Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar cover
Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar screenshot
PC Steam Gog
Genre: Role-playing (RPG), Turn-based strategy (TBS), Adventure, Indie

Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar

Grimoire Selling Like Crazy On The Steam Store Overnight
Grimoire was quietly released in the morning in America without much fanfare and has sold well over a thousand copies before closing hours. Not bad for an indie game written by one person with almost no advertising whatsoever of any kind. The sales seem to be increasing hourly.

Everybody who has played it has known they are on the verge of discovering something really amazing. A lack of understanding of the user interface and game mechanics has not prevented the majority of players from concluding they may be looking at one of the best computer roleplaying games ever written. The smartest ones intuit it, they don't need a press rep to give them a bag of promotional goodies for them to guess it.

For this reason, the manual is a priority this weekend and it will be released as a prototype early next week.

Initial reports of bugs in the display (mostly due to resolutions and display modes that did not exist only a few years ago) were fixed shortly after the game went live. There were other problems with 64 bit machines that were also solved in less than 120 minutes after they were reported.

This did not stop a vocal, dedicated group of politically motivated activists from deliberately purchasing the game solely to give it a bad review and then get a refund. They were trying to stop a tsunami by body surfing the edge of it. That attempt has already tanked. The incline is so suffused in Grimoire it is only a matter of time before their slander of the game is washed away by the sheer volume of people discovering how rich it is.

As the author, I know what people have not discovered yet. They are on the tip of an iceberg and Grimoire runs into deep, deep waters. The density they see now is only a fraction of what they are going to find as they push further into the game. A play of only a few hours will not even break the surface. The familiar area of the original demo, the Avian Mountains, is now only a single drop of rain in a cyclone compared to how much they will discover when they leave this area. Rather than tell people of the Dirge ... or of Waterport ... or of Bahomet Megalith ... or of the Necropolix ... or of Black Pierre ... or of the Raven Wildes ... or a hundred other areas ... or of the vast story that awaits them ... would only spoil the fun. I prefer to let word of mouth do that for me, the best kind of promotion of them all.

Grimoire Bug Reports Assimilated And Patched Within 120 Minutes of Release
Sapiens thinks if you have a clinically tested IQ of 183 it means you're better at solving the jumble in the newspaper. This is what Sapiens actually believes.

There are other things you can do with a super powered atomic brain nearly 6 full derivatives greater than the intellectual distance between the ordinary man and Koko the Sign Language Gorilla.

An ordinary man might be delirious and babbling after 72 hours without sleep, these bug reports forced me to bring on another 0.002% of my brain capacity to solve them with a few keystrokes and upload a new binary to Steam.


  1. Bug encountered clicking GPC portraits on some machines
  2. Bug encountered when modifying "SCALE" setting
  3. Bug encountered with music volumes (this may or may not be fixed)


If you have a savegame going and you don't want to uninstall your current game, you can just delete your "game.cfg" file in your Steam common folder if you can find it.

I want you to know if my back is ever in the corner again I am more than willing to bring on as much as 0.005% of my brain power online to fix the game and keep the troops fighting. Any time not spent playing Grimoire is wasted playing life, which will never give you any Perk Keys like Grimoire does. Remember that.

Grimoire Manual, Steam Keys To IndieGoGo Backers and Discounts
I was working on the manual before I got sidetracked onto one million issues to fix before release. Now that the game is out and fairly stable I will work over the weekend and should have the manual ready early next week, likely as a self-executing browser reference.

Steam Keys will go out tomorrow, was just getting the backer details together in a spreadsheet merging identical backers of both campaigns on IndieGoGo in 2012.

The current discount will run until August 12th. After that it is likely Grimoire will not change in price again for many years. I hope the biggest fans of the game got the discount price at launch.

I have seen some early bug reports on issues I've never encountered but considering that thousands of people are now playing Grimoire without any concerns I would say it is pretty solid at launch. The great thing about Steam distribution is that patches will be seamless and transparent to the user as long as the game logic and map don't change - they won't. Owners of Grimoire can expect a patch on a weekly basis and a feature upgrade on a monthly basis. It's no big deal at all to do an update now with the pipeline I have set up.

Grimoire Launched At 9:00 PM on Friday Night in Australia on 4/08/2017
The game is live on the Steam Store now. Time to rest for a couple of minutes before going to work on my next game. I'm going to take a 30 minute break, get a Whopper and come back. I am thinking of some kind of Japanese romancing sim that takes place in a boarding school with girls who are disfigured but have great inner beauty. I actually wanted to start on that game in 1994 but I got sidetracked onto this Grimwhatchamacallit thingy.

Grimoire Gets Endorsement From Big Man Tyrone
Everything is tracking well here, no delays no hitches for the August 1st release of Grimoire.

Police worldwide have been deputizing private citizens to work in crowd control in the event of public riots and looting breaking out when the inevitable Grimoire shortages are announced and Grimoire rationing goes into effect.

As many people know, I am a great admirer of the meme king Big Man Tyrone. He always seems to be on the cutting edge of anything before it goes viral. Private individuals have been in negotiations with Big Man Tyrone for months attempting to get him to endorse Grimoire but he refused until he knew it was just about to come out. He did not want to become a target for Melonhead death squads by offering his support too early.

Big Man Tyrone has officially endorsed Grimoire and the world will never be the same again.

Big Man Tyrone's Grimoire Shot Heard Round The World

Grimoire Opening Discount of 10%
I have decided it is just a nice thing to do for people who have been waiting years to play my game if I offered a 10% discount on the game during it's first week. After this ends, I want to assure anyone waiting for the game that Grimoire will never, ever sell at a discount at any time it is on the Steam store ever again. I won't permit it to be sold below it's retail value for any reason. I am too proud of my finished product to permit it to be turned into simply another commodity in a Steam sale. If Valve ever decides that sales of the product no longer justify it having a page then I will move it to another venue - but as the author I will never offer my game at a discount again anywhere. I'm not a corporation that turns out games like sausages and computes their price curves over rates of decay in market value. Grimoire is my unique and proprietary product and I only want to sell it to the most hardcore fans of the genre. I was never targeting the mass market or casual gamers. It is in the first paragraph of the original design document I wrote more than 20 years ago when I was putting a proposal together that described the entire game end-to-end in both story, design and implementation. It was an aristocrat's manifesto when it was written and the language was specifically that of an aristocrat declaring the game was not going to be designed to appeal to the masses. Only fans of the genre.

In other news, Ellsworth Hall is continuing his development of a full suite of musical scores based on the original MIDI themes he created for Grimoire and these will be offered for sale alongside Grimoire at some time in the future on a CD on the store if approved by Steam.

The release of Grimoire is now one week away.

Grimoire Reset, New Launch Date 1-8-2017
I apologize for the game being late but it's ready now. Three more weeks of work was exactly what was needed. The game is in fine shape now to release and has never looked better.

I was able to fix each and every single bug identified in the month prior to the original launch date and the game is smooth as butter now.

Twenty years is a long time to work on a single game, three weeks late is not much of a price to pay for it to be perfect or nearly so when it is released.

Thanks to all the real Grimoire fans for your patience. I appreciate that people are willing to wait for true greatness.

Grimoire Will Debut Shortly, Proposed Price $39.95
Been working around the clock here to finish up every possible detail before Friday. The game is looking really good. It has been very enjoyable to review areas I have not looked at in a long time and discover they are even more fun than I remember.

There are still going to be parts of the game that are not quite polished but the game as it currently stands is truly a one-of-a-kind classic. I have successfully played through all four endings of the game using save points and cheat codes and I found my own product to be more satisfying than any of the Wizardry games and even better than the original Eye of the Beholder series. I can only hope others agree this time next week.

This week I have been scrambling to make sure that all spells have some sort of visual effect, these are complete now but it is likely new visuals will be added in the future for various displays and magic effects. I added one last new monster animation I have had shelved for a while and added boss encounters to several areas I had skipped in the past.

Ellsworth Hall is working on a full orchestral soundtrack of all the themes currently scored in MIDI in Grimoire. It is likely that will be offered on the store page as a standalone purchase after it goes live.
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