[The Necromancer’s Tale] is a story-rich CRPG focused on the experience of becoming a necromancer. The story centres on social intrigue, secrecy, blackmail, and a creeping insanity – all wrapped into a gothic tragedy.
I was lead-developer over the 5.5 year development process, and the team involved 8 writers (including me) – with the narrative finally coming in at 400,000 words. We released the game on July 17th.
Reviewing Strongly
Although we had a hunch (from the demo and beta testing) that players liked the writing, we really had no idea how the narrative would resonate with the wider player-base once we hit full release. Therefore it was (and is) amazing to see almost-universal acclaim for the narrative, its progression/arcs, and the writing generally. It’s so cool to see so many players really *get* what we were trying to achieve with aspects such as the slow slide into depravity, and the lengths that one might go to in order to gain knowledge, power and revenge. As an English-lit graduate who majored in gothic literature (many years ago!), this really means a lot to me.
Our game is currently at 93% positive on Steam (440 reviews), with nearly all reviews citing narrative and writing as its key strengths. Lots of players have commented in their reviews, or in our Discord server that they find the story utterly engaging.
One reviewer referred to the game as a Gothic Masterpiece: [see review here]
We have also been shortlisted as a finalist in the prestigious TIGA 2025 game awards, in the Narrative & Storytelling category, and included in various narrative-focused game showcases such as AdventureX.
Hard Work Post-Release!
I have released quite a few games before, and as lead developer I was prepared for a few weeks of hard work patching niggles and bugs, and adding quality-of-life features. It’s important to be super-responsive to players in the period following a game’s release, because you want their experience to be as good as possible, and you *really* want to avoid frustrating them with bugs and soft-locks.
What I hadn’t anticipated was the amount of work required for hint-support. My previous games had all been smaller or systems-based (rather than narrative, puzzle-oriented), so the deluge of questions and comments about the story/puzzle content was a bit overwhelming. Since I was the central developer, integrating the work from the other 7 writers, I was the only person with complete and in-depth knowledge about how everything fits together.
So I had to single-handedly run the hint-support (mostly on Discord and Steam forums) as well as single-handedly do the debugging, patching, and feature additions. It was pretty hard going for a few weeks. At one point, about three days after release, and with very little sleep, I was up at 5am helping a player milk a cow… that pretty much sums up the work of an indie-dev. 
One of the first things I added was a mechanism for players to easily upload their save-game files along with bug reports (from right inside the game) and this helped a lot when diagnosing the exact combination of narrative states causing issues.
Key additions post-release have included:
- Some improved sequencing and narrative in a couple of places where players found the story jarring or the MC’s motivations unclear.
- Some new narrative content in places where there was a clear opportunity to extend/strengthen things- especially where these things leaned into the core themes and plot.
- Some extended romance options.
- A wilderness map with fast travel.
- Improved minion control (this work is still ongoing – the main criticisms of the game have been around minion control and combat, so I’m still working hard to improve these aspects while staying true to the game’s core design).
- Steam Deck verification. Yay! All my work back in January on input abstraction, D-Pad menu control, and joystick control of the mouse-pointer has paid off.
GamesCom
Kirsty and I brought The Necromancer’s Tale to GamesCom (Cologne) in late August, and spent a full week running our booth there between us (11 hours per day). This would have been grueling enough already, but following the few weeks I had just had, it was doubly so.
GamesCom was a great experience- we met lots of other devs (which is always lovely) and lots of enthusiastic players (some of whom had already played our game!). We also made some good industry contacts, which is what these events are also about. From a personal point of view, though, it was stressful being away from my development PC for over a week– it meant I couldn’t accurately diagnose certain bugs and couldn’t patch the game if anything game-breaking came to light. Luckily, everything was okay– but if our launch date had been any closer, I think it could have been damaging to the game’s reception to have been away from the office for so long.
Our next goal for the game is to get it ported and released on PS, XBox, and (if they’ll have us) Switch2.