***As discussed in a previous post, Swords and Runes III was originally numbered as II. It will be referred to as III throughout this post (and elsewhere forever more) in order to avoid confusion.***

To say that Swords and Runes III has been a long time coming is a rather large understatement. Even before the first entry was finished the programmer, nemesys, was already hinting at making a sequel to the first game. The first mention that I can find of Swords and Runes III is October 22, 2014… 2014! That is six whole years ago now, and three months before even Swords and Runes I was finished. It would be many months before work on the project began, but the wheels were turning well in advance.

Well, now in 2020 the project is finally going to see the light of day! It was never far from either of our minds, and it did not take long to get started on it, but it has taken a while to get it finished up and released. Outside of the beta testers I do not think that it has even been shown, publicly or privately, and only a few hard copies exist in my archives. I will get into the reasons why that is so momentarily, but first a bit about the game for those less interested in the history and development of it.

Swords and Runes III is a chronological sequel to Swords and Rune I, and it is similar in both gameplay and style. In terms of narrative it is set 100 years after the events of the first adventure, and follows the journey of an arcane sorceress who shares a certain resemblance with one of the cast of SRI. There are several improvements in gameplay over the original, and some further additions beyond the core mechanics, but the game as a whole maintains a clear link with the first.

For practical reasons, Swords and Runes III is going to see a limited release of sorts. Similar to what KHan Games has done in recent times, the game is going to be produced in batches. The first batch will consist of 101 copies, each with numbered title screen and housed in a translucent gold (yellow) cartridge shell. For those long time Goose fans out there, you can see that this first (and possibly only) batch corresponds to the NA Edition format that I used for Swords and Runes I, 0-to-X, and Spook-o’-tron.

Production will be based on demand, and that could mean that this batch will be it. RPGs are a niche genre to begin with, and venturing outside of the established norms further limits the potential audience; it is hard to know what to expect. If the demand is there, additional batches will not have numbered title screens, nor will they have these gold cart shells. Additional runs may also be delayed due to the pandemic. Indeed, I would put money on that being the case. I have had these cart shells and PCBs on hand for a few years now (I’m a planner!), and that is where we have run into issues with releases such as Trophy, so I cannot say for certain exactly when another release might be possible.

The batch method of production has its pros and cons, but for small releases that involve thousands of dollars in up front costs the benefits are high. It does me no good to turn away sales by not printing more copies of the game, but it also does not do me much good to have hundreds of unsold copies on hand (and paid for out of pocket years in advance!). The struggles of a homebrewer are very real when it comes to the logistics of physical manufacturing.

At this time a ROM release is not planned.

There may also be a public offering of a wooden box Limited Edition (see picture above). These are primarily built as a reward for those who have helped with the development of the game, a small token of appreciation in light of their hard and often thankless work. That being said, additional copies are usually built in order to offset this cost. If public sales occur, they will be limited to less than ten copies. This is fewer than I had intended (or would have liked), but the pandemic has made sourcing parts rather difficult. The fact that I am able to do this release at all is due to having bought many of the pieces years ago.

Please check Twitter for sales’ announcements, or the Store page here on SGP.com.

Origins

To give a bit of context for how this game came to be, we need to travel back to those halcyon days of 2014. I had been trying to learn to program the NES for all of a year and a half, which at the time felt like a long time. I was working on a Zelda-like game, codenamed Project SLR, and dreaming of the day that it would be done and released. In those days most releases were happening on the NintendoAge forums, which was a great place to both learn how to make games and also release them to an enthusiastic audience. I got into NES programming because I wanted to make a grand RPG, but I started with an adventure game since it seemed less daunting, a point on which I am still undecided nearly eight years later.

At the time, the only NES homebrew RPG that had even been hinted at being in development was Kevin Hanley’s Unicorn, so you can imagine my immense surprise and delight when a forum post appeared announcing a new game entitled “Swords and Runes.” This was the second project by a new user named “user,” whose other handle is nemesys (which I will be using here on out for obvious reasons of clarity). His first project had been an afternoon endeavor called 1,007 Bolts, but Swords and Runes was going to be on a whole other scale.

I publicly reached out to him expressing interest and excitement in his project, and he responded by asking if I would be interested in helping to edit the game’s text. As English was not his first language he felt that it needed looking over by a native speaker, which I was more than happy to do. Over the following weeks and months we got to talking about possible physical production of the game, and I outlined what to expect based on what I knew from my own explorations of that topic. At that point he asked if I could help make arrangements with a publisher, and I decided that I would go ahead and fill that role myself. I knew that I wanted to physically release anything that I programmed, and performing the task for someone else seemed like it would serve as a good way to figure things out without the pressure of it being one of my own works.

I had now gone from text editor to publisher, which brought with it a “few” more responsibilities, all of them interesting. Design questions began appearing in my inbox daily or hourly, along with progress reports and updates. I cannot take credit for most of them, but I think I served as a good sounding board in any event. I did want to make sure the game was scrutinized by gamers, so I arranged for a group beta test, based on what I had participated in for Hanley’s Larry. I even ended up drawing the title screen for the game (for better or worse). Lock, stock, and barrel the ROM for the game was finished in terms of gameplay by Christmas 2014, with a few bugs getting cleaned up before the New Year, and the title screen being added shortly after.

The development of Swords and Runes I was rapid, to say the least. As I mentioned above, long before the game was finished, nemesys was already talking about a sequel, an idea to which I gave full support. However, I wanted to see how the first game was received by folks, particularly since the second game would be funded outright by SGP. Whereas SRI was an external project acquired by SGP, SRIII would become an internal project. At the time I also remember not wanting the SGP catalog to become too RPG heavy, which seems silly in hindsight.

Although we did not start on the new game immediately, a private brainstorming thread was begun on January 9, 2015. Some of the SRI testers were invited back, and some new folks were added based on their excitement over the first entry. Ideas were tossed around for a sequel based on what worked in the first game and what did not, and we began to come up with a plan for Swords and Runes III.

In the meantime, nemesys toyed around with some other projects, some public and some private. He pitched several ideas to me to see if I might be interested in funding them, but he also posted publicly about other games. One of them was a 2048-like game called 0-to-X, which would of course become the second SGP release. When I saw it I expressed interest in publishing it, and after coming to an agreement we formed a plan about how to continue with development. Whereas SRI was developed by nemesys, and SRIII was going to be designed by a team, 0-to-X was in a halfway house between the two. The core engine was built, but it needed polishing and testing. I had say in all aspects of the game, except what the actual game was.

This began a sort of odd working relationship that persisted through the next four games we developed together, entirely due to me. I saw a lot of promise in what nemesys was building, but I also wanted to take things further. Why not add in features such as flash saving, commissioned music, and some technical tricks? He agreed to that, provided that I added those things myself. Therefore, all games that he “finished” for me moving forward would be playable but not release ready, as they were missing various components. You can start to get an idea as to why they have sat on my hard drive since 2015, but it seemed like a good idea at the time! For the record I still think it was a good idea, although I am regretful that they have taken so long to get out into the world.

The first step to this process was reprogramming nemesys’ code. He had developed a custom compiler and syntax, and I could only write in NESASM. Although I would have said otherwise at the time, this proved to be a valuable learning experience, being forced to understand how someone else programmed. I had to deeply know what he was doing in order to be able to modify it in any way. It taught me a few technical tricks that I still use, and a greater understanding of NES architecture.

The next step was to break his converted code apart in a way that allowed it to work with my usual way of doing things. Nemesys wrote in a very tight and integrated fashion, which I needed to modularize both in order to make sense of it and to be able to use it as I wanted. His games were all NROM, some written nearly to the byte, so they had to be converted to UxROM before any additions could be made. After that things like a sound engine, music, extra graphics, or whatever could be added.

While this created some production delays, this left nemesys free to continue developing new games. 0-to-X finished up development in February of 2015, and he was ready to begin something new without delay. Besides the fact that SRI was still not released, I was also in the process of starting a new job and moving five hundred miles away to start it. I wanted to be directly involved with the creation of SRIII, so we needed to find a project that would require little input on my end. The result of that was CityZen, a city building simulation, which had been on his mind for several months. I will have more to say on that other, seemingly lost game soon.

As development on that game occurred, I was busy working on the release of SRI. The limited edition finally came out in June of 2015, a full six months after development had ended. Until you go through it, games seem like cut and dry things to release. If you finish the ROM, the physical side of things should naturally follow, right? That is generally far from the case, and SRI was my trial by fire for physical production. There were faster options in terms of getting the game out, but I needed to be cost effective in my choices, which meant a lot of exploration and doing things myself.

Regardless of the delays, the response was to Swords and Runes I was great, even without the retail release available for purchase (that would have to wait until October due to materials). People were excited for this quirky new RPG on the NES! With that in mind, as CityZen wrapped up I figured that it was time to begin development of Swords and Runes III.

Despite postponing actual development of SRIII, work on the game’s design had progressed while development of 0-to-X and CityZen had taken place. This meant that when nemesys began programming SRIII it was a speedy affair. At one point I was going to write the story for the new game, but with all that I had had going on in life during the previous six months, he had arrived at a tale that he wanted to tell. The story would follow a young girl, Kyzu, who bears a 1:1 resemblance to Lyvn from SRI. The narrative links between the two games are many, as are the locations that the player encounters.

SRIII was developed concurrently with SRII, which was internally known as the TBS (turn-based strategy). Even the final ROM that he provided was labeled “TBS Nov 5 15.nes.” As I have talked about before, this game began as a European war simulation, but when I saw the total world building vision of Rob Bryant’s Candelabra epic, I asked nemesys if we could recast it within the Swords and Runes universe. Since development was just getting started on the game, he was only about a week into work on it, that was a change that he was happy to accommodate. The events of the game were to be set between SRI and SRIII, and it would serve as the narrative bridge between the two games. I will have more on that game in the future.

One major gameplay change for SRIII was that all four characters would be unique in terms of stats. In the first game Khan and Shao, the two melee fighters, were simply copies of each other. This time around all four characters would have different attributes and abilities. They would all have at least one magic spell, with the character Noah being the most interesting one in that he only possesses three spells. Since magic use drains HP, this seemingly small change causes the game to play rather differently than SRI, since all new strategies must be devised.

As fans of the first game know, the Swords and Runes games do not have experience points as a reward for battles. Instead, levels are gained upon defeating a boss and acquiring a rune. These victories increase melee character attack and open up new spells for magic users. This had the effect of causing the first game to be largely non-linear, allowing the player to explore as she or he saw fit. This was something that we wanted to retain for SRIII, although in the end this caused the game to become much more difficult.

In order to balance things out, we ran the beta testing in a similar style to the first game. The testers did an amazing job on the game, and nemesys able to finish up development of SRIII on October 31, 2015 (and SRII on November 10). The games were “finished” on his end, and I would need to add both music and title screen art, as well as anything else I saw fit.

A whole three days before this SRI finally saw a general release. I had even ordered packaging for 0-to-X, bundling it with the two CIB versions of SRI to save costs, but releases take time. Beyond 100% finishing the four unreleased games of his, my time was swallowed designing packaging, promoting SRI game, building, and shipping games. I was also deep into my work on Family Vacation at this point, with the goal of having it finished by Christmas (ha!).

The situation at SGP, then, was one of a massive logjam. Nemesys coded very quickly, and by the time the first Swords and Runes was released to the public, he had more or less finished four other projects for me. Publishing simply could not keep up with his output, and the revisions further complicated issues. The process of converting his custom syntax to NESASM, figuring out what he was doing, finding ways to break it apart, and then inserting changes into his extremely integrated code took a bit longer than I had hoped. When finances required that I get moving on 0-to-X, for instance, that process took a couple of months, tanking any plans I had for working on my own games. Remember, at this time I still had not finished one of my own projects, and was instead spending all of my time finishing other’s work. No exactly a place I wanted to be in life.

With a backlog of four games to release, I stepped back from funding any further projects for the time being. I needed to get out what I had helped bring to life, but I also wanted to work on my own games. The 0-to-X conversion finished up right as I was experiencing health issues, and that put a new wrench in things as I was unable to work for a month. When I did return to work, the last thing I wanted to do was work on anything other than my own projects, at least in terms of programming. I was still building and shipping the CIB copies of 0-to-X, as well as finishing up the LEs. I was also given the opportunity to do some paid writing, and on the whole a lot was going on.

The three unreleased nemesys games sat, and would remain untouched, for several years.

A “Brief” Interlude: 2015-2020

I guess this is a strange time to bring up yet another project, but it relates to why I finally decided to finish up Swords and Runes III. By the fall of 2016, after 0-to-X had been released, I had recovered from surgery (enough anyways), development of Spook-o’-tron had commenced, a book had been written, and I began thinking about starting my dream project. I got into NES development to make an RPG, and so far I had spent three and a half years not doing that. Neck surgery kind of put things into perspective for me, but more than that it gave me a lot of time to think and plan a larger game. In combination with that, I exclusively played RPGs most of that year, since action games were too much of a strain on the body. Finally mastering the wall jump in Super Metroid the week before I went under the knife convinced me of that!

But what game to make? I had sketched out several RPGs over the previous decade, but I had never gotten terribly far, even if it felt like it at the time. A lot goes into game development, a lesson learned the hard way after three years of learning to program and not even having a simple project completed. During the pre- and post-surgery days I was writing out thoughts for a grand space epic, having tacked a giant sheet of kraft paper to the wall so that I could write them down while standing in a neck brace (my first notebook entry appears to be dated August 17, 2015). At some point, however, my mind wandered back to the Swords and Runes series.

When we started planning SRIII a lot of ideas were thrown around. Some of these were tabled for even later installments, but we found many ideas for how to expand upon the first game. We did not draw up a design document per se, but a list of features was agreed upon long before actual development began. When development did start, however, it was found that the majority of these would not fit within the budget that was realistic for the release, based on the sales performance of SRI. This overly pragmatic issue of funds ended up determining what SRIII would become, as it probably does most games outside the hobbyist realm (and within it of course). Even still, I felt that we had left a lot of good ideas on the table. The plan was always to continue the Swords and Runes series, even after nemesys and I had parted ways following the completion of the last game.

I started work on Swords and Runes IV that fall, laying out a rough design and starting to work with Chris Cacciatore on assets for the game. Yes, this is the first that I have spoken about my big RPG, and it is kind of odd to be doing so deep into a post about another project. I guess this is a teaser then for those still reading? I feel a bit like Bob Ross placing a bush by the stream that just he and the listener know about, but that is how it will be for now. I will have much more to say on that project soon (volumes!), as I have felt unable to speak about it until SRIII is released. It is safe to say that this is one of the main reasons for finally releasing SRIII; I want to talk about what lies ahead! As is probably obvious, it wouldn’t do to start talking about SRIV when folks hardly know about the existence of SRII and SRIII. Indeed, they most likely only found out about the two nemesys games since I started this blog a couple of months ago.

I will save posting any images of SRIV for now in order to not confuse people between it and SRIII. As a verbal sneak peek, though, if SRI and SRIII have been compared to Atari’s Adventure meeting the first Final Fantasy, I would say that SRIV is comparable to Just Breed (or other late NES era games) in terms of graphical complexity, and to Final Fantasy IV in terms of animations, gameplay, and polish. I hope that I am not over talking it, but the jump from SRI/III to SRIV is one of magnitudes in every department. It’s okay to start getting excited now.

How all of this impacted SRIII, CityZen, and SRII was that the new RPG consumed all of my limited free time. I was working on programming Spook-o’-tron, starting on a homebrew history book, launching a Kickstarter, starting a podcast, designing my dream RPG… I was in too deep! When I did have a small bit of time I started programming sections of SRIV, blocking off a few days or a week to get something, however small, accomplished. Then I got involved with the fellows from Retrotainment, and things kicked into an even higher gear as we formed The 6502 Collective. Oh, and during this time we moved apartments, states, rented a house, bought a house, got a cat, got another cat, got rid of two cats, released more games, and who knows what else. I vaguely remember a time when I worked at a video rental store and spent my mornings and evenings reading the Nerdy Nights, dreaming about making a game. Actually doing that has been much more complicated!

One of my many diversions during the last four years of working on SRIV was to apply the conversion process outlined above to a seemingly unnecessary game: Swords and Runes I. Unlike the other projects, nemesys had completely finished that game, and I had done everything on the publishing side; it was complete. As I got deeper into work on SRIV, however, I wanted to see how he did things. I wanted to see where I was going in new directions, and also get a look at the engine underneath. I knew this game a lot better than SRIII, plus I knew that it completely worked, so in late November of 2018 I started on that process.

To my great and pleasant surprise, it only took about two weeks to convert SRI and get it fully working. It provided an amazing study experience, and it has given me a point of reference ever since in terms of how similar or different SRIV is from its predecessors. This also provided a much needed confidence boost after the harrowing 0-to-X conversion. Nemesys’ code and style had stayed the same, but I had learned a thing or two since early 2016.

The next November, in 2019, I converted CityZen, finally moving that project slightly closer to completion. The 6502 Collective had finished up The Convention Quest a few months earlier, which I used as a crash test for the current SRIV engine, and I got the itch to get more SGP games out into the world. This was partially motivated by the need to affirm to myself that SGP still existed. Working with The Collective was great, but I did not want to lose my own identity in the process.

Getting CityZen ready for a public release proved to be more complex than I had hoped, as the more that I played it the more that I felt that a number of additional features were needed for it to appeal to people. That was the project that I was working on when the pandemic hit, spending my afternoons out in public at a coffee shop drawing screens for the tutorial mode. That feels like a long time ago now, but once the world changed the spell was broken and CityZen has lingered unfinished since due to the design hurdles.

I picked up SRIII this past June since I knew that it needed less work, and I managed to beat my record and finish the conversion process in six whole days. I then switched back to SRIV, as I waited on music for SRIII, and then of course my hard drive crashed. Fifteen years of using the same computer, eight to seventeen hours a day, and it was dead. The old Gateways were built like tanks, but everything has its time. Along with the HDD went SRIII as I had not backed it up. Talk about demoralizing. It took me five years to finally get around to the project, and now I was going to have to do it all over again. It fit with my 2020 plan of finishing up old work, though, so once I had rebuilt my computer, I went straight to work on it. At this point it is probably good to shift back to talking about SRIII and forget about my many other projects for the time being.

Swords and Runes III, Post-Goose

The state of Swords and Runes III mid-2020 was the same as that of 2015: the game needed music and a title screen. Everything else was finished, beyond some minor updates. I changed the copyright year, since that had obviously drifted, as well as altering any mentions of Swords and Runes “II” to Swords and Runes “III.” I added in what has become my standard SGP intro sequence, which proved to be a small nightmare, but I managed it in the end without having to rewrite nemesys’ entire engine. Drawing and importing the title screen was not too much work, though I am sure that it could have been done better. It does fit with the one used in SRI, if nothing else. Of course, the one I drew back in June was much, much better, but it was lost to the ether so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

In terms of gameplay, when I had converted SRI I made one major change, reducing the time that the player sits waiting for an enemy to make a decision. In the Swords and Runes games an active battle system is used, with players having about four seconds to enter a combination of buttons to target an enemy. It might seem like it would be best to reduce enemy decision time to zero, and to just have the enemy act immediately, but that is the only period of time when the player gets a break to form strategic decisions. When a hero’s turn is up, action must be made without hesitation. This alteration was included in SRIII, making the battles quicker without making them more intense.

Upon digging in and playing the game with fresh eyes, I began to realize that the quest for non-linearity had some shortcomings. SRIII was too hard, and I softened the difficulty in some places. I doubt that most players will notice, and they will still probably blame me for it being rather difficult, so I am not too concerned about these changes. Without giving too much away, a couple of the bosses have less HP than the others, and they are all now weak against two spells and not just one. That’s all I am going to say though; go adventure and find out for yourself!

The biggest addition of the third game, particularly over the first, is in the music department. Nemesys composed the SRI music himself, along with writing the sound engine. It got the job done, and the short loops were rather effective for the constantly changing areas and screens. However, based on player feedback it was also the most heavily criticized aspect of the game. The HumanThomas and I have been collaborating on various projects for a few years now, including work on CityZen and SRIV, so it made sense to ask if he would be interested in doing the music for SRIII. He took rather well to the challenge of short loops, particularly after the lengthy tracks needed for SRIV, and it gives another point of continuity between the two rather different games. As usual, we decided to use Shiru’s excellent Famitone2 sound engine.

And so ends the tale, at least for now, of Swords and Runes III. It has been a bit of a bumpy road to get here, but I guess that it always is. All parts are on hand to finish this release, and probably by the time you read this I will have done the final playthrough and started building copies of the game. I would like to say thanks for all of the interest and support in the first Swords and Runes, even after all of these years. If you were a fan of it, Swords and Runes III will be right up your alley!