Founder of Spiderweb Software Discusses Developing Role Playing Games

Jeff, president of Spiderweb Software, talks about developing fantasy role-playing games

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/cc-spiderweb.mp3

Or listen to it here…

[wp_youtube]0-PCMi4j38o[/wp_youtube]

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at Casual Connect in Seattle, and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Jeff: Sure. My name is Jeff Vogel. I’m the President of Spiderweb Software, Spiderweb.com. We were founded in 1994. We write fantasy role-playing games for Macintosh and Windows. We’re a small indie shop.

Our better known series are the Avernum Series and the Geneforge Series.

Interviewer: So, you still have downloadable games that people download and they install and then they play.

Jeff: Yep. We’ve been doing it for a really long time, and we just have a very old school model. Every year we write a game and we release a demo and then people, if they like the game, can buy the whole thing.

Interviewer: Awesome. And do you have an online forum community or anything else like that, or is that it?

Jeff: A passionate online community. About a decade ago we started a forum, and it just turned into its own community with its own traditions and customs and in-jokes which exists completely aside from the game. It’s amazing how that sort of thing can appear. I’m really proud of it. I think it’s really cool.

Interviewer: And do you interact with it on a daily basis, or how does that work?

Jeff: I don’t interact with it as much as I should because I’m so busy. It’s such a huge drain just writing games, but I always try to occasionally stop in and give people the first information about what our new role-playing game is going to be like.

Interviewer: So, you release one RPG a year. Can you talk about the development process behind it, and since it’s cross platform what technologies do you use?

Jeff: Well, after a long time we get set in our ways. We have our own rituals, but every game starts with just a lot of thinking. You go just go off into the wilderness with paper and pencil, and you just write down ideas and change them and rewrite them and boil it down and do a story.

And then, once you have that, you crystallize it. How many dungeons will it have? What are the objectives? And then, you sit down and you rework the engine, and then you just day by day grind out the sections until you have a game. And then, you release it. Well, we, that’s what we do.

Interviewer: And do you use RPG Maker or something else like that?

Jeff: Straight up C++. It’s all of our own engines, all of our own libraries. It’s very low tech, simple, runs on old machines, old school technology, all in C++, all libraries built by us which enable us to make new products very quickly.

Interviewer: What inspires you to make these RPGs in the first place? How did you go about promoting it at first?

Jeff: I just personally have a lifelong fascination with role-playing starting from Dungeons and Dragons in the fourth grade. It’s just what I have a knack for. I love creating the stories and giving people a world to explore in and figure out how they want to affect it. And to affect it, it’s just a personal, a personal obsession.

Interviewer: So, you have this obsession. How does it convert then into you actually making the game? How long did that first game take?

Jeff: Well, my first game was sort of a survival mechanism to survive grad school. After two years of grad school, I had to do something else or I’d go crazy, so I spent six months just taking off and writing a game.

And the first one was really agonizing because I had to learn to code a Macintosh and learn how to write the code. But, it took about eight months, and it was very simple and I released it just on a lark. And nobody was more surprised than me that people bought it.

Interviewer: Wait. Where did you release it, on the Internet or was it…

Jeff: This is actually in 1995, so it was before the World Wide Web was something that people had even heard of. So, most of our copies were AOL, believe it or not and a system called CompuServe that doesn’t exist any more. It was only, like, two years later that we started selling stuff over the web.

Interviewer: So, you released this. Did you even have built-in acceptance of sales, or how did that even work?

Jeff: It has a strange, stupid registration system different than anyone else uses that we still use, although we’re moving away from it, I’m not proud to say. Basically, they paid for us. They pay us, and we generate a key for them. They put it in and it turns the demo into a full game. So, it was a classic model of what the old timers call shareware.

Interviewer: So, you get people buying this. What are you feeing at that point? What are your thoughts?

Jeff: Complete and utter, stunned astonishment that anyone would actually pay money for my games, but once I recovered from the surprise within two months I’d quit grad school and decided to do it first time because role-playings are my obsession. And so, the chance to make that was not something I’d walk away from.

Interviewer: So, you start trying to do this full-time. What are the challenges when you first do that, and what were some of the concerns you had because this is something surprising in the first place?

Jeff: There was a terror of losing your house that never goes away. People ask me, “How can you keep doing it? How can you keep working day in and day out by yourself?” And what I always say to that is, “Fear of losing your home does wonders to focus the mind.”

And there’s just the fear and the grind of doing it day after day, but after a while it’s just my job. I get up in the morning. I have breakfast. I get dressed. I go downstairs, and I place dragons. And I write dialogue and I put orks in a dungeon. There’s a routine and you just do it.

Interviewer: Since you started out a while back, you’ve been through many shifts in the gaming industry. Have any of these even phased you? Have you even tried to embrace any of them, or does it even matter?

Jeff: It is terrifying how out of touch I am with the game industry. It moves so quickly, like Farmville. Farmville didn’t exist two years ago, and now it’s taken over the world. I’m old and crusty, and it’s hard to comprehend.

The one thing that I’ve really grabbed onto is portals which I write old school gamer games, so they don’t do as well on the portals as they could, but I’m working hard on shifting my games in a way that they appeal to the old school gamers. But, still there’s something that can do well on portals.

Interviewer: So, are you looking into casual RPGs, or do you still want to do the story lines that you’re focused on now?

Jeff: My games get casualer. There’s always going to be a certain hard core element to them because that’s what I do, and I think the success of Dragon Age has proved that a hard core game really can sell. But, I’m trying to make them more casual friendly where to remove unnecessary complexity and confusing bits and weirdness so that it’s not just hard cores only, so that ordinary people can sit down and comprehend it and have a good time.

Interviewer: So, you’re obsessed with RPGs and RPG design. Can you talk about then how that obsession manifests itself in your games? What are some of the things that you address to make sure that it’s the perfect RPG or an RPG you’re proud of, when you release one every year?

Jeff: For Spiderweb Software games, I think the most important element to a role-playing game is the role-playing. I think that my design trademark is I want the player to be able to make choices and have those choices have a real fundamental effect on the world you’re playing in and the ending.

I think that as much as anything is what I look for when I sit down to design a new game, and I think that that is one thing that the RPG genre offers that’s really cool.

Interviewer: How do you go about doing that effectively because that seems like it would be a lot of work to make sure that any change or any modification that a player does in the world actually affects the fun?

Jeff: Well, I’m only one person, and there’s always limits. In the end, there’s only going to be a certain finite number of concrete choices you can make. So, in that case the object is to make the choices interesting. You know, you sit down first and you come up with a good work of fiction, and then you turn it into a game.

And you look for those sort of turning points, those crisis points in the story line you create and find ways that the player can make a choice that’s an interesting choice, an interesting decision that has interesting effects on the world. And that is, more than anything else, the trademark, the thing that I want to put in my games.

Interviewer: As you’re designing this, are you getting feedback from anyone else, while it’s in its private beta, private?

Jeff: I have a lot of beta testers. They’re volunteer beta testers, very hard working, very good people, and they give me a lot of feedback. But, by the time anyone sees it, the story is made. So, there’s a certain leap of faith element where I just make up the story and I’m kind of stuck with it. And so, I just have to hope it’s a good story. Fortunately, for me it’s always been good so far.

Interviewer: Let’s talk about the story. So, do you just write out then all the back story, everything else about this, or how are you developing the story? How long does it take for you to develop the story?

Jeff: It’s all written out. I’ve got paper and pencil and before I even write one line of code, I write and write and write and write about the story, about the characters, about the history of the world. And I think this is a standard thing.

Every Series game makes a design document where you really want to know where you’re going before you start setting down the code. Once that’s in place, and that takes months, ideally I start thinking about it months and months before code starts being laid down just because I need time to come up with good ideas.

Interviewer: And so, what’s next in store for you in terms of your community, in terms of your RPGs, in terms of, maybe, experimenting with other variations on RPGs?

Jeff: Well, our next game is going to be called Avedon, the Black Fortress. And it’s an all new story line, all new engine. It’s low budget, like all of our games, but it looks nicer than anything we’ve done before. It’s got a very intricate story line, a lot of interesting choices, a lot of cool stuff that happens, a lot of opportunity to be good or to be evil.

And we’re going to work really hard on marketing, something that we’ve not always had a knack for and just spreading it out to the world and giving people a cool RPG to play.

Interviewer: In terms of marketing, what are you going to do differently now, compared to before?

Jeff: We’re really trying to make this game more casual friendly. It’s still a hard core RPG but with an accessibility to it. So, ideally we’ll get it on portals, like Steam, and just give it a wide audience and give people a chance to just check it out.

Interviewer: Where can people find out more information about the games that you’ve made already?

Jeff: The best place to look would be SpiderwebSoftware.com. Our most popular Series are the Avernum Series and the Geneforge Series which are old school RPGs with a lot of innovative elements. They’ve been very popular. They’ve gone on for a while, and the download and demos are big and they’re free. We have big demos, and they’re free. So, take a look if you like RPGs, especially with a big of retro style to them. I think you might be happy.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.