Founded Spiderweb Software in 1994. Has written many games, including the Exile, Geneforge, Avadon, and Avernum series. Avernum 4: Greed and Glory out now!
Joined October 2013
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22 Oct 2025
Avernum 4: Greed and Glory is out! The 31 year old cult classic Avernum series is back as a unique indie RPG set in a vast underworld nation.
Fight a monster plague. Explore the depths. Be loyal or treacherous. Get rich and famous! Huge & full of fun.
store.steampowered.com/app/3…
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I felt compelled to go see Disclosure Day last night. How could I resist a new Steven Spielberg movie about humanity meeting aliens (again!) in 2026? I'm not made of stone.
I had some quibbles, of course, but it was a very fun and exceptionally well made (of course) movie and I really enjoyed it.
I also got a big kick out of how Boomer-coded it was. The most outlandish part of it's science fiction premise is that it the story exists in time-out-of-time where every human being can get simultaneous perfect video reception on their phones at all times and places, but they would use that to watch TV news.
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Parents: If you take your kids to Disclosure Day, please have The Talk with your kids about what TV news shows were. Also explain what the "weather girl" was.
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Jun 12
A lot of great feedback and discussion about yesterday's post of game reviews and weird games. Was fun! Two thoughts ...
1. There are so many ways for a customer to find out if they want a game or not. For me, watching on Twitch is enough. Pro reviews are a bit obsoleted, sadly.
2. I still think we need good critics who can pick apart games constructively. This helps the art form for everybody.
Jun 11
New Blog Post: The Sad Unusability of Video Game Reviews. There is a way that pro reviewers can be helpful. It just doesn't work for video games. Even if there were reliable reviewers. Which there is not.
So just use Steam refunds a lot!
(Link in reply.)
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Jun 11
One thing I forgot about the obsoleteness of reviews: A huge portion of the time I now decide whether or not to buy a game by watching someone stream it on Twitch.
A good streamer can even point out the good and bad things about the design in the way a good critic used to.
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Jeff Vogel retweeted
Jun 11
Reviewers are irrelevant in the modern world where you are moments away from actual paying customer reviews the moment you release. Like it or not a large enough crowd reviewing your game gets to the truth and you cannot resist the truth.
Jun 11
New Blog Post: The Sad Unusability of Video Game Reviews. There is a way that pro reviewers can be helpful. It just doesn't work for video games. Even if there were reliable reviewers. Which there is not.
So just use Steam refunds a lot!
(Link in reply.)
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Jun 11
New Blog Post: The Sad Unusability of Video Game Reviews. There is a way that pro reviewers can be helpful. It just doesn't work for video games. Even if there were reliable reviewers. Which there is not.
So just use Steam refunds a lot!
(Link in reply.)
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Jun 11
The blog post is here. Now back to work on our next Kickstarter, which should be ready soon ...
bottomfeeder.substack.com/p/…
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Jun 11
I really want good video game reviews for a selfish reason: A good critic can analyze what makes a game work or not work in a way that makes the entire art form better.
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Jun 8
Nerd Deep Housecleaning Update:
At long, blissful last. Our final fax machine off to Goodwill, so that it can hopefully torment someone else.
It's weird how long I needed to send faxes. I kept having to deal with various accountants, legal depts., etc, and you are always at the risk of encountering some stubborn fossil who insisted on a fax.
But that finally faded away. Now even the most stubborn bridge troll must accept a decent quality cell phone picture of a signed document. So at last this once-amazing technology can be returned to the earth.
Also note the pile of unused ink cartridges, those vile little extortion nodules.
(We also got rid of our last land phone line. I feel so light. So radiant.)
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Jun 5
I'm watching Day of the Devs and remembering back in the day. Asking myself, "What was the first indie game that made people realize indie games could actually lose money?"
N ? Tacoma? Sunset?
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Jun 5
Nerd Deep Housecleaning Update:
Way back in the 90s, hard drive storage was expensive. CDs couldn't be rewritten. Floppy disks were TINY. It was a real problem.
Then geniuses invented the Zip Drive. Like a floppy disk, but it could fit a magesterial 100 MB. Everyone adapted to them instantly. We stored everything on them.
A perfect system. Except that, occasionally, your zip drive would make a small 'click' noise and the disk would be completely ruined.
Anyhoo, hard drive space became cheaper and the zip disk was obsoleted.
We still had a ton of them. We use them as drink coasters now. I have a latte on one (containing an ancient backup of the original Nethergate code) as I type this.
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Jun 5
Status Update: The zip disk I was using as a coaster made a little click sound, and all my coffee instantly evaporated.
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Jun 4
When not working on our next game, I've been playing through the ol' indie games backlog. Tried Ball x Pit. (Pronounced 'balkspit')
It's Vampire Survivors if all the enemies came straight down instead of all directions. That was enough for me to burn 20 hours getting to the credits. I think I have enough dopamine receptors for one of these games every two years.
My favorite innovation is that you can unlock characters that play the game for you. You have to beat the final level with 8 different characters to win, and I was able to do a bunch of this while making dinner.
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May 14
New Blog Post! After much disruption, I'm back to blogging with a short cheery post about creation. Video games are a young art form, and there is still so much to be discovered. You don't have to be a Capital-C Creator or hitmaker to take part.
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May 14
Post is here: bottomfeeder.substack.com/p/…
Also slowly getting back to writing games. There are delays, but I hope to have things to show by the end of Summer!
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May 8
This posters suffers from "Everyone should want what I like." syndrome. Vidya is a sprawling art form and fans want many different things from games.
"mindless chores" are what many players want for many reasons. I don't, so I play one of the 8 billion other games.
May 8
"Dollar-per-hour" is the worst thing to happen to modern game design.
Devs stretch their games with mindless chores just to justify the price tag.
You refuse to pay full price for a 20-hour game, but data shows that less than 30% of players actually finish 60 hour games.
I'd much rather pay for 20 dense hours with zero filler than 60 bloated hours of map clearing. The Uncharted series is a perfect example of this. Amazing pacing with zero fluff. Exactly as long as they need to be.
We need to start valuing density over duration again.
ALT Some masterpieces that take even less than 10 hours to finish
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Jeff Vogel retweeted
LAUNCH ANNOUNCEMENT
Forbidden Solitaire is out now!
We are immensely proud to release this awesome game made by two veteran indie studios and we hope you really like it.
Steam: tinyurl.com/ywj43ptj
GOG: tinyurl.com/2s3sv45j
Itch: tinyurl.com/3k4bjt8m
Plz share, thx!
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Jeff Vogel retweeted
Apr 27
"Some writers are only born to help another writer to write one sentence." - Ernest Hemingway
Alas, most of the 10s of thousands of indie games out on Steam each year won't succeed. Yet, this mass contains new ideas that will one day be taken and grown into great successes.
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Jeff Vogel retweeted
Apr 28
I'm super excited to announce that you can now buy Skald and Avernum 4 in a great value-packed retro CRPG bundle on Steam!
I've always been a big fan of @spiderwebsoft so this one was a lot of fun!
So what are you waiting for? Go support some old men who make games⚔️ Link👇
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Apr 27
I'm always very flattered when people take the effort to try to play our old, old games. For the very few interested, here's advice for getting Exile 3: Ruined World (from 1997) going on Linux ...
youtube.com/watch?v=ITTD7Blp…
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