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Spiderweb Queen's Wish 2: The Tormentor - Jeff Vogel's new series continues

Contagium

Savant
Patron
Joined
Aug 2, 2018
Messages
477
Location
New Hampshire, USA
Was the geneforge remake ok?

I enjoyed it. Some nice QOL improvements with the UI. Graphics look good on new monitors. Maybe I'm easier to please than some. IT'S WAY BETTER than Queer's Wish.
 

Terra

Cipher
Joined
Sep 4, 2016
Messages
896
At least some of the characters appear correctly oriented this time, is he going for 8-way or maybe diagonals are old/placeholder. Overall art still makes me sad though.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,232
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Huh, did he just launch this out of the blue?



https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spiderwebsoftware/queens-wish-2-the-tormentor

3f7736b6d96f5a8774b5ea72f2e4e992_original.jpg

We are Spiderweb Software. We have been happily creating fantasy adventures since 1994, and we have a new story to tell!

You are the youngest child of Queen Sharyn, the absolute leader of the Empire of Haven. While your older siblings have grabbed fame and power, you have slid by in a life of quiet luxury. Until now.

Your mother, the Queen, is ill. Haven is in a panic, struggling to keep up with her endless list of final wishes. You are the youngest of the family. Not entirely trusted with the serious work of Empire, you're given the tedious royal errands.

So you are sent to tour the Rokaj, one of your more remote and ferocious vassal states. Your father's homeland. When you arrive, you expect the usual tedium of welcoming banquets and speeches, but get an assassination attempt instead. Now you must search the mountains of the Ro and put down a violent rebellion, while obeying (or not) the constant commands of your Royal family.

Reclaim land. Build forts. Abuse your butler. Be diplomatic or do battle. History is happening quickly ... Try to survive it.

11ecaa4f107de3ead06c4c10339e04bd_original.jpg

Explore an enormous world. Let factions bid for your allegiance. Explore cunningly designed dungeons. Get haircuts from your butler.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,232
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Oh this is interesting: https://bottomfeeder.substack.com/p/queens-wish-the-conqueror-post-mortem

Queen's Wish: The Conqueror Post-Mortem
Lots of experiments. Some successes.

The next game, Kickstarting now! Sequels are tricky. You have to keep the cool, old stuff, but you also have to add unexpected new stuff.

I have been writing indie role-playing games for a living for 27 years. The end of my career is still a few years away, but it is in sight. So I am figuring out how I want to go out.

Three years ago, I started what is likely my last all-new game series, Queen's Wish. I didn't want to fade out the easy way. I wanted to make something unique. The story. The game system. The battles. I wanted all of these to feel fresh and different and unlike any other game out there.

So I wrote Queen's Wish: The Conqueror. It took two years of hard work, constant thought, multiple redesigns, and one near-nervous breakdown. But I did it.

(Sometimes I get accused of not caring anymore and phoning it in. If you don't like Queen's Wish, fine. But if you tell me it's just an easy cash-in, your opinion is ignored forever.)

This article is about the weird choices I made in the game. Which worked. Which didn't. And how I will fix them.

You probably didn't play Queen's Wish. And you don’t have too, since I am writing this article more as a series of game design ideas, and how they worked out in practice.




The old-school straight-on terrain view has fans and detractors. We’re keeping it. The buildings look bad. We have a better system now.

But You Should Play It

Queen's Wish: The Conqueror did not get the happiest reaction at first. Whenever you change something in your games, you will lose some customers. The changes need to earn more customers to make up for it.

Queen's Wish changed just about everything from our earlier games, and a lot of people found it to be very jarring. Sales were shaky and online reviews weren't great. I was sad, so I spent a few months concentrating on the next game.

But then, a year later, I went back and looked at Queen's Wish. I found that the online reviews had turned really good. Sales had stayed strong instead of trailing off. Somehow, the game found its audience.

Now we are doing a Kickstarter for the next game in the trilogy, Queen's Wish 2: The Tormentor. We don't know if there is still an audience for it. Indie sequels fail all the time.

But we think we have a chance, especially if we fix the problems. Because there were a few problems.

So here are some of the choices (and mistakes) we made, and how they worked out.




Adding shops and workshops is easy and cool. You need them to make the best items in the game.

Choice 1: You Have To Do Dungeons In One Run

In our earlier games, you could whittle away at a dungeon in multiple trips. You could bust in, kill half of the enemies, return to town to rest, and then return to finish the dungeon off. When you got back, the foes you already killed would be (mostly) gone.

In Queen's Wish, all enemies respawn when you return to a dungeon. You have to use tactics and planning and conserve your power to finish the adventure in one run. The dungeons are very carefully balanced to make each run close and exciting. (But a lot of players don't like "exciting." "Exciting" is stressful.)

Our old players would enter a dungeon, blow all their best abilities on the trash at the entrance, run out of steam, rest up, and find that they have to start over. This is a real change in how you have to approach our games, and a lot of our old fans didn't care for it. (Which is their right. People like what they like.)

I don't consider this change a mistake because I love how close and exciting the fights are. It makes Queen's Wish, of all my games, the one I most enjoy playing. However, it does remove a lot of safety and feelings of raw power. It's a hard trade-off to balance, and it is one that every RPG designer has to make a decision about early.

Choice 2: Experience Is Given In Big Lumps (Mistake!)

I really liked The Witcher 3. In that game, every foe gave you a tiny bit of experience, but the only way to get actual levels was to finish quests. Queen's Wish is almost the same. Your experience comes in big lumps when you finish quests, but killing monsters gives you nothing.

I didn't want people to be able to farm foes and kill the same enemy again and again to gain strength. It's boring. And yes, some players will do the boring thing. Some feel a compulsion to do it. But I didn't want to encourage this. I always want you experiencing new material.

The problem is that it neglects one of the key selling points of computer RPGs: They give you a constant drip of pleasant dopamine hits by giving you a steady flow of little rewards.

Getting experience from every foe you kill is, simply, more fun. Queen's Wish gave you levels and power at the same rate as it would have otherwise, but it FELT less satisfying.

So Queen's Wish 2 will rework experience and other minor rewards to spread them out more. RPGs have a set of expected basic mechanics and reward systems that make them fun and work well. A designer ignores these at his or her own peril.




There is a huge huge variety of battles in Queen’s Wish. And now I have to make up a ton of new ones.

Choice 3: Building An Empire (Needs Work!)

The most unique quality of Queen's Wish is that most of your power comes by building your forts. You take over forts. Then you finish dungeons and quests to get resources. (Wood, Stone, Iron, Etc.). Then you use those resources to upgrade your forts. This gives you the power (as abilities and equipment) to beat tougher dungeons.

I love this system. I love that your power comes from industry and making a strong nation and that your best equipment is what you make yourself. It is unique in RPGs and fits perfectly with the plot and setting. Also, making buildings and shops and defenses appear just feels really satisfying.

However, there was a problem. Since the system was so new and complex (and took a long time to design), I couldn't put too many options in it. It was hard enough just balancing its current simple form.

But now the system is in. It works. And so I can expand it. Queen's Wish 2 will have a lot of new options for developing your characters and your Empire. Players repeatedly asked for more choices to make, and they will get them.

Choice 4: Fewer, Better Abilities, But All Useful (Needs Work!)

Some RPGs give dozens and dozens of spells and abilities. Some of them are overpowered, but most of them are useless. Much of the game is figuring out the overpowered spells and just using them again and again.

I don't care for that. I think that each game system has only a limited number of abilities that can be useful in it, and if you include too many then useless and overpowered abilities are inevitable.

So, for Queen's Wish, there are only 44 abilities or so, but they are all balanced to be useful. Some are more powerful and generally valuable than others, but, on the highest difficulty, all of them have places where they shine. (And you can change your abilities around whenever you return to town. This is necessary, especially on higher difficulty levels.)

I like how this turned out, but players really wanted even more abilities. At a certain point, you have to stop arguing with how the genre works. So Queen's Wish 2 will have 12 more abilities. It'll be a bit of work to make them both unique and balanced, but I think that number will feel more satisfying to players.

Side Note: When trying to make a turn-based RPG, designers often try to create the illusion of depth by heaping on more stuff. More skill trees. More abilities. More choices. But most of these choices tend to be: "Here's one obvious great thing and a lot of crap." Turn-based RPGs are really hard to design in a way that the player has meaningful and tactically interesting choices.




The skill system is solid. I just need to add a bunch more skills and ways to earn them.

Choice 5: Family Matters!

All of our games have a lot of plot and writing, and we try to give the player a lot of important choices and possible endings. This is the trademark quality of our games, so we have to continue it with Queen's Wish 2. (Even though it's a ton of work.)

In addition, most computer RPGs never really deal with more mundane human issues, especially family, parents, and children. I wanted to expand my story to parts of the human experience that games almost never touch.

So in Queen's Wish games, the three main characters are your mother (the Queen), your brother, and your sister. They will have most of the dialogue in the series, and your interactions with them have a huge effect on the story.

Also, the game is free of the cheap meta jokes and irony that have infested computer game writing over the last few years. The writing in Queen's Wish is sincere and emotional. These are people who simultaneously love each other and drive each other crazy. (So, family.)

Writing the family dialogue is difficult, but it is also my favorite thing about the series. I love writing these characters. This is one thing I won't give up.

I don't actually know if players will like the whole story or if the earnest tone is popular or not. However, sometimes you have to write what you have to write. Luckily, this lets me put into the market things that aren't already there (whether you want them or not).

A New Kickstarter

A lot of why I am writing this is because we are doing a Kickstarter for Queen's Wish 2: The Tormentor, the new game. Since I am asking you to support a game that doesn't really exist yet, I want you to know what I am changing and what I am trying to improve.

Writing sequels is a tricky business. You need to add a lot of new stuff, since the old game probably had enough content to get people tired of the old system.

I really don't know how Queen's Wish 2 will sell. I just know that I have to finish the series. This is my last attempt to do something really new and cool before retirement. (The rest of the time, I'll be doing remasters.)

I have to make sure I'm happy with it, and hopefully the rest will take care of themselves over the long run.
 
Last edited:

Grauken

Gourd vibes only
Patron
Joined
Mar 22, 2013
Messages
12,786
If Vogel thinks he'll end his career on a high note with his most respected games his latest series, I have some bad news for him
 

Luzur

Good Sir
Joined
Feb 12, 2009
Messages
41,392
Location
Swedish Empire
Could be better if he reworked the settlement building system abit and...i dunno, redo the other stuff. QW1 felt like a watered down Avernum with stuff missing.
 

Contagium

Savant
Patron
Joined
Aug 2, 2018
Messages
477
Location
New Hampshire, USA
I'll give everyone the TL;DR version:

"I'm old. Very old. Been making old games for an old time. I'm tired and my old career is coming to a tired end soon. Sorry you don't like the game"


Oh this is interesting: https://bottomfeeder.substack.com/p/queens-wish-the-conqueror-post-mortem

Queen's Wish: The Conqueror Post-Mortem
Lots of experiments. Some successes.

The next game, Kickstarting now! Sequels are tricky. You have to keep the cool, old stuff, but you also have to add unexpected new stuff.

I have been writing indie role-playing games for a living for 27 years. The end of my career is still a few years away, but it is in sight. So I am figuring out how I want to go out.

Three years ago, I started what is likely my last all-new game series, Queen's Wish. I didn't want to fade out the easy way. I wanted to make something unique. The story. The game system. The battles. I wanted all of these to feel fresh and different and unlike any other game out there.

So I wrote Queen's Wish: The Conqueror. It took two years of hard work, constant thought, multiple redesigns, and one near-nervous breakdown. But I did it.

(Sometimes I get accused of not caring anymore and phoning it in. If you don't like Queen's Wish, fine. But if you tell me it's just an easy cash-in, your opinion is ignored forever.)

This article is about the weird choices I made in the game. Which worked. Which didn't. And how I will fix them.

You probably didn't play Queen's Wish. And you don’t have too, since I am writing this article more as a series of game design ideas, and how they worked out in practice.




The old-school straight-on terrain view has fans and detractors. We’re keeping it. The buildings look bad. We have a better system now.

But You Should Play It

Queen's Wish: The Conqueror did not get the happiest reaction at first. Whenever you change something in your games, you will lose some customers. The changes need to earn more customers to make up for it.

Queen's Wish changed just about everything from our earlier games, and a lot of people found it to be very jarring. Sales were shaky and online reviews weren't great. I was sad, so I spent a few months concentrating on the next game.

But then, a year later, I went back and looked at Queen's Wish. I found that the online reviews had turned really good. Sales had stayed strong instead of trailing off. Somehow, the game found its audience.

Now we are doing a Kickstarter for the next game in the trilogy, Queen's Wish 2: The Tormentor. We don't know if there is still an audience for it. Indie sequels fail all the time.

But we think we have a chance, especially if we fix the problems. Because there were a few problems.

So here are some of the choices (and mistakes) we made, and how they worked out.




Adding shops and workshops is easy and cool. You need them to make the best items in the game.

Choice 1: You Have To Do Dungeons In One Run

In our earlier games, you could whittle away at a dungeon in multiple trips. You could bust in, kill half of the enemies, return to town to rest, and then return to finish the dungeon off. When you got back, the foes you already killed would be (mostly) gone.

In Queen's Wish, all enemies respawn when you return to a dungeon. You have to use tactics and planning and conserve your power to finish the adventure in one run. The dungeons are very carefully balanced to make each run close and exciting. (But a lot of players don't like "exciting." "Exciting" is stressful.)

Our old players would enter a dungeon, blow all their best abilities on the trash at the entrance, run out of steam, rest up, and find that they have to start over. This is a real change in how you have to approach our games, and a lot of our old fans didn't care for it. (Which is their right. People like what they like.)

I don't consider this change a mistake because I love how close and exciting the fights are. It makes Queen's Wish, of all my games, the one I most enjoy playing. However, it does remove a lot of safety and feelings of raw power. It's a hard trade-off to balance, and it is one that every RPG designer has to make a decision about early.

Choice 2: Experience Is Given In Big Lumps (Mistake!)

I really liked The Witcher 3. In that game, every foe gave you a tiny bit of experience, but the only way to get actual levels was to finish quests. Queen's Wish is almost the same. Your experience comes in big lumps when you finish quests, but killing monsters gives you nothing.

I didn't want people to be able to farm foes and kill the same enemy again and again to gain strength. It's boring. And yes, some players will do the boring thing. Some feel a compulsion to do it. But I didn't want to encourage this. I always want you experiencing new material.

The problem is that it neglects one of the key selling points of computer RPGs: They give you a constant drip of pleasant dopamine hits by giving you a steady flow of little rewards.

Getting experience from every foe you kill is, simply, more fun. Queen's Wish gave you levels and power at the same rate as it would have otherwise, but it FELT less satisfying.

So Queen's Wish 2 will rework experience and other minor rewards to spread them out more. RPGs have a set of expected basic mechanics and reward systems that make them fun and work well. A designer ignores these at his or her own peril.




There is a huge huge variety of battles in Queen’s Wish. And now I have to make up a ton of new ones.

Choice 3: Building An Empire (Needs Work!)

The most unique quality of Queen's Wish is that most of your power comes by building your forts. You take over forts. Then you finish dungeons and quests to get resources. (Wood, Stone, Iron, Etc.). Then you use those resources to upgrade your forts. This gives you the power (as abilities and equipment) to beat tougher dungeons.

I love this system. I love that your power comes from industry and making a strong nation and that your best equipment is what you make yourself. It is unique in RPGs and fits perfectly with the plot and setting. Also, making buildings and shops and defenses appear just feels really satisfying.

However, there was a problem. Since the system was so new and complex (and took a long time to design), I couldn't put too many options in it. It was hard enough just balancing its current simple form.

But now the system is in. It works. And so I can expand it. Queen's Wish 2 will have a lot of new options for developing your characters and your Empire. Players repeatedly asked for more choices to make, and they will get them.

Choice 4: Fewer, Better Abilities, But All Useful (Needs Work!)

Some RPGs give dozens and dozens of spells and abilities. Some of them are overpowered, but most of them are useless. Much of the game is figuring out the overpowered spells and just using them again and again.

I don't care for that. I think that each game system has only a limited number of abilities that can be useful in it, and if you include too many then useless and overpowered abilities are inevitable.

So, for Queen's Wish, there are only 44 abilities or so, but they are all balanced to be useful. Some are more powerful and generally valuable than others, but, on the highest difficulty, all of them have places where they shine. (And you can change your abilities around whenever you return to town. This is necessary, especially on higher difficulty levels.)

I like how this turned out, but players really wanted even more abilities. At a certain point, you have to stop arguing with how the genre works. So Queen's Wish 2 will have 12 more abilities. It'll be a bit of work to make them both unique and balanced, but I think that number will feel more satisfying to players.

Side Note: When trying to make a turn-based RPG, designers often try to create the illusion of depth by heaping on more stuff. More skill trees. More abilities. More choices. But most of these choices tend to be: "Here's one obvious great thing and a lot of crap." Turn-based RPGs are really hard to design in a way that the player has meaningful and tactically interesting choices.




The skill system is solid. I just need to add a bunch more skills and ways to earn them.

Choice 5: Family Matters!

All of our games have a lot of plot and writing, and we try to give the player a lot of important choices and possible endings. This is the trademark quality of our games, so we have to continue it with Queen's Wish 2. (Even though it's a ton of work.)

In addition, most computer RPGs never really deal with more mundane human issues, especially family, parents, and children. I wanted to expand my story to parts of the human experience that games almost never touch.

So in Queen's Wish games, the three main characters are your mother (the Queen), your brother, and your sister. They will have most of the dialogue in the series, and your interactions with them have a huge effect on the story.

Also, the game is free of the cheap meta jokes and irony that have infested computer game writing over the last few years. The writing in Queen's Wish is sincere and emotional. These are people who simultaneously love each other and drive each other crazy. (So, family.)

Writing the family dialogue is difficult, but it is also my favorite thing about the series. I love writing these characters. This is one thing I won't give up.

I don't actually know if players will like the whole story or if the earnest tone is popular or not. However, sometimes you have to write what you have to write. Luckily, this lets me put into the market things that aren't already there (whether you want them or not).

A New Kickstarter

A lot of why I am writing this is because we are doing a Kickstarter for Queen's Wish 2: The Tormentor, the new game. Since I am asking you to support a game that doesn't really exist yet, I want you to know what I am changing and what I am trying to improve.

Writing sequels is a tricky business. You need to add a lot of new stuff, since the old game probably had enough content to get people tired of the old system.

I really don't know how Queen's Wish 2 will sell. I just know that I have to finish the series. This is my last attempt to do something really new and cool before retirement. (The rest of the time, I'll be doing remasters.)

I have to make sure I'm happy with it, and hopefully the rest will take care of themselves over the long run.
 

Sinatar

Arbiter
Joined
Jan 25, 2014
Messages
569
Oh this is interesting: https://bottomfeeder.substack.com/p/queens-wish-the-conqueror-post-mortem

Queen's Wish: The Conqueror Post-Mortem
Lots of experiments. Some successes.

The next game, Kickstarting now! Sequels are tricky. You have to keep the cool, old stuff, but you also have to add unexpected new stuff.

I have been writing indie role-playing games for a living for 27 years. The end of my career is still a few years away, but it is in sight. So I am figuring out how I want to go out.

Three years ago, I started what is likely my last all-new game series, Queen's Wish. I didn't want to fade out the easy way. I wanted to make something unique. The story. The game system. The battles. I wanted all of these to feel fresh and different and unlike any other game out there.

So I wrote Queen's Wish: The Conqueror. It took two years of hard work, constant thought, multiple redesigns, and one near-nervous breakdown. But I did it.

(Sometimes I get accused of not caring anymore and phoning it in. If you don't like Queen's Wish, fine. But if you tell me it's just an easy cash-in, your opinion is ignored forever.)

This article is about the weird choices I made in the game. Which worked. Which didn't. And how I will fix them.

You probably didn't play Queen's Wish. And you don’t have too, since I am writing this article more as a series of game design ideas, and how they worked out in practice.




The old-school straight-on terrain view has fans and detractors. We’re keeping it. The buildings look bad. We have a better system now.

But You Should Play It

Queen's Wish: The Conqueror did not get the happiest reaction at first. Whenever you change something in your games, you will lose some customers. The changes need to earn more customers to make up for it.

Queen's Wish changed just about everything from our earlier games, and a lot of people found it to be very jarring. Sales were shaky and online reviews weren't great. I was sad, so I spent a few months concentrating on the next game.

But then, a year later, I went back and looked at Queen's Wish. I found that the online reviews had turned really good. Sales had stayed strong instead of trailing off. Somehow, the game found its audience.

Now we are doing a Kickstarter for the next game in the trilogy, Queen's Wish 2: The Tormentor. We don't know if there is still an audience for it. Indie sequels fail all the time.

But we think we have a chance, especially if we fix the problems. Because there were a few problems.

So here are some of the choices (and mistakes) we made, and how they worked out.




Adding shops and workshops is easy and cool. You need them to make the best items in the game.

Choice 1: You Have To Do Dungeons In One Run

In our earlier games, you could whittle away at a dungeon in multiple trips. You could bust in, kill half of the enemies, return to town to rest, and then return to finish the dungeon off. When you got back, the foes you already killed would be (mostly) gone.

In Queen's Wish, all enemies respawn when you return to a dungeon. You have to use tactics and planning and conserve your power to finish the adventure in one run. The dungeons are very carefully balanced to make each run close and exciting. (But a lot of players don't like "exciting." "Exciting" is stressful.)

Our old players would enter a dungeon, blow all their best abilities on the trash at the entrance, run out of steam, rest up, and find that they have to start over. This is a real change in how you have to approach our games, and a lot of our old fans didn't care for it. (Which is their right. People like what they like.)

I don't consider this change a mistake because I love how close and exciting the fights are. It makes Queen's Wish, of all my games, the one I most enjoy playing. However, it does remove a lot of safety and feelings of raw power. It's a hard trade-off to balance, and it is one that every RPG designer has to make a decision about early.

Choice 2: Experience Is Given In Big Lumps (Mistake!)

I really liked The Witcher 3. In that game, every foe gave you a tiny bit of experience, but the only way to get actual levels was to finish quests. Queen's Wish is almost the same. Your experience comes in big lumps when you finish quests, but killing monsters gives you nothing.

I didn't want people to be able to farm foes and kill the same enemy again and again to gain strength. It's boring. And yes, some players will do the boring thing. Some feel a compulsion to do it. But I didn't want to encourage this. I always want you experiencing new material.

The problem is that it neglects one of the key selling points of computer RPGs: They give you a constant drip of pleasant dopamine hits by giving you a steady flow of little rewards.

Getting experience from every foe you kill is, simply, more fun. Queen's Wish gave you levels and power at the same rate as it would have otherwise, but it FELT less satisfying.

So Queen's Wish 2 will rework experience and other minor rewards to spread them out more. RPGs have a set of expected basic mechanics and reward systems that make them fun and work well. A designer ignores these at his or her own peril.




There is a huge huge variety of battles in Queen’s Wish. And now I have to make up a ton of new ones.

Choice 3: Building An Empire (Needs Work!)

The most unique quality of Queen's Wish is that most of your power comes by building your forts. You take over forts. Then you finish dungeons and quests to get resources. (Wood, Stone, Iron, Etc.). Then you use those resources to upgrade your forts. This gives you the power (as abilities and equipment) to beat tougher dungeons.

I love this system. I love that your power comes from industry and making a strong nation and that your best equipment is what you make yourself. It is unique in RPGs and fits perfectly with the plot and setting. Also, making buildings and shops and defenses appear just feels really satisfying.

However, there was a problem. Since the system was so new and complex (and took a long time to design), I couldn't put too many options in it. It was hard enough just balancing its current simple form.

But now the system is in. It works. And so I can expand it. Queen's Wish 2 will have a lot of new options for developing your characters and your Empire. Players repeatedly asked for more choices to make, and they will get them.

Choice 4: Fewer, Better Abilities, But All Useful (Needs Work!)

Some RPGs give dozens and dozens of spells and abilities. Some of them are overpowered, but most of them are useless. Much of the game is figuring out the overpowered spells and just using them again and again.

I don't care for that. I think that each game system has only a limited number of abilities that can be useful in it, and if you include too many then useless and overpowered abilities are inevitable.

So, for Queen's Wish, there are only 44 abilities or so, but they are all balanced to be useful. Some are more powerful and generally valuable than others, but, on the highest difficulty, all of them have places where they shine. (And you can change your abilities around whenever you return to town. This is necessary, especially on higher difficulty levels.)

I like how this turned out, but players really wanted even more abilities. At a certain point, you have to stop arguing with how the genre works. So Queen's Wish 2 will have 12 more abilities. It'll be a bit of work to make them both unique and balanced, but I think that number will feel more satisfying to players.

Side Note: When trying to make a turn-based RPG, designers often try to create the illusion of depth by heaping on more stuff. More skill trees. More abilities. More choices. But most of these choices tend to be: "Here's one obvious great thing and a lot of crap." Turn-based RPGs are really hard to design in a way that the player has meaningful and tactically interesting choices.




The skill system is solid. I just need to add a bunch more skills and ways to earn them.

Choice 5: Family Matters!

All of our games have a lot of plot and writing, and we try to give the player a lot of important choices and possible endings. This is the trademark quality of our games, so we have to continue it with Queen's Wish 2. (Even though it's a ton of work.)

In addition, most computer RPGs never really deal with more mundane human issues, especially family, parents, and children. I wanted to expand my story to parts of the human experience that games almost never touch.

So in Queen's Wish games, the three main characters are your mother (the Queen), your brother, and your sister. They will have most of the dialogue in the series, and your interactions with them have a huge effect on the story.

Also, the game is free of the cheap meta jokes and irony that have infested computer game writing over the last few years. The writing in Queen's Wish is sincere and emotional. These are people who simultaneously love each other and drive each other crazy. (So, family.)

Writing the family dialogue is difficult, but it is also my favorite thing about the series. I love writing these characters. This is one thing I won't give up.

I don't actually know if players will like the whole story or if the earnest tone is popular or not. However, sometimes you have to write what you have to write. Luckily, this lets me put into the market things that aren't already there (whether you want them or not).

A New Kickstarter

A lot of why I am writing this is because we are doing a Kickstarter for Queen's Wish 2: The Tormentor, the new game. Since I am asking you to support a game that doesn't really exist yet, I want you to know what I am changing and what I am trying to improve.

Writing sequels is a tricky business. You need to add a lot of new stuff, since the old game probably had enough content to get people tired of the old system.

I really don't know how Queen's Wish 2 will sell. I just know that I have to finish the series. This is my last attempt to do something really new and cool before retirement. (The rest of the time, I'll be doing remasters.)

I have to make sure I'm happy with it, and hopefully the rest will take care of themselves over the long run.

So the only mistake he feels he made was the XP system.

Oh yea, this is gonna be a pile.
 

almondblight

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So the only mistake he feels he made was the XP system.

Oh yea, this is gonna be a pile.

He also says that he's adding more choices and character building options to the game and that buildings in the first looked bad and will be improved (wasn't one of the listed points, but it's in the caption). And that he stands behind the "complete a dungeon in one go" design. I doesn't look like it's supposed to be a comprehensive list, though.

Queen's Wish never looked that interesting to me, but the things he's saying here seem to be in the right direction.
 

OSK

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This is my last attempt to do something really new and cool before retirement. (The rest of the time, I'll be doing remasters.)

At least he's honest. He does have the rest of the Geneforge series to remake.
 

Aemar

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24345.jpg


Guess who's back, back again? The laziest/most shameless dev in the industry.
 
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Infinitron

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"We're not good at PR, to be honest" https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spiderwebsoftware/queens-wish-2-the-tormentor/posts/3293560

Queen's Wish 2 Funded, Close to First Stretch Goal!

5c4b04194495368090862ded4ef308ef_original.png

We now have the official icon for queen's Wish 2: The Tormentor!

We wanted to do at least one update for our Kickstarter before it ended! We're not good at PR, to be honest, but it is important to be grateful to everyone who is being so kind to us.

Queen's Wish 2 funded in 48 hours. Thank you so much to all of you for having faith in us. We'll do our best to make a great game for you.

In the last few weeks, we've been working on the game. Writing piles of dialogue. Doing art direction. Making a new, more satisfying experience system. There are a million little jobs that need doing to make a game. We'll be sending out regular updates to let you know how things are going, better and worse.

There are ten days left in the Kickstarter now, and we have a good chance of making our first stretch goal. We'll be doing more PR in the next few days and try to get more people in the door.

We'll have one more update when we enter our final week of the Kickstarter. Thank you again for helping Spiderweb Software continue to be a thing!

- Jeff Vogel
 

almondblight

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From the comments:

I really wish this was being hyped more with updates, tweets, etc. Seems like Jeff is just letting the campaign ride this time. 0 updates just doesn't look good to someone considering backing. Stretch goals are looking rough, which is a shame...

I don't really like to spam people, which is why I didn't put any updates. But I can see why it's a good idea, so I'll write something. Thanks!
 

Infinitron

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https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spiderwebsoftware/queens-wish-2-the-tormentor/posts/3296398

Queen's Wish 2 Kickstarter Enters Final Week!

5c4b04194495368090862ded4ef308ef_original.png

Almost there ...

Our Kickstarter for Queen's Wish 2: The Tormentor is one week from completion, and we're actually quite happy with how it is going. Since this is our third Kickstarter and for a game in the middle of a series, we expected to have fewer backers than before. (Only so many people will want Certificates of Absolution.)

But we funded right away and are very close to our first stretch goal, and this is thrilling for us. Spiderweb Software is a tiny company in an insanely competitive field. In a world where great indie games are given away for free constantly, it's really hard for small developers to hang on. And yet, we do, year after year, thanks to your trust and support.

So we'll be watching the Kickstarter like crazy for the last week, hoping to break through the Stretch Goal line. In the meantime, I'll be writing Queen's Wish 2 dialogue for your crazy fantasy family. I've been writing piles and piles of story this month. It's exhausting. Writing really tires out my old brain fast. Yet, I think the quality is there, it's fun to hear what my characters have to say, and we really think you'll enjoy it.

So thank you again! You'll be getting a lot of updates from us. And, finally, here is some new creature art.

- Jeff Vogel

40cce37ee32edc625452f4d3c9c71530_original.png

The rootling, one of the new magical monstrosities you will meet in the Rokaj.
 

thesheeep

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From the comments:

I really wish this was being hyped more with updates, tweets, etc. Seems like Jeff is just letting the campaign ride this time. 0 updates just doesn't look good to someone considering backing. Stretch goals are looking rough, which is a shame...

I don't really like to spam people, which is why I didn't put any updates. But I can see why it's a good idea, so I'll write something. Thanks!
I don't feel like my rating properly reflected my thoughts on Jeff's reply, so let me reiterate:

:deathclaw::deathclaw::deathclaw:

I mean, wow. He's rushing in blindly and still succeeds with minimal effort. That's... somewhat admirable, really.
 
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KeighnMcDeath

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3 people pledging $1,200 good fucking retarded.

$80K Level - New Quest Line

Queen's Wish 2 is going to be a big game. A whole nation full of factions, dungeons, fortresses, and massive side quests. However, there is room to make it bigger. If we reach this level, I will design a whole new side quest line, with its own extra-challenging encounters and special, extra-valuable loot.

For extra giggles, I will base this quest around prompts I will solicit, improv-comedy style, from backers.
Uh what???
:prosper::prosper::prosper::prosper::prosper:
The comedy is they backed it.
 

almondblight

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3 people pledging $1,200 good fucking retarded.

A large part of Vogel's success has been that he's managed to build and maintain a core community of hardcore supporters. Being able to consistently rely on 4,000+ repeat customers was essential, and combined with his extremely aggressive release schedule (with the exception of 1999, he release one game every year from 1995 to 2009) has ensured a study flow of income. The Spiderweb forums are two decades old and still extremely active. And despite the lukewarm reception of his recent titles here, he does seem receptive to feedback and satisfies his core fanbase.

More developers should learn the importance of fostering a community. I've seen a lot of promising projects that begin with a lot of buzz and enthusiasm, but the developers ignore the community for years and when the game eventually does come out, barely anyone knows it exists.
 

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