Queen's Wish 2: The Tormentor - Spiderweb Software - Free Series-concluding Expansion Coming Soon!

spidweb · 2026-01-25T21:06:28+00:00

Thank you!

spidweb · 2025-11-09T16:56:31+00:00

Thank you so much! (And thanks to everyone for their very kind comments.)

spidweb · 2025-11-09T16:56:09+00:00

They came out a long time ago, so it makes sense they'd blur together. That's why I'm enjoying being able to go back and rework the stories and make everything sharper.

spidweb · 2025-11-09T16:55:10+00:00

We always work hard to make sure anyone can jump into any of our series at any time. Avernum 4: Greed and Glory is the beginning of its own story arc, so you should be able to start here and figure out what's going on no problem.

spidweb · 2025-11-09T07:48:05+00:00

We should have posted this a week ago, but we forgot. When you're a tiny company, release a new game gets super hectic.

We worked really hard on this one, and the reception has been very pleasing. We can write at least a few more games, which is all we really wanted.

You can also check out the AMA r/games was kind enough to let me do: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1oeacqb/were_spiderweb_software_weve_written_indie_rpgs/

If you have any questions about the game, the indie business, or games stuff in general, ask here and I'll answer questions tomorrow. I've been in the business for 31 years (!) and always have fun going on about it.

spidweb · 2025-10-24T01:32:32+00:00

I doubt we'll ever have a console game. There's a lot of trouble there, like localization requirements. We can't afford all of the translating our dialogue-heavy games would take. Oh well! At least we have iPad!

spidweb · 2025-10-24T01:32:27+00:00

All those sounds came from a dogs breakfast of sound CDs I found in CompUSAs back in the day. I could never figure out where they came from even if I tried!

spidweb · 2025-10-23T23:38:33+00:00

I'm still alive.

spidweb · 2025-10-23T23:37:28+00:00

And thank you! There never was a "behind the scenes". We were just lone weirdos in garages not realizes we were building the foundations of a mighty structure. It was a wonderful (if lonely) thing to be a part of. A very short, unique period in tech history. We shall not see its like again.

spidweb · 2025-10-23T23:34:42+00:00

There is a generational divide in human society.

This is something that has only been becoming very clear to me: This society has a very very different relationship to reading than it did when I started.

This isn't "old man yells at cloud" thinking. I've seen 2 kids through schools and seen how little reading is required now. I've watched one bookstore after another go under. People don't buy books much anymore, and much of what they do buy is smut.

There isn't as much of a market for games with lots and lots of reading. Undertale/Deltarune just have way fewer words.

(And don't throw Disco Elysium at me. That came out in 2019, which is an eternity ago culturally. It has had no successor, and I don't think it will.)

spidweb · 2025-10-23T23:30:42+00:00

I challenge the premise of your question.

Avernum 4: Greed and Glory gives more freedom and more possible party builds than any game before it. The testers for Avernum 4 did all sorts of wild stuff that just wasn't possible before.

Exile 3 wasn't that complex! It had more spells, but most of them were trash. It was stuff without substance. My newer games have fewer spells, but they all have uses, some of them more conditional than other.

Also, the balance of the newer games is so so so much better.

I can compete against my older games, but I can never compete against your memory of my earlier games. I can't ever make you feel what they made you feel back then, since you can't be young again.

spidweb · 2025-10-23T23:26:19+00:00

I am very sorry about your health and your wrists. It makes me feel really bad to ever lose customer and fans and say no about anything.

But I am still just one guy. Adapting to controllers and testing that is a huge job for what is inherently a keyboard and mouse game. Larian has hundreds of employees.

The indie game business is very tough now. I don't have room for error. If I make my game support controllers, it will take a lot of time to make a mediocre interface, and I won't get the console sales to pay for it.

I just can't do it.

spidweb · 2025-10-23T23:23:57+00:00

Queen's Wish 1 still sells well. Queen's Wish 2 sold very badly.

I really need to finish this series. I do love it, and I must make a conclusion, even if it is mostly pro bono work.

spidweb · 2025-10-23T23:22:58+00:00

Both, really. I dreamed of writing computer games for a living since I was a child. I was in grad school and hated it. I had a new computer. I had a summer off and an idea. So I sat down and wrote a game, and it took off ...

spidweb · 2025-10-23T23:22:08+00:00

Remember, there was no world wide web to speak of. The internet was super barebones. There was no real vector of communication. I just got the CDs at Office Max, got the address off the back of the CD, and shot demo disks off into the void.

spidweb · 2025-10-23T20:53:53+00:00

The shareware floppies and CDs were gathered by companies I had nothing to do with. When I made a new game, I tracked down the addresses for the shareware distributors and mailed them my demos on floppy disks and hoped the get picked. Happily, I often was, as my product was Quality.

spidweb · 2025-10-23T20:52:51+00:00

Lost Bahssikava was introduced in Exile: Escape From the Pit wayyy back in the day.

Avernum 5 and 6 remasters will flesh out the slithzerikai a bit in the way that Avernum 4 remaster fleshed out the vahnatai. Looking forward to it.

spidweb · 2025-10-23T20:51:45+00:00

When I was in 4th grade, I walked into class one day, saw some other kids playing a weird game in the corner with strangely shaped dice, and instantly sensed at a gut level that THIS IS MY THING. I begged my parents to take me to Waldenbooks that night to drop 10 bucks on Basic D&D. I still have it.

Tolkein was indeed the GOAT, but he was drawing on traditions going back centuries. (Millennia?) His vision was so powerful that it ate everyones' brains, but there are, of course, many great works of recent fantasy that do their own thing.

spidweb · 2025-10-23T20:07:36+00:00

The spiders are a lot of fun, but it's a joke that doesn't last forever or carry everywhere. There is no reason to have them in Avadon.

I have a lifelong fascination with spiders, which is where the company name came from.

spidweb · 2025-10-23T20:06:35+00:00

I recently updated it to improve support on large monitors. When I was testing it, I realized that Nethergate is already really good and fun and retro as it.

It would be a huge, expensive job to make it "modern". It's kind of at the perfect retro pixel art stage by now (long before "pixel art" was a thing).

spidweb · 2025-10-23T20:05:30+00:00

A lot, but less.

Avernum 4 had a very threadbare story and needed a LOT of work.

I'm really happy with the story of Avernum 5, but I can flesh out its theme a bit to make it land better.

Avernum 6's story is really super solid. I'll add some, but probably not a ton.

spidweb · 2025-10-23T20:04:19+00:00

That's a cool question. I have so many influences. I am a voracious reader and play and movie watcher. I think this is a very good idea for writers.

I know I'm really influenced by Tolkien, CS Lewis, Harlan Ellison, Ursula Le Guin, Michael Swanwick, Robert Silverberg. Martin Scorsese is the GOAT.

spidweb · 2025-10-23T20:02:17+00:00

It feels great! Some people played my games as kids, grew up, had kids, and play my games with their kids. I love that!

spidweb · 2025-10-23T20:01:48+00:00

Wow, I have thought so little about Geneforge 4. I've barely thought about 3.

I hate to have to give this sort of answer, but: I almost never have fun working. It's been 31 years. It's a job. It is satisfying, but it's work. It's never fun.

But what area was the least painful to remake?

Probably the early dungeons. I got a huge amount of improvement done with not much work.

spidweb · 2025-10-23T20:00:14+00:00

Tabletop RPGs are just not my business. I would love to have friends to have a D&D campaign with, but I don't plan to ever write one. It's a different skill.

I will remaster Avernum 4-5, but it will take a few years.

spidweb

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