The Avernum 4 Story, Part 2: What Went Wrong and Why

An excessively self-flagellating post-mortem of a 20 year old game.

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.)

Screenshot of original Avernum 4. The game only ran at 1024x768 because that’s what pretty much everyone’s monitor handled.

"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.

The new Avernum 4: Greed and Glory look. I tried to make everything look lived-in and dark and underworldy.

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.

In recent remasters, I’ve tried to keep the old skill systems. People seem to like the retro crunchiness of it. I left the old Avernum 4 skill system in, but then I added a pile of new customization options from other remasters.

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.)

Pictured: Not a bad game.

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.

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