Kickstarter For Geneforge 3 - Detonation Has Launched!

Marketing mode, activate!!!

We have launched the Kickstarter for our next game! We are creating Geneforge 3 - Detonation, a full remake of 2005’s Geneforge 3. This is the middle chapter of our hugely popular, cult-classic Geneforge Saga, and we are really excited.

You can buy the game in advance, get cool one-time-only merch, and even help make the game. We hope to release it in Spring, 2027 for Windows, Mac, and iPad.

Thanks to all who support us! Kickstarter is a huge part of the reason we are still in business, and the people who trust us with their early money have our eternal gratitude.

OK. That was the marketing for this blog post.

Returning to these old products gives me a chance to do post-mortems. Which, in turn, lets me talk about the games business. In particular, surviving in it for a long time. And that’s what this blog is for!

Geneforge 3 had a troubled creation and release, but it was hugely educational for us. Reacting to how Geneforge 3 did gave us the tools that enabled us to stay in business for the 20 years that followed.

So for the Kickstarter, we will talk about how Geneforge 3 was created. The next parts of the story, development, release, and sales, comes later.

“What? ANOTHER Remaster?”

Yep.

So I have written 18 (!!!!!) all-new, full-length games, which is a hugely prolific career by any reasonable standard.

But now I’m old. And the newer games I write don’t sell as well. Why? A lot of reasons. But them’s the facts. It happens to creators all the time.

Meanwhile, our remasters do really well for us, and they are really necessary. And hugely personally satisfying to write, since these older games are the ones I’m most proud of. These old games don’t work well anymore, and there is SO much room for improvement. This pains me a LOT.

I don’t have that much career left, and I want to make sure my best work goes into the future as shiny as possible. So, as of July, 2026, that is my main job. You know. Posterity. That little thing.

So where did Geneforge 3 come from?

Let’s Time Travel Back To 2004

We started Geneforge 3 in 2004. How many games had we written before it? Let me check Spiderweb Software’s Wikipedia page ...

In this decade, we had released ELEVEN games. Seven all-new games and four remasters.

This was an insanely prolific pace. Honestly, I don’t know how I did it. (Working every day except Christmas helped.)

(Note that this frenetic pace left room for remastering. There is less need to remaster Avadon since, like it or not, that game is very close to what I intended to make.)

I had just released Blades of Avernum, which was a remaster of Blades of Exile. It was a scenario creation kit, featuring, a full, quite powerful scripting engine. It didn’t sell nearly as well as Blades of Exile. Partly because there was a lot more competition then, and partly because I was getting exhausted.

At the time, not only had I been going full speed for a decade, but I had one very small child and another almost on the way. And I was getting older, the curse that comes for us all.

Meanwhile, In Reality ...

The Internet evolved a lot between 1994 and 2004. For example, the world wide web had become widely adopted. The Dot Com Crash of 1999 was painful, but it was now accepted that it was possible to run a profitable business on the internet, so people didn’t automatically assume I was a scam artist or pornographer.

The tools available for indie developers (still called “shareware authors” at the time) were, however, painfully crude. We still sold all our games on our own web site, using an online store we hand-coded for ourselves in 1997. (We spent a LOT of time in those dark days inventing e-commerce from base principles.)

There was one huge development, though! Wind Tangent and Real Arcade approached us, offering to sell our games on their websites. Geneforge, in particular. They even paid us a hugely generous 30% of sales!

We went along with it, because, hey, why not, only to find that they generated ACTUAL MONEY. What seemed like a weird, shocking scam turned out to be our future and the future of our industry.

Because these sorts of software sales were so new, Real Networks actually had me visit them and bought me lunch and stuff. They asked my opinions about how the store should work, and they actually listened. They also told me they would only sell Geneforge if I put in a tutorial, which lead to me making my very first tutorial. This was a HUGE improvement.

So many of the smartest things I’ve done I only did when I was forced. Again, I’m exhausted a huge portion of the time. We didn’t have adderall back then. Maybe I’ll start taking it when I’m 80 and ready to do the fifth Exile 2 remaster.

Where was I? Oh yeah. Geneforge 3.

So I Started a New Game

The shareware biz back then was tough. When I released a game, the Doom Clock started ticking. Would I release a new game before the checks started bouncing? Poor sales for Blades of Avernum only ratcheted up the pressure.

So I got my frazzled nerves in order, sat down for too little time, and decided what Geneforge 3 would be about. At the time, I thought Geneforge would be 6 parts. This far in, it was time for war and carnage. Enough mystery. Enough foreplay. I’d set up a cool, cool sand castle of a world.

It was time to do the really fun thing: Knocking it down.

I’ll talk about development in a few months when the game is announced for reals ...

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. And they’re all cheap 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 support our new Geneforge 3 - Detonation Kickstarter. Either way, thank you for your attention!