This year has certainly been a roller-coaster ride for iPad-owning fans of indie RPG developer Spiderweb Software and their Avernum series of games. First, excitement when the release of Avernum 2: Crystal Souls was announced for release in April. The game released, but it was soon discovered that it had some issues with the just-released iOS 8.3 update. After investigating the issue, Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software put up a post on his site stating that due to the severity of the problem, the iPad release of Crystal Souls had been pulled and canceled. He went on to state that he was finished with iOS development for the foreseeable future, and would remove his previous games from the App Store if and when they should stop working. Truly, it was the darkest of timelines.
It was also kind of confusing for many people. Though just about anyone can see how much harder it has become to make a profit putting out premium iPad-only RPGs, Vogel had always seemed dedicated to the fanbase he had built on the platform. Canceling an already finished (and temporarily released) game seemed like a very bold move. As it turns out, it was partially a health-related issue. Mr. Vogel put a new blog post up today describing his situation, stating that for a variety of reasons, he was in a state of exhaustion at the time of the game’s release. He goes on to say that this “led (him) directly to the biggest professional screw-up of (his) career" by which he seems to refer to the release, pulling, and canceling of Crystal Souls for iPad. I can’t and won’t say things about his health better than he does, so please go read that blog post. It’s worth reading, I promise.
The upshot is, Mr. Vogel’s feeling better and more energized, and has gotten to work on rewriting the engine he uses for iPad games. He seems optimistic about it, saying, “it took days of basically constant, family-neglecting work, but I have a working engine and a working game again." With his health on the uptick and iPad games back on the slate, it looks like things are coming to a good ending after all for Avernum 2: Crystal Souls on iPad, along with Spiderweb’s future games. Let’s hope first and foremost that Mr. Vogel can stay healthy and happy in his life, and if we get some more cool games out of that, more’s the better.
