I’m working on a digital adaptation of the legendary Blood Sword series.
Yes… that Blood Sword. The five-book epic created by Dave Morris and Oliver Johnson. A saga that merged narrative gamebooks with tactical combat, cooperative gameplay, and some of the darkest, grittiest fantasy ever written for the format. For many of us—especially in Eastern Europe—this series wasn't just a reading experience. It was a rite of passage.

Now, after years of building interactive stories, experimenting with combat systems, and shaping gamebook engines—I finally feel ready to tackle it.

What You Can Expect
My goal is to capture the essence of Blood Sword—the tactical battles, the meaningful choices, the grounded tone, and the sense that you're living through a smart, branching RPG campaign carefully crafted by a meticulous dungeon master.

• Turn-based, grid combat, heavily inspired by the original battle maps
• Class-based characters with unique roles and abilities: Warrior, Trickster, Sage, Enchanter
• Branching narrative faithful to the books—but enhanced with dynamic systems and choices that matter
• Co-op inspired design — even though the game is single-player, you’ll feel the presence and synergy of a full party
• Visual atmosphere that reflects the grim, grounded world of Legend

This will be my most ambitious project to date, both in terms of scale and in how deeply personal it is to me.

Join the Journey
The game is still early in development, but the Steam page is live. I’d be honored if you check it out, follow it, and help spread the word.

Wishlist Blood Sword on Steam

Let’s walk into The Kingdom of Wyrd together this winter.

Stay sharp.​

Barcelona, Spain / Vienna, Austria - April 15, 2025: Today, developer Alkimia Interactive has revealed new insights into the Gothic 1 Remake. The development team offered another in-depth look, as part of their making-of-series, into the creation of their ambitious project: This remake of the cult classic will not only deliver a complete visual overhaul but also introduce systemic and narrative refinements that aim to elevate the beloved original into a modern experience.

"Our job was to find out what elements should stay exactly as they are and what elements should be expanded," explains Reinhard Pollice, Alkimia Interactive's Studio Director. Throughout the production, the developers found themselves constantly navigating between honoring the original while thoughtfully enhancing it with new ideas to make the experience even more compelling. Gothic 1 Remake aims to stay true to the original’s core narrative, while addressing long-standing issues: Plot holes, contradictions, and logical inconsistencies have been carefully reviewed and rewritten.

Creating a believable, breathing open world is one of the remake’s central design goals. The team implemented a detailed living world simulation where characters follow daily routines, witness player actions, and dynamically respond to events, even when the player isn’t nearby. "We’re not just configuring NPCs’ homes or schedules.", says Javier Untoria, Lead Game Designer. "We are creating a living world with a lot of character."

Another exciting part of the remake is how the development team expands existing areas and and found inspiration in elements that were originally cut. The development team looked at areas that were empty in the original and fleshed them out. From mysterious dungeons to hidden paths and deeper interactions with orc culture, many of the game’s lore-rich aspects are being given space to truly shine.​

A turn-based isometric non-linear indie CRPG inspired by the classics. Explore an alternate-history dystopian country on the brink of a civil war and leave your mark on its future.

• Experience non-linear branching storylines shaped by your choices and skills
• Use diplomacy to achieve your goals or let brute force do the talking
• Choose a side in the conflict or escape the chaos on your own terms
• Master turn-based combat where every decision shapes the outcome
• Explore a captivating alternative history world with a twist

Hello Kindred,

We would like to share an update on the development and release window of Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines 2.

As Marco explained in the video, Bloodlines 2 will not be ready for release in the first half of 2025.

Paradox Interactive and The Chinese Room are committed to delivering this game, and we believe that ensuring great technical quality is more important than sticking to a specific date.

The game is currently in a late development stage, and feedback from the community has been taken into account during this time. TCR is working hard on quality assurance to ensure it is stable and free of bugs that could disrupt the player experience.

Bloodlines 2 will launch in October 2025 when the game meets the technical quality standards that you, our fans, rightfully expect and deserve. Please stay tuned for the game’s exact launch date.

We want to ensure that the content we share with you is high-quality and showcases exciting game features. With this updated release timeline, we will pause our development diaries so that the team can concentrate on refining the game.

However, we will still be available online for questions and comments, and we welcome everyone to join the Bloodlines 2 Discord.​

Tim Cain claims that he never gave much of a thought to any sequels to Fallout during the three and a half years he spent working on the first game. Brian Fargo, on the other hand, started to think “franchise” as soon as he woke up to Fallout’s commercial potential circa the summer of 1997. Fallout 2 was added to Interplay’s list of active projects a couple of months before the original game even shipped.

Interplay’s sorry shape as a business made the idea of a quick sequel even more appealing than it might otherwise have been. For it should be possible to do it relatively cheaply; the engine and the core rules were already built. It would just be a matter of generating a new story and design, ones that would reuse as many audiovisual assets as possible.

Yet Fargo was not pleased by the initial design proposals that reached his desk. So, just days after Fallout 1 had shipped, he asked Tim Cain to get together with his principal partners Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson and come up with a proposal of their own for the sequel. The three were dismayed by this request; exhausted as they were by months of crunch on Fallout 1, they had anticipated enjoying a relaxing holiday season, not jumping right back into the fray on Fallout 2. Their proposal reflected their mental exhaustion. It spring-boarded off of a joking aside in the original game’s manual, a satirical advertisement which Jason Anderson had drawn up in an afternoon when he was told by Interplay’s printer that there would be an unsightly blank page in the booklet as matters currently stood. The result was the “Garden of Eden Creation Kit”: “When all clear sounds on your radio, you don’t want to be caught without one!” Elaborating on this thin shred of a premise, the sequel would cast you as a descendant of the star of the first game, sent out into the dangerous wastelands to recover one of these Garden of Eden Kits in lieu of a water chip. This apple did not fall far from the tree.

But as it turned out, that suited Brian Fargo just fine. Within a month of Fallout 1′s release, Cain, Boyarsky, and Anderson had been officially assigned to the Fallout 2 project. None of them was terribly happy about it; what all three of them really wanted were a break, a bonus check, and the chance to work on something else, roughly in that order of priority. In January of 1998, feeling under-appreciated and physically incapable of withstanding the solid ten months of crunch that he knew lay before him, Cain turned in his resignation. Boyarsky and Anderson quit the same day in a show of solidarity. (The three would go on to found Troika Studios, whose games we will be meeting in future articles on this site, God willing and the creek don’t rise.)

Following their exodus, Fallout 2 fell to Feargus Urquhart and the rest of his new Black Isle CRPG division to turn into a finished product. Actually, to use the word “division” is to badly overstate Black Isle’s degree of separation from the rest of Interplay. Black Isle was more a marketing label and a polite fiction than a lived reality; the boundaries between it and the mother ship were, shall we say, rather porous. Employees tended to drift back and forth across the border without anyone much noticing.

This was certainly the case for most of those who worked on Fallout 2, a group which came to encompass about a third of the company at one time or another. Returning to the development approach that had yielded Wasteland a decade earlier, Fargo and Urquhart parceled the game out to whoever they thought might have the time to contribute a piece of it. Designer and writer Chris Avellone, who was drafted onto the Fallout 2 team for a few months while he was supposed to be working on another forthcoming CRPG called Planescape: Torment, has little positive to say about the experience: “I do feel like the heart of the team had gone. And all that was left were a bunch of developers working on different aspects of the game like a big patchwork beast. But there wasn’t a good spine or heart to the game. We were just making content as fast as we could. Fallout 2 was a slapdash product without a lot of oversight.”

Still, the programmers did fix some of what annoyed me about Fallout 1, by cleaning up some of the countless little niggles in the interface. Companions were reworked, such that they now behave more or less as you’d expect: they’re no longer so likely to shoot you in the back, are happy to trade items with you, and don’t force you to kill them just to get around them in narrow spaces. Although the game as a whole still strikes me as more clunky and cumbersome than it needs to be — the turn-based combat system is as molasses-slow as ever — the developers clearly did make an effort to unkink as many bottlenecks as they could in the time they had.

But sadly, Fallout 2 is a case of one step forward, one step back: although it’s a modestly smoother-playing game, it lacks its predecessor’s thematic clarity and unified aesthetic vision. Its world is one of disparate parts, slapped together with no rhyme, reason, or editorial oversight. It wants to be funny — always the last resort of a game that lacks the courage of its fictional convictions — but it doesn’t have any surfeit of true wit to hand. It tries to make up for the deficit the same way as many a game of this era, by transgressing boundaries of taste and throwing out lazy references to other pop culture as a substitute for making up its own jokes. This game is very nerdy male, very adolescent-to-twenty-something, and very late 1990s — so much so that anyone who didn’t live through that period as part of the same clique will have trouble figuring out what it’s on about much of the time. I do understand most of the spaghetti it throws at the walls — lucky me! — but that doesn’t keep me from finding it fairly insufferable.

Fallout 2 shipped in October of 1998, just when it was supposed to. But its reception in the gaming press was noticeably more muted than that of its predecessor. Reviewers found it hard to overlook the bugs and glitches that were everywhere, the inevitable result of its rushed and chaotic development cycle, even as the more discerning among them made note of the jarring change in tone and the lack of overall cohesion to the story and design. The game under-performed expectations commercially as well, spending only one week in the American top ten. In the aftermath, Brian Fargo’s would-be CRPG franchise looked like it had already run its course; no serious plans for a Fallout 3 would be mooted at Interplay for quite some time to come.

Yet Fallout 2 did do Interplay’s other big CRPG for that Christmas an ironic service. When BioWare told Fargo that they would like a couple of extra months to finish Baldur’s Gate up properly, the prospect of another Interplay CRPG on store shelves that October made it easier for him to grant their request. So, instead of taking full advantage of the Christmas buying season, Baldur’s Gate didn’t finally ship until a scant four days before the holiday. Never mind: the decision not to ship it before its time paid dividends that some quantity of ephemeral Christmas sales could never have matched. Plenty of gamers proved ready to hand over their holiday cash and gift cards in the days right after Christmas for the most hotly anticipated Dungeons & Dragons computer game since Pool of Radiance. Baldur’s Gate sold 175,000 units before 1998 was over. (Just to put that figure in perspective, this was more copies than Fallout 1 had sold in fifteen months.) Its sales figures would go on to top 1 million units in less than a year, making it the bestselling CRPG to date that wasn’t named Diablo. The cover provided by Fallout 2 helped to ensure that Dr. Muzyka and Dr. Zeschuk would never have to see another patient again.​