Our Next Game and Kickstarter ... Avernum 4: Greed and Glory!
As in days of olde, we are artists searching for patrons.
While I mostly write stuff of general interest, there are times when I have to address posts more directly to my fans. This is one of those times. Let's get the basic PR out of the way:
We have launched the Kickstarter for our next game, and we're thrilled to finally return to the world of Avernum! Avernum 4: Greed and Glory will be an epic, indie, turn-based fantasy role-playing adventure for Windows, Mac, and iPad. It continues the saga of Avernum, a nation in caverns far under the world, full of misfits, adventures, treasures to be found, and monsters to hunt (and that hunt you).
It will be a remaster of the indie RPG cult-classic Avernum 4, which came out way back in 2005. The original is a massive RPG, full of skilled warriors and wizards using a multitude of weapons, spells, and artifacts to conquer an enormous world. It is old and doesn't run well anymore. We will completely rework everything to make a great, modern game.
The Kickstarter will run for four weeks and comes with a huge variety of stretch goals and backer rewards. You can get unique merch, including stickers, hand-drawn original art, and the original, signed, annotated designs from our first game, Exile,from back in 1994! We humbly ask for your support as we take this mostly-forgotten game from our past and rebuild it as something really cool.
Thank you for your patience. If you've appreciated this blog and want to support us, backing this Kickstarter is a great way to do it. Plus, you'll get a fun game next year!
So let's talk more about Kickstarters and Avernum 4!
We Still Love Kickstarter
It's very possible that, without Kickstarter, we wouldn't be in business anymore. Or we would, but in a far reduced form. It gives generous patrons a chance to pay a lot more for our game and get lots of goodies in return.
In return, we get to remaster our old, forgotten games, fill them with polish and new content, and send them into the future in a far more playable and fun form. We have 6 games we very much want to remaster, and Kickstarter will hopefully keep making it possible.
Avernum 4, in particular, could use a lot of work.
It Came Out In A Dark Time
In the early 2000s, Spiderweb came close to going under. We got complacent and released two kind of so-so games in a row, sales were poor, and we got pretty scared. So I rethought everything about our process, put out two games that sold well, and avoided disaster. One of those successful games was Avernum 4.
However, it's a really flawed game.
Making Avernum 4 required a massive rewrite of the Avernum engine, and it took a ton of time and energy. At the same time, we had an infant child, and I had a really hard time getting sleep and focusing.
As a result, Avernum 4 was a decent game and had the nice, valuable Avernum name. However, it is really underdeveloped in a bunch of ways. The story is painfully barebones. So are a lot of areas in the game world. Some regions are terribly balanced and full of too much trash, as my longtime fans will testify.
At last, 20 years later, I get to go in and fix this. I'm really excited about it, but it's going to be a heck of a big job.
So anyway, thank you for your kind attention. The next section is for the fans. A lot of people played Avernum 4 back in the day, and I suspect the more devoted will want me to answer some questions about the remaster. I'll just dump a quick FAQ here to link to before I try to get a little sleep.
Avernum 4 Remaster Questions Answered
For people interested in what the remaster will be like ...
Q: How Will The Story Change?
A: Avernum 4 was what it had to be about. Avernum 3: Ruined World left a lot of big questions about the future of the underworld unanswered and I felt I had to deal with them before moving on to other things.
However, when I started the second trilogy, I didn't yet realize what those three games had to be ABOUT. Why spend so much time telling this story? I didn't really figure that out until I was almost done with Avernum 5.
So I will totally expand the stories of Avernum 4, with lots more characters, factions, and choices. Avernum is free, and it is powerful and valuable. What is its future? Who will control it? How far can it expand?
Q: How Will The Game System Change?
When I made Avernum: Escape From the Pit, I made a new skill tree system. I think it was decent, but it wasn't super-popular. Worse, it didn't respect what about the old games made them popular. This respect is very important when doing a remaster.
So Avernum 4: Greed and Glory will use the Avernum 4 skill system. However, I will take from the Avernum 1-3 Trait systems, which provided a ton of cool ways to customize your characters.
The Battle Discipline system will remain. Also, we will be rebalancing to make melee and archer characters stronger and more necessary in relation to priests and mages.
Q: How Will The World Layout Change?
A: Avernum 1-3 had a world where you wandered through an outdoors and then entered towns, which were sort of "zoomed-in" zones. This worked well, but, by the time I was done with Avernum 3, I was completely out of ideas for what to put in the outdoors.
Avernum 4-6 had a more open-world feel, where there was no distinction between towns and outdoors and outdoors just blended into the towns. The problem was that parts felt crowded. Also, people don't like change.
I am adding a ton of detail and new areas to Avernum 4: Greed and Glory to make the outdoors feel more mysterious and possible to get lost in. I'm also playing a lot with the lighting, to make the underworld feel creepier and more real.
Q: How Will The Graphics Change?
A: I am going through every icon in Avernum 4 and reworking/rescaling/reshadowing and adding a ton of new art on top of it. I'm also getting some great results with the lighting. It'll still be a low-budget, icon-based Spiderweb game, but it will be, to my eyes, pretty.
Thats it for now. If we get more good questions, we’ll answer them here. I think this new game is looking really good. Wish us luck!
Thank you for your patience. We will return to normal blog posts shortly. Thank you all again for your attention and support for our odd little toys.
I am so excited for this, and for an original Exile map! Exile (with the original sprites) was my very first RPG, and the start of lifelong love for the things. What a treasure trove you uncovered!
FWIW, I didn't really like the seamless indoor-outdoor (or city-wilderness if you will) style, because it felt like the world was significantly smaller. In the earlier Avernums, it felt like the wild was HUGE, where every step on it was, maybe a kilometer of movement? But when a step on the wilderness was as large as the steps in the city, where a grid step was perhaps 5m, suddenly that was just gone, and the world was suddenly tiny.