I hope you have as much fun making fun of the annoying protagonists as we did.

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Spiderweb Software creates turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good story and fun. We have announced our next game, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory. Wishlists are greatly appreciated.

This newsletter is free. However, the existence of paid subscribers makes me feel guilty if I don’t update it enough, which results in more posts.

We just announced the release date for our next game! Avernum 4: Greed and Glory is coming for Windows and Mac on October 22, 2025. iPad version soon after. The 31 year old, indie classic Avernum series continues at last, with a huge world and awesome story. (Wishlist on Steam now! It makes a difference!)

Avernum 4: Greed and Glory is a remaster of Avernum 4, which came out in 2005. This game was a huge success for us, but it was also very flawed. Sometimes, games fans like to see how the sausage is made. So I've been writing posts about the creation of the original. What went right and wrong.

Last time, I wrote about our business troubles and how they pushed us to go back to the Avernum well. It was a big decision, but it was, of course, only the start. Next, we had to decide what sort of game to make.

(This article contains mild spoilers for Avernum games.)

"OK. We're Writing Avernum 4. What Now?"

So the decision was made. New Avernum game. Great.

Once that path was chosen, several very big decisions had to be made. Simple choices that would shift the whole huge project. (I often spend one minute making a choice that, succeed or fail, determines 5 years of my life.)

The first question: Is this a stand-alone title, or will there be more? A choice with enormous artistic and financial implications.

We decided very quickly that it would be a new trilogy. Partly because we wanted to make money, and partly because we sensed (correctly) that this world was rich enough to support 3 more stories.

The second question: What would the game be about? This question was easy to answer. Sort of.

The first Avernum trilogy told the story of Avernum's battle for survival and freedom. These games had very clear, visceral goals. The previous game, Avernum 3: Ruined World, ended with victory! The threats are gone. Avernum is a free land. Those who want to escape can. Hooray!

And yet, Avernum 3 also ended on a cliffhanger. The main enemy in that game survived and swore vengeance on Avernum. My hand was kind of forced here. There was a cool villain out on the loose. Even better, the cause that villain was fighting for had not been entirely settled.

So we decided very quickly to write another trilogy and that Avernum 4 would finally settle the issue of the villain from Avernum 3.

This was enough to make a game, but not enough to make it good. As I said in the first part of the story, at this point I was throwing my plots together in a haphazard way.

When I started a game, I wrote a lot of quick, unconnected bits of story. A very brief outline and a handful of scrawled ideas. Then I tore into the writing and hoped that a satisfying tale emerged at the end. However, my games were growing very complex and ambitious, and I didn't yet realize I needed to be far more disciplined when plotting them out.

It was years before I realized what I did wrong.

What I Did Wrong

When I write a series of games, I need to have an overall idea of where the tale is going. What is the mood, the theme, all that stuff. What holds the overall story together and gives it a clear throughline.

The Geneforge Saga was 5 parts. When I wrote the first part, I didn't know what the fourth part would be. But I did know how the story would end, and I just made all my decisions to direct the story toward that goal.

The second Avernum trilogy didn't have that. When I started Avernum 4, I never thought, "What are these games ABOUT? What is Avernum like? What does it want? Where is it going, and how does the player help?"

It was only after Avernum 4 was out that I actually thought about these questions. The answers are obvious in retrospective.

The first Avernum trilogy is about the childhood of Avernum. About it growing into a free, functional land.

But that is only the beginning of the story. It doesn't answer the questions: "Now that we are free, what are we going to do? How do we deal with all the other people we share this crowded underworld with? What are our morals, our principles? What is Avernum FOR?"

The answer was that, since the first trilogy was about Avernum's childhood, the second trilogy had to be about becoming an adult. Establishing itself. Getting a job. Getting older. Facing its age. The time of wildness was past. It was time to become established and sustainable, which is a huge struggle in itself.

I realized this too late. Avernum 4 was too focused on the fighting and not enough on what was happening to this strange, cool world. It turned into a fairly generic, low-stakes story.

But even if I realized this was an issue, there was another problem.

I'm Only One Guy, And It Was A Big Job

Avernum 4 was a huge step up, technically, from Avernum 3. Everything was rewritten:

1. We changed to an open seamless world. Sections were loaded and discarded as you travelled. This was a real hassle to program.

2. I added a full scripting engine that controlled all special encounters and creature behavior.

3. A new spell and skill system.

4. All art was redone.

It was a massive amount of effort, at a time when I was a far less experienced programmer than I am now and when I also had a newborn in the house. As a result, I had a shortage of time and energy. Too much of Avernum 4's dialogue reads almost placeholder. The minimum necessary to make the game function. (It was really painful to go back and look at a lot of this, though it was very satisfying to finally flesh it out.)

Avernum 4, for all its flaws, was the most draining development experience I had in my career. (Tied with Queen's Wish: The Conqueror.) The system was loaded with stuff I'd never programmed before, and debugging took enormous reserves of time.

Even if I had realized what the problems with the story were, I wouldn't have had the time or energy to address them. We needed to released Avernum 4 at a certain point to keep checks from bouncing. (Remember this is the pre-Steam world. It was far harder to sell shareware then.)

I didn't have time to take a breath and see what I needed to do until Avernum 4 was safely out. (And, thankfully, very profitable.)

I Don't Want To Punch Myself Too Much

Avernum 4 was shareware, so people got to play it a while before they bought it. A lot of people bought it. Its user reviews on Steam are Very Positive.

It's not a bad game! Flawed to our diehard fans and to its author's ruthless gaze, but there's a ton of fun there. I just wanted to clean it up and add more fun.

The problems, such as they were, had to wait twenty years to be fixed. I'll write one more of these next month, when Avernum 4: Greed and Glory is out, and explain how I fixed the problems. Because I do believe I fixed them.

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Spiderweb Software creates turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good story and fun. We have announced our next game, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory. Wishlists are greatly appreciated.

This newsletter is free. However, the existence of paid subscribers makes me feel guilty if I don’t update it enough, which results in more posts.

It's really dangerous to critique popular fantasy product these days, especially the marketing. It puts you at risk of being sucked into some horrible, interminable culture war argument. However, I write fantasy games for a living, so marketing them is an area of particular importance to me, and I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons for maaaany years.

So let's see how Wizards of the Coast is selling Dungeons & Dragons these days!

(Fantasy marketing is very important to me because our next turn-based indie RPG, in a massive world with a great story, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory, comes out in October. Wishlist now!)

To perform the experiment, I Googled "Dungeons & Dragons,” went to the official link, and pulled out the very first two images they show. As in, for a new person interested in the game, the art that consulting and testing, and 8 levels of management decided would make the best impression on you.

I really like one of these images. The other, I am, perhaps, less of a fan. I had a lot of fun looking at them closely. So let's take a look!

Image #1: The Pastel, Forgotten Realms Heavy-hitter.

This is D&D's all-important first impression. I've provided the full version (stolen from Game Informer). It’s the cover of one of the new books, a supplement for the reasonably popular Forgotten Realms setting.

Take a good look. Give it a moment. What do you think? What is this image selling to you? What sort of person would see it and say, "I want this in my life."?

I am not a fan of this image, but I suspect a great amount of money and time went into making sure it did not appeal to me.

So I'm not going to say whether it's good or bad marketing. Only WotC's secret sales data will say so. However, I can make some notes about it and what product I think it is trying to sell.

1. It's very pastel and soft focus. Not much contrast, minimal shadows. Kind of flat. A serious break from decades of D&D art style. A strange tonal contrast from the history of the game, which mainly involved butchering bugbears on an industrial scale to bump your sword up to +3.

2, Even more interesting to me is the content. There is no action! It's a bunch of quirky characters in a glamour pose. Like the yearbook photo from Adventurer High School, class of 2025.

Traditional D&D art emphasizes the action. Stealing treasure. Fighting monsters. Getting out of trouble. They are really leaning into selling the podcast model of D&D as improv theater, where you play the wackiest whatever you can.

(I was recently in a D&D game where two players INSISTED on playing Kuo-Toa. You know. The hopelessly evil, subterranean, Lovecraftian human-sacrificers that were originally high level monsters and thus came with a huge suite of innate abilities. That game was ... quirky.)

3. That odd fellow front and center is Minsc, a character from Baldur's Gate 2, a D&D videogame that came out in 1998.

Note Minsc, in addition to all that face ink, has a hamster (!) on his shoulder. That is Boo, who Minsc says is a “miniature giant space hamster.” I didn't play him in Baldur's Gate 2 because I thought he was annoying.

In addition to being featured in a good game of a previous millennium, he showed up in a few cameos of video games since then. For example, he appeared in hour 70 of my Baldur's Gate 3 playthrough. Because of some mystery choice I made, I was forced to kill him forever. I felt nothing.

But Minsc is currently the veeeery first adventurer the person curious about D&D is meant to see. A grinning weirdo with a hamster. Sorry, I meant a "miniature giant space hamster.” All this is very improv comedy. On brand.

4. The other characters in the group are people from the Forgotten Realms universe. Outside of Forgotten Realms, nobody will have any idea who they are. But they look pretty fantasy, so it's fine.

(The first reason to select these characters, I would think, was to sell copies to Forgotten Realms fans and to those who are interested. Yet, the character in this setting who has the most popular culture traction is definitely the conflicted dark elf warrior Drizzt, with the bonus that he looks super badass, and yet he’s not here. Odd. A shame to leave such a strong trademark on the shelf.)

5. The others are nice and adventurey, in a more generic way. In classic D&D fashion, they did make sure to include an extremely hot demon girl with huge breasts, a come-hither stare, and bondage gear. I want to buy a van so that she can be painted on the side of it.

Normally, there would be complaining about how not-realistic her armor is. Not hearing any carping about her. So some of this marketing is still VERY traditional.

("That's not a demon girl! It's a tiefling!" NOBODY KNOWS WHAT THAT IS!!!)

6. Since it is Dungeons & Dragons, there does need to be a dragon. You can see a giant one to the left, hiding behind a bush looking vaguely stoned.

That dragon doesn't look super-dragony, so they included two bonus dragons in the foreground who are apparently about to totally make out. I am increasingly unsure what is supposed to be going on in this art.

Again I must point out that, to be where it is, this art had to be approved by many people in many meetings. I can imagine the reams of notes that were involved. ("Can the tiny blue dragon look 20% hornier?")

So what exactly is the purpose of dragons in D&D? They used to be awesome endbosses, terrifying legends from the depths of time, lurking in the shadows ready for epic battles and huge loot drops. In other words, to an old grognard like me, prime D&D fodder. Is this still the case?

Anyhoo. Fantasy games are always aspirational. They are power fantasies, but power can mean many, many things. So what fantasy is being sold here?

This art is not about aspiring to do. It's about aspiring to be. Not doing awesome things but just being generally awesome, in a magical place where the buildings are nice and elfy and even the dragons are chill. Also, demon girls will go out on dates with you.

It's a very bold shift from the past, a dramatic and focused change in what this game is meant to be ABOUT. I think it's really interesting.

Is this good or bad art? We’ll find out. If it sells copies, it’s good. If not, it’s bad. I really want to know if this style sells.

Image #2: The Hot Action Sales Pitch.

The second image on the main page was this, smaller and to the right of Image #1. It's the cover of the starter book, the book that is intended to be for the new player.

Again, take a good look. What is this image selling to you? What sort of person would see it and say, "I want this in my life."?

The first thing I notice is that they really locked in here. It's still pretty pastel and soft focus (and too busy), but they are really trying to both attract people to the game and explain what this game is about. It's selling a very different game than Image #1.

There is a lot of information here.

Some observations:

1. It's an action pose! Something is happening! It's a very clear fight with a very clear bad guy who really means business. (The dragon's expression is really nicely done.)

(Tangentially, the second dragon over the castle isn't great. Perspective is weird. In fact, the composition of the whole piece is a bit odd. The dragon is behind the fighter. The hobbit is aiming who knows where? The dragon is falling backwards. Is it drunk? And yet, absolutely none of this matters. The VIBE works.)

2. The adventurers are far less strange. There are still humans in D&D? Who knew?

But, more importantly, note that they are the standard party mix. Fighter. Cleric providing support. Wizard and cowardly rogue in the background sneaking in damage. This image is doing a lot of heavy lifting explaining not just what this game is about but how it is played in practice.

3. Is that a giant squirrel on a branch to the left?

4. There is a LOT in this image. Perhaps they put a little too much icing on the cake?

The wizard is holding his spellbook, and it also has little icicles on it. The priest isn't just blessing the fighter, he's sending light tendrils all the way to the dragon, plus he has a glowy egg in his off hand for reasons. And the lady fighter should perhaps have left her yellow scarf collection at home. It's gonna get all burned up. This art is very noisy. Almost like they don't entirely trust the appeal of the game they're selling.

But I'm being picky. I think this art makes some really weird technical choices, and yet it totally works. Ten year old me would buy this game.

(But the age at the top right is 12+? Boooo! D&D rights for 4th graders!)

By The Way, It Doesn't Matter

It's fun to complain about D&D because it won't make any difference. D&D will never fail. It will always reign. It will be the default tabletop RPG for as long as you walk this Earth. It is the best example of the First Mover Advantage.

Everyone loves being angry at D&D because it's the safest possible opinion. Complaining about D&D is like punching a giant pillow. The pillow doesn't notice.

No, your favorite obscure RPG will not rise to dethrone D&D. The world is not going to be taken over by SHMURPS or Swordfinder or Vampire: The Vampiring. Not enough people care enough to generate critical mass around another title.

If you are mad at D&D and lust for revenge, you can play Second Edition instead. That'll show 'em!

I just wanted to make sure you knew.

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Spiderweb Software creates turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good story and fun. We have announced our next game, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory. Wishlists are greatly appreciated.

This newsletter is free. However, the existence of paid subscribers makes me feel guilty if I don’t update it enough, which results in more posts.

If you are trying to create something cool and creative, at some point you are probably going to want feedback from others. I certainly do. Even geniuses make mistakes, and I'm no genius.

Happily, we have the internet! Every minute of every day, you can show your work to people and get feedback. Waves of feedback. Floods of feedback. Enough feedback to drown in it. Some of it mean and vicious.

I have long written about the value of Filtering Your Inputs. Our brains are delicate and plastic. Too much feedback, especially when it's hostile, has a way of getting into a creator's head. If I read too many opinions, it really disorients me. I get too many voices in my head, and I can't confidently make decisions anymore.

It's a tough problem, especially since engaging with your community is a very helpful activity to get traction selling your work online. I like to chat and answer questions, but I want control over the sort of feedback I get.

(I was motivated to write this by seeing this video. It’s by a developer who quit trying to be an indie, and part of the problem was the despair caused by too much unfiltered online feedback. He talks about it in the first few minutes.)

So here is some unsolicited advice on how to get good advice without going insane.

You Can't Just Filter The Bad Advice

Human brains evolved to be very trusting. When I get feedback, even if it's clearly not helpful or in bad faith, I have to spend energy analyzing it, debunking it, and getting back to work.

I simply don't have this time and energy to spare.

So, when I engage people online, I do my best to avoid reading too many unfiltered opinions. The decades have taught me that, unless I've just released a game and are looking for bug reports, there's just no profit in listening to the raw feed.

(This is why releasing an Early Access game terrifies me.)

What I Do Instead

I occasionally ask for volunteer beta testers. I create my own private community full of people who are allowed to go at me full blast. I want criticism. It is necessary. It just has to be helpful.

Sometimes, we ask for volunteers. Sometimes people write us with bug reports, and we see if they're interested in testing. Some Kickstarter backers get early betas. From these sources, we have built a loyal beta tester squad. It is only through their patience and hard work that I can stay in business. I am immensely grateful to them.

If you can handle the opinions of the horde being screamed directly in your brain, that's great, but I have observed that most creators can't. So if you create online and your work is getting traction, consider trying to build a small testing community.

What Do I Want In A Tester?

There are obvious things. They need to have a good working computer and give comprehensible feedback with support files (like saved games) when needed. They have to play the game. They have to be reasonably polite. Pretty obvious stuff.

Outside the obvious, when looking for a constructive criticism person, there are three things the person needs to be helpful:

1. They Have To Be Able To Give Harsh Feedback

They have to chew me out when I deserve it. Politely, but still.

When I make a small testing community, I'm not making a bubble. I'm not starting a cult. I need people who can criticize!

I have had testers who found SERIOUS problems, but they were nervous or shy about pointing them out. Some testers quit because the need to report flaws was too stressful for them. It happens. I wish them well.

2. They Must Criticize In Good Faith

I don't need trolls. Or power struggles. I need people who genuinely want to take part in an act of creation, and they need to want to make the game better.

Also I provide beta testers with something valuable: A purpose. There is happiness and meaning in being able to take part in an act of creation. I listen to testers feedback very carefully, I let them make a difference, and I make sure they know they made that difference.

But the focus has to be on helping to create better art.

3. They Must Be On Board With What I Am Doing

I write turn-based games. Story-heavy. With low budgets and lots of reading. So I need testers who are into that sort of game.

This is a far bigger deal than it might seem.

One of the key perils of listening to unfiltered input is that a lot of people will just throw their anger at you because you're making a thing they just don't care for.

If you want to tell me I should write a multiplayer game, or you hate turn-based games, or you only like games with great production values, well, I'm afraid that isn't actually helpful to me. In fact, it makes me feel bad that I can't make you happy, even if it is impossible for me to make you happy.

Disappointing people makes me sad. I don't like feeling bad, and it certainly doesn't help me work. So I only recruit as testers people who are actually fans of the sort of thing I like to make.

Note One Thing Missing From This List

I did not add ...

4. They Have Good Taste And Make Good Suggestions

Seems like a natural thing to add to the list, and yet ...

The honest truth? Pretty much every single tester I've ever had who had qualities 1 through 3 ended up having 4 automatically. Every nice person who likes turn-based RPGs has given me solid advice. I didn't always act on it, but they always had a point.

People are actually pretty cool overall.

This Is All Just Like My Opinion, Man

If you want to create online, you should take mental self-protection seriously.

I have seen so many battle-hardened creators crash out because they read the wrong feedback at the wrong time. Some were friends, some became Extremely Mad Online.

Our brains are pliable. It's a great quality! It's what makes us able to be artists in the first place.

Just, when some stranger gives you a big pile of opinion, remember: About 30% of people are mean. About 30% are crazy. And a lot of people are both.

Be careful who you let into your head. Filter your inputs. That's my free advice. Good luck!

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Spiderweb Software creates turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good story and fun. We have announced our next game, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory. Wishlists are greatly appreciated.

This newsletter is free. However, the existence of paid subscribers makes me feel guilty if I don’t update it enough, which results in more posts.

(This review should be pretty spoiler-free.)

I have long been a fan of the late, great science fiction writer Harlan Ellison. One of his best (if not the best) short stories is a grim, inventive classic called "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream".

A video game version of this story, designed by Ellison himself, came out in 1995. It was a point-and-click adventure game. And I spent many years as a huge fan of adventure games.

So, of course, I never played this game.

Until recently. A version came out for Playstation 4/5, and I thought it was finally time to take a break from writing my own indie RPG to try it out. A got a copy on Steam for, like, 7 cents.

It's a fascinating title. Here is my guide for if you want to experience a truly unique game. Which is worth it, with warnings.

(If you want to read the story, and you SHOULD, Google "i have no mouth and i must scream full story". At least the Internet Archive version should be legal.)

Why I Never Tried The Game

While Harlan Ellison was a great and influential writer, he was also a seriously high-octane crank. Before the game came out, he wrote about how video games were a debased art form that existed to consume huge globs of time and not provide any actual art for the trouble.

This was a pretty reasonable thing to say in 1995 (and rings pretty true now, honestly). However, I felt that he didn't have the experience or attitude to be a really good video game designer on his first try.

This is doubly true because he was making a 90s point-and-click adventure game. You know? The genre that happily lets you get stuck for 5 hours because you didn't notice a particular pixel on one of 50 screens was a little darker than the others.

(My opinions of the genre are well-summarized in the finest piece of gaming criticism ever written.)

So we have an arrogant, first-timer, designing a game in a genre that is very, very tricky to get right. The best that you can hope for here is a failed experiment with intermittent bits of coolness.

That’s why I didn't play it. I thought that it would be, in part, a frustrating mess, and nobody would admit it because if they did Harlan Ellison would run to their house like the liquid metal robot from Terminator 2, unhinge his jaw, and swallow them whole.

Well, I Finally Did Play It

Playing it, I rapidly found that my initial guess was correct. Now that Harlan is lamentably gone, I can tell you that the game is strange, arbitrary and unfair by even the universally unforgiving standards of its genre. On top of that, it’s really buggy!

And yet, I recommend it.

The Good Stuff

It was written by a great writer, and it contains some of the most insane, deranged material I've ever seen in a video game. It has some disturbed stuff that, if it didn’t have such a storied pedigree, Steam and itch.io would remove it even before Mastercard yelled at them.

The game also has cool settings, an interesting story, and 90s pixel graphics that are charming as hell.

However, the gameplay is REALLY arbitrary. The whole game takes place in this world of dream logic where you just kind of have to use every possible action on every possible object to advance, no matter how nonsensical it seems.

To get the good ending, you have to play 100% perfectly, and things that can block you can be, again, totally arbitrary. Do two steps in the wrong order and you get totally blocked, with literally no option but suicide, even though there is no sensible reason why it should be that way.

So Here's What I Want You To Do

Well, honestly, you should just read some of the guy's stories. 100% guaranteed the best use of your time.

But if you play the game, find a good walkthrough. This one is great.

If you get stuck more than 10 minutes, use this to find out what you did wrong. Harlan didn't play fair. You don't have to, either.

Do all this, and you will experience a genuinely unique and ambitious vision of what video games can be, and one that still feels fresh today.

Preservation Of Video Game History

We hear a certain amount about preserving video game history, and I agree with it. To a point. Of course, the hoarder in me wants us to be able to own and play every video game ever made.

Then again, what percentage of video games are worth ever playing again? I have played almost all Atari 2600 games ever made, and I assure you most of them can be peacefully returned to the soil.

But this one? Absolutely, 100% worth saving. Is it a success? I'm not sure. But if it is a failure, it's the sort of failure that's better that a million mediocrities.

Cheat your way through it for a few hours. It's fascinating!

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Spiderweb Software creates turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good story and fun. We have announced our next game, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory. Wishlists are greatly appreciated.

This humble blog has cycled back around to marketing season! The silence will end. I'm going to write a bunch of fun articles soon. But first, marketing!

We at Spiderweb Software have just announced our next indie, turn-based RPG, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory! The epic, cult-classic Avernum saga started way back in 1994 and tells the story of a strange, heroic underworld nation. For decades, dedicated fans have helped this land in the darkness fight for survival, freedom, and glory.

The epic story continues in this new adventure, featuring a massive world, an intricate system full of character builds and options, and a great story. You can see a trailer and screenshots on Steam or the game's home page. It will be released for Windows and Mac in October, 2025, with an iPad version soon after.

As always, please wishlist the game on Steam. That is the best way to give support right now! Wishlists lead to more Steam exposure, and these things tend to snowball.

Now for blogging ...

The Story Of Avernum 4

I know some readers of this blog are interested in Spiderweb Software history, the evolution of our business, and how we make games. I have been writing indie games for a living continuously longer than any other person, after all. (It's a dumb achievement to have. But it's mine.)

So as I announce the various milestones for Avernum 4: Greed and Glory, I'll tell the story of its creation, which is a little bit interesting.

Avernum 4: Greed and Glory is a remaster of Avernum 4, released in 2005. OG Avernum 4 is, to me, my most flawed game. The game I look back on with the most disappointment, and the game I was most eager to get a chance to remake. It made a bunch of money, but it had problems.

Part 1 - Why We Wrote It

We started Avernum 4 in 2004. At that point, we had been running Spiderweb Software for ten years. We had three full-time employees and had attained a fair amount of success.

In the time we'd been running Spiderweb, I had already written EIGHT full-length new games and four remasters. In ten years. While living a reasonably normal life. This is a rate of production I can barely comprehend now. I honestly don't know how I did it.

But in 2004, we were in trouble.

My previous two games were Blades of Avernum (a remaster of the very successful Blades of Exile) and Geneforge 3, and these games didn't sell.

In retrospect, the reasons are clear. Blades of Exile was a scenario creation system that was too complex for most people to use. Geneforge 3 was badly balanced, had some design issues, and just didn't offer enough new stuff.

Sales had been too slow for too long, and we were getting close to bouncing checks. I had to get serious and figure out how to turn things around. So I had to figure out what was wrong.

We Were In A Rut

When I started writing games in the last century, I had a very informal process. I didn't really think much about story or structure. I would sit down for half an hour, sketch out a plot on a single sheet of paper, and then dive into writing the game. I would throw quests together off the top of my head whenever I made a new town.

My first games ended up with interesting worlds and stories almost despite themselves, as I blasted them out as fast as I could using the game designer version of dead reckoning. Maybe I showed real, raw talent, or maybe I was lucky. Either way, in 2004, my luck had run out, and I needed to figure out a process for making games that was sustainable in the long term.

We also needed money. I wanted a sure thing. I'd written 4 Avernum games, and I got requests for more almost daily. At the same time, I really thought there were more stories to tell in the world of Avernum.

So daddy decided to cash in. The next game would be Avernum 4 and the easy money.

But I don't do cash-ins. I really, honestly care about these games, and I really do put all the energy I can spare into them. If I was going to go back to Avernum, I wanted to tell a new trilogy of stories in this world.

The problem, of course, is I skipped the step where I seriously thought about what those stories should be. I came up with a plot for Avernum 4, sure, but I had not (yet) answered the question: "What is actually going on? What will this overall story/trilogy really be about?"

Thus, the most grueling design process in my life (tied for the dubious honor with Queen's Wish) was off to a grim start.

To Be Continued ...

We plan to announce the precise release date for Avernum 4: Greed and Glory in September, and I'll talk about the original's creation and what went right and wrong.

In the meantime, expect a lot of fun posts on this poor neglected blog.

So thanks for any wishlists you can spare, and you'll hear from us soon!

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Spiderweb Software creates turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good story and fun. We have announced our next game, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory. Wishlists are greatly appreciated.

A lot of mixed stuff too small to get individual posts. (Though it would probably be better if I wrote more frequent, smaller posts. Maybe I'm not good at this.)

1. The Steam Summer Sale

Steam now has four regular annual sales, in addition to frequent festivals. Why does anyone ever pay full price for a video game anymore, lol?

Anyway, as always, Spiderweb Software's games are all on sale. Geneforge 2 - Infestation has a nice big discount. Take a look!

2. New Interview Of Me

I did a long interview with the Full Time Game Dev and it turned out great. I get to rant freely for 1.5 hours, and I got to say a lot of fun stuff. Thanks so much to Thomas Brush for creating this forum where indie game developers can wallow in limitless terror. Take a look!

3. It's Tough Out There For Indie Devs

I try not to complain about the tough nature of the indie games business these days. For a software engineer, my salary is low, but for an artist, my salary is great, so I really don't want to complain. Don't waste an atom of pity on me.

But two things recently got my attention.

Some wildman analyzed all of the 51 (!!!) games that released on Steam on a randomly-selected day and broke them down by sales, amount of effort, and so on. Very interesting read.

A couple of them kind of made money. Most of them blew up on the launch pad. It's hard to see how any of them will turn a profit.

Some people say the reason for this glut is because so many titles are lazy, assets flips, etc. This is pure cope. The thing that sticks out to me is how many of these games are genuinely high effort. Good work is just dying on release.

Second, there was a really clever game a few years back called Hypnospace Outlaw. An adventure game based on wandering the world wide web of the 90s. Really clever.

The developer just put up a tearful video about how the sequel is canceled. If you enjoy watching peoples hearts rip in half on YouTube, this is prime content.

It's really sad. This guy is the real deal. Making a sequel to a solid game. Had a publisher. Now he's emptying his bank account to pay back Patreon backers. Scary stuff. I'm pouring one out for a real one.

4. A Few Indie Games I Tried

Played Thronefall, a successful tower defense game whose big innovation is taking away as much player choice as possible. I could NEVER make this game. I like too much the puzzle/freedom/try things elements of tower defense. Yet, it gave a bunch of people what they wanted: A chill game with towers. Hats off to them.

Brotato released DLC, which enabled me to spend 100 more hours playing Brotato.

I was really intrigued by Desktop Survivors 98. Like Vampire Survivors but with retro computer jokes. Then I watched one minute of it on Twitch and knew I couldn't stand it. Those dopamine receptors are all burned out. Maybe I'll pick it up when they make Windows Vista Survivors. Looking at the number of reviews this game has, they sold a decent number of copies. However, the game is only $5, so no big success here. It has meme appeal and actually got some advance press, so I thought things would look better.

Quadrilateral Cowboy is one of my all time fave indie games. When its developer, Brendon Chung, announced he was making Skin Deep, a stealth game with a publisher and budget, that was an instant wishlist and a buy. I played the first half of Skin Deep, and I don't think the design works. (Too repetitive. Too chaotic. Levels too samey. Gunplay doesn't work in this engine.) But if you're into game design, it's REALLY worth 20 bucks to get it and puzzle out what you think of this design for yourself. It's definitely unique.

(Ten years ago, this game would have made a huge pile of money. Now ... Times are tough.)

Finally, I played Minishoot Adventures, the twin-stick shooter/Metroidvania boiled down to its purest essence. It could be sold as a generic product ("TWIN STICK METROVANIA" in all black letters on an all-white background), but it delivers a tasty helping of the product. If those marketing buzzwords tickle your brain, give these nice people your $15.

5. I Still Write Games

Official announcement and trailer for Avernum 4: Greed and Glory coming soon. This game is gigantic and I'm actually kind of pleased with it. It's full of neat stuff.

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It’s very hard to get links for a blog out these days. If I write something you like, I encourage you to link to it on socials.

Spiderweb Software creates turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good story and fun.

(Contains spoilers for Cyberpunk 2077 and The Last of Us.)

Polish studio CD Projekt Red made The Witcher 3, one of my favorite video games ever. So when they announced Cyberpunk 2077, I was really excited.

Then they released it, and it was a non-functional disaster. I was sad, but also a little relieved. Not playing it saved me 50 hours, which was nice.

Then I spent those 50 hours under Covid house arrest. I probably used that precious time saving up for a Golden Toilet in Animal Crossing.

Anyhoo, I finally played Cyberpunk 2077 and its enormous DLC, Phantom Liberty. The game was good. The DLC was very good. A bunch of scattered thoughts ...

Quantity Has A Quality All Its Own

Man, but I love playing a gigantic, big-budget AAA game sometimes. A huge fantasy world that positively drips money.

But it has to feel BIG. I didn't get that feeling from the new God of War game. My memories from those are mostly wandering down narrow tunnels. I want something I can get lost in, like Baldur's Gate 3.

(This desire, to me, explains a lot about why the Oblivion remaster did so well. It's aging and has its flaws, sure, but it's BIG.)

Cyberpunk 2077 had a big budget, and it's all on the screen. There are tons of nice little details. A huge world to explore full of surprises. More optional quests than anyone would want, with a lot of neat settings and writing. I'm walking away from the game knowing I left cool stuff behind.

The DLC is even more lavish. If you play this game, be sure to do all of Phantom Liberty.

There was a lot of fun little design tweaks. For example, you are constantly looting little upgrades to make your grenades and healing better, and enable your character to have more cyborg mods. It provided a constant flow of progress and pleasant dopamine hits. The shop to mod your person was also fun to hang out in.

Twice in the early game, you get to do this really cool thing where you investigate something by wandering around inside a 3D recording of an event, looking for clues. It was complex and expensive, so I knew it wouldn’t appear outside the early game (it didn’t), but I enjoyed it while it lasted.

Anyway, it was good. All that said, now I shall do my shop talk and picking of nits.

Writers, Please Give Your Characters Charm

So CD Projekt Red shelled out the big bucks to put Keanu Reeves in their game. As in, the guy stuck in your head, Johnny Silverhand, looked exactly like Keanu. You see and hear him a lot.

I found this insanely distracting. Like, every time Johnny came onscreen, a tiny voice in my head said ("Look! It's Keanu!")

I have been a fan of Keanu's since well back into a prior century. He has a natural chill likability onscreen that is always good fun.

Which is why I will never understand that they made Johnny-Keanu the most relentlessly obnoxious, unlikeable character I've ever encountered in a video game. True fingernails-on-chalkboard territory. He's smug and mean and insulting and abrasive. And then he has a loooong sex scene. (Ew.)

I complained about this on Twitter, and multiple people assured me he gets better near the end and in the DLC. He does not.

This really sticks out to me because I'm playing Split Fiction with my wife. It's fun and pretty, but its two female protagonists are, again, laughably unpleasant. And sure, my wife and I are having a great time making fun of them and intentionally causing them to die, but wouldn't likable characters be better?

Designer, I beg you, play Baldur's Gate 3 again. It had a huge variety of characters, good and evil, friendly and hostile, but they were full of charm. If you're gonna expect me to spend 50 hours (or far more) with these assholes, make them enjoyable to watch. (Bonus assigned viewing: The Sopranos, which is loaded with charming evil.)

It's Fun, But Easy

I had fun playing Cyberpunk 2077. Not an ecstatic amount of fun. It's a shooty game, but I found the fights pretty repetitive. I liked them, but all the non-boss fights felt kind of the same.

However, this may be my fault. I played on Normal difficulty, and found it to be wildly easy. Serious power fantasy territory. This means that the normal difficulty is correctly tuned. I should have played on a higher difficulty.

(Side note: It’s impossible to balance a large open-world RPG. Players who do all the side stuff find the game too easy. Players who rush through the main story find everything too hard. Yet, though the game was too easy for me, I still had fun. I found that very reassuring while I work on my own large open-world RPG.)

The hacking system was the magic in this RPG. This was neat, kind of. Basically, when you hack an enemy, you hold down a button that slows time. You pick a target and press a button. The target eventually dies. It felt powerful, which was nice, but it was uncompelling gameplay. So many of the fights for me went Select. Click. Select. Click. Repeat until alone.

In the end, it was fine. I had a good 50 hours, but I would have done a lot more of the optional content if the fighting had more zazz. (Note that Grand Theft Auto games have this exact same problem, and you don't even get magic. If you want a real focus on fun combat, play one of the new Doom games.)

The Story Was Good, But With A Familiar Flaw

The story has a great hook: You get an alien personality copied into your brain, and it's taking you over. You have to get rid of it before it kills you.

(Baldur's Gate 3 had something very similar. This plot device can be retired for a bit. Maybe we can go back to a main character with amnesia for a while.)

In a long game, a clear story hook like this is vital. Cyberpunk 2077 has a billion distractions. When you return to the main story, you must be able to remember what it is about!

I still had a lot of trouble with the story. With everything pulling me in so many directions, I couldn't keep all of the characters, missions, factions, corporations, and general lore straight. It didn't help that I had to remember all this stuff for two people in my head, instead of the usual one.

You Have To Be Careful About Telling Players How They Should Feel

Video games have no excuse for ignoring the general writing advice of "Show, Don't Tell". After all, games can easily show you things. They're VIDEO games, after all.

So I start the game with some guy named Jackie. Apparently, we're friends or partners or siblings or clones or something. In the prologue, Jackie and I murder a whole bunch of people. Then he dies. Oh well. Goodbye, guy I just met.

And then I spend hours and hours being told how this guy I killed people with for 5 minutes is the kindest, gentlest, wisest fellow you could ever hope to meet. I didn't feel any of it, because I never got the chance to know the guy.

If you want to mourn a character in your game, that's great. It can be solid storytelling. I can be sad about the death of a character in a video game, but you have to earn it.

Remember, everyone was super sad in The Last Of Us 2 when Joel died, but to make that happen we had to spend a full 1.3 games with him.

I Don't Get The Morals Of This Game

Cyberpunk 2077 takes place in Night City, the worst place in all of history. It's a nonstop ferment of corruption, hopelessness, murder, and more than a little rape.

The game tells me I am supposed to hate the corpos (Cyberpunk 2077er punk-talk for "corporations"). Yet, as far as I can tell, the corpos are the only thing in this miserable hellcity that works. Without the corpos, the whole mess would collapse in on itself in five minutes.

My first introduction to the corpos was that I was breaking into one of them, killing a ton of people on the way, to steal stuff. Are we 100% sure in this situation the corpo is the bad guy?

The only reason I would hate the corpos is that Cyberpunk 2077 told me I had to. No other reason. It's ok for a game to tell me what my role in a world is, but it's another thing entirely, in an open-ended game like this, to tell me what my morality is.

Anyway, in the end, I sided with the United States. 'MURICA!!!

It's A Good Game

When I write these drive-by reviews, I always feel bad. It makes me seem far more negative than I am. CD Projekt Red took a real risk putting in the work and money to fixing Cyberpunk 2077, and they succeeded. It's a really cool game. I had a lot of fun with it, and it totally justified the money and time I expended.

I am totally onboard for Witcher 4. I already know that it will be full of difficult but charming people, and my magic will involve lots of fire, the way the game gods intended.

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Spiderweb Software creates turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good story and fun. You can still late-back the Kickstarter for our next game, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory.