Founded Spiderweb Software in 1994. Has written many games, including the Exile, Geneforge, Avadon, and Avernum series. Queen's Wish 2: The Tormentor is out!
May 6, 2024 • 6 tweets • 7 min read
Indie Postmortem 1: Geneforge 2 - Infestation. Funding and Building.
A weird development process that actually sort of works.
(A Twitter blog thread, alas.)
About a month ago, we released our newest indie RPG, Geneforge 2 - Infestation. Fan reaction has been really positive. Reviews are great. It's making decent money. We get to stay in business.
That's the quick summary.
The video game business is in a weird, scary, contracting, almost recessionary place right now. Nobody is sure what is going on. So this is a quick game release post-mortem. How did we fund, develop, and market this game? What were the results?
I started writing all this because I wanted to give some numbers and other results of our PR strategy. Then it bloated. I ended up writing a huge description of our entire creative process.
I'm posting it this way for two reasons. One, we do often get asked about our games-writing process, as it's solid enough to keep us going for 30 years. Second, we do a lot of things in weird ways, and I want to inspire creators to not back down from doing things in their own weird ways. Do what it takes to get the game out, dude!
I hope all this TL;DR is a little helpful for people who want to create stuff online. Or people who are foolhardy enough to want to make money writing games.
The Game In Question
We're Spiderweb Software. We started making indie RPGs in 1994, which was a long time ago. Over the years, we've built up a very kind and patient following of fans. Some people played our games as kids, grew up, had kids of their own, and now play our games with them.
Our new game is called Geneforge 2 - Infestation. It's a story-heavy, turn-based RPG, which is a very popular genre that doesn't get that many quality games. This game is a remaster of our popular cult-classic RPG called Geneforge 2 which came out in 2003. It's an unusual, unique, innovative game made with a budget of basically zero.
So we have a lot going for and against us. On the down side, we're a tiny company with no budget. On the up side, we have a fan base and decent name recognition. Bear these factors in mind when you try to learn from our experiences.
To fully understand the context of the information I give below, you should immediately buy 3 copies of Geneforge 2. One to play. One to have around in case the first copy loses its freshness. And one for your mom.
