Paul Wang

I am currently neck deep (About 30 000 words) into writing the infamous and disastrous retreat from Moscow, which served as the calamitous final act of Napoleon’s Campaign of 1812.

Needless to say, this is a section which I’m putting a lot of work into. The retreat from Moscow is perhaps one of the most iconic events of the Napoleonic Wars, and although it isn’t anywhere near as climactic a turning point as popular history would portray it as (Napoleon actually lost more troops advancing on Moscow than retreating from it), it remains one of those events which even casual Napoleonic Wars-understanders will expect to see rendered in its full, brutal glory.

And I’m going to try my best to meet those expectations.

The retreat from Moscow, as I envision it, is going to be a brutal, terrible ordeal to survive – perhaps worse than anything in the campaign so far. It will strip your player characters down to their essential elements, and make you consider what they really are when the food is gone, when the Cossacks are behind every tree, and when even a moment’s rest might be fatal. There will be chances to win great glory, and chances to betray your character’s deepest convictions. The cold and hunger and exhaustion will all be enemies – but so will the might of an entire empire mobilised against you, playing the role of a slasher movie’s antagonist to make sure your character doesn’t make it back across the border alive.

Designing and writing this section will require a careful balance. I want to make it grueling, without making it unwinnable. That means throwing in at least a few ways to avoid near-certain death, even for sub-optimal character builds, although those methods may involve costs which the player might not much like.

It will be a section which will be the end of many a run – but given the way I am planning on setting up meta-progression, that doesn’t necessarily mean that having a character who meets their end here – as so many soldiers of Napoleon’s armies did – will be a complete write-off. Even when your character dies early, they’ll still be able to unlock new Origins and Traits for their next – and perhaps more successful run.

If you’d like to help me out by funding additional art and music – and get access to the development Discord and the playtest builds, take a look at the Patreon page for Shadow of the Eagles here.

In the meantime, my first Patreon’s still going. This month’s Creator’s Guide to Writing and Worldbuilding and Soldier’s Guide to the Infinite Sea, are both now up, so take a look if you’d like.

As of now, I am almost done the immense 65 000 word interlude which bridges the gaps between Act 4 and the two versions of Act 5.

Why is this interlude so damn big compared to all the other ones which have come before it? Two reasons.

The first is that I needed a method for sorting players into the two versions of Act 5 in a way which meant neither could be framed as a reward (because, I mean, let’s face it, your choices are either prolonged Cossack-and-Bashkir Torture, or prolonged Caçadore-and-Baker-Rifle Torture, neither of those are rewards), and in a way which would create a reasonable in-story reason to send the player one way or the other.

The second is the simple fact that this interlude covers a lot of time, basically the entire stretch from the end of the War of the Fourth Coalition in 1807 to the beginning of the War of the Sixth Coalition in 1812. Even with a lot of compression and consolidation, that’s a lot of stuff to cover, especially when the player character is now likely senior enough and politically relevant enough to be involved in some of those things personally.

Even then, there’s a lot I have to sort of gloss over. The big ones are, of course, the first half of the Peninsular War, and the War of the Fifth Coalition. It was a hard decision to “cut” both of these from the main narrative, but it was a decision I made fairly early on (note that the title image I uploaded at the beginning of active development only starts listing battles in Spain in 1811, and omits the major engagements of the War of the Fifth Coalition). I’d like to fill these in eventually with post-release expansions of some kind, but I’m focusing on getting this done before I start seriously thinking about things like that.

If you’d like to help me out by funding additional art and music – and get access to the development Discord and the playtest builds, take a look at the Patreon page for Shadow of the Eagles here.

In the meantime, my first Patreon’s still going. This month’s Creator’s Guide to Writing and Worldbuilding, might be of particular interest. It’s a detailed “mid-mortem” about the first eleven months of Shadow of the Eagles‘ active development, and the lessons I’ve learned in that time. It’s a little “out of date” in the sense that I wrote it nearly two weeks (and therefore, about 60 000 words) ago, but it might give you some insight on how things have been going – and how I plan to go on moving forward.

This month’s Soldier’s Guide to the Infinite Sea, is, of course, now also up, so take a look if you’d like.

As of about an hour ago, Act 4 of Shadow of the Eagles is story-complete.

This was… a considerable amount of work. This Act 4 alone clocks in at nearly 300 000 words – and the whole game is easily well over 850 000 words in total by now.

Of course, all of this was necessary. Act 4 covers the Wars of the Third and Fourth Coalitions – usually considered the high points of both Napoleon’s military and political careers, as well as perhaps being the most well-known part of the Napoleonic Wars altogether. That being said, I don’t really see the next two acts being much smaller. Act 5A will cover not only the Russian Campaign of 1812 (iconic in its own right), and the pivotal 1813 German Campaign, but also the final Campaign of 1814. Act 5B will cover the Peninsular War, which has certainly become a disproportionately visible part of the popular understanding of the Napoleonic Wars in the english-speaking world thanks to the involvement of two particular British officers (one real, one fictional).

That means it might be another three months each to finish these acts, and depending on how long Act 6 (covering the Hundred Days) and the Epilogues take, that might mean that I’ll be cutting it awfully close if I want to make my best-case release target for the middle of next year.

But in the nearer-term, I’ll be taking a bit of a break over the course of the next week or so. One thing I’ve discovered about being medicated is that I also burn out faster. I suppose that makes a lot of sense, I’m writing at a rate of something like two and a half to three times faster than I used to, which naturally means that I also work through my mental resources a lot faster too. I also need to make sure to take tolerance breaks, so that my my brain doesn’t build up a resistance to my meds. I’m currently on the lowest possible dose for these, and I’d like to keep it that way.

That being said, I’ve already written about 50 000 words this month, and I’ll certainly be adding quite a bit more before the month ends. I’m still on track to finish the next interludes and start prep work (research, outlining, and so on) on Act 5A before the start of October – and I’ll also try to find the time to reorganise some of my variables for ease of use, and implement more of the soundtrack and maybe the portraits too. I’ll be building up another “polish list” for that sort of thing to tackle sometime this month, which means even if there’s not as much new story content added as compared to last month’s build, there’ll still be plenty of changes.

If you’d like to help me out by funding additional art and music – and get access to the development Discord and the playtest builds, take a look at the Patreon page for Shadow of the Eagles here.

In the meantime, my first Patreon’s still going. This month’s Soldier’s Guide to the Infinite Sea and Creator’s Guide to Writing and Worldbuilding, are now also up for general viewing, now that they’ve been up for a week for existing backers.

I am now about 52 000 words into August, which means I’m about 150 000 words into Act 4 – and currently about halfway into the famous double-battle of Jena-Auerstedt, when Napoleon and Marshal Louis-Nicolas Davout destroyed two Prussian armies on the same day.

Among Napoleonic history buffs, Auerstedt is commonly seen as the more spectacular accomplishment. “At Jena, Napoleon won a battle he could not lose,” said the French historian Hourtoulle. “At Auerstedt, Davout won a battle he could not win.”

The numbers seem to bear this out. At Jena, Napoleon initially attacked the 40 000 Prussians of Prince Hohenlohe’s army with the 35 000 or so troops of Lannes V Corps and the Imperial Guard, but he was heavily reinforced throughout the day. By the end of the battle, those 40 000 Prussians were outnumbered two to one, and were broken mostly because Napoleon was able to hit them with more troops than they could handle, in three directions at once.

Auerstedt, on the other hand, saw the 30 000 troops of Marshal Davout’s III Corps run headlong into the Duke of Brunswick’s 65 000 strong main Prussian army in a way which meant that during the opening phase of the battle, the Prussians were fighting III Corps’ single lead division, a force they outnumbered ten to one.

Yet by the end of the morning, not only had Davout’s III Corps been able to withstand the numerically superior enemy, but it was able to switch to the attack, driving the Prussians from the field.

Auerstedt was, by far, the more impressive tactical victory – but Jena, I think was also an extremely impressive accomplishment of the operational art – the art of moving and coordinating armies to make sure that when battle is joined, you have more resources than the enemy. Napoleon had divided his army into eight Corps for his campaign, but he had coordinated them so tightly than when an enemy army was reported near Jena, he was able to concentrate six of those Corps on his position within 24 hours, assembling massive numerical superiority while also coordinating an ongoing battle during the last few hours of it.

Both of these battles deserve their due attention, and I’m going to try to do my best to give them both the attention they deserve. What battle you fight will be determined by your character’s rank, but I want both of them to feel significant. They will be the last “decisive” major victories Napoleon is going to win for a while – because the next major battle after these two will be the chaotic bloodbath of Eylau, before the War of the Fourth Coalition finally comes to an end in the aftermath of the Battle of Friedland.

If you’d like to help me out by funding additional art and music – and get access to the development Discord (where you can suggest new features to add to the polish list) and the playtest versions, take a look at the Patreon page for Shadow of the Eagles here.

In the meantime, my first Patreon’s still chugging along. This month’s Soldier’s Guide to the Infinite Sea and Creator’s Guide to Writing and Worldbuilding, are now also up for general viewing, now that they’ve been up for a week for existing backers..

I am now about 40 000 words into Act 4, having covered the Camp at Boulogne and the Ulm Campaign, the first outing of the Grande Armée. That means over the course of the past month, I’ve finished the two Interludes covering the Coup of 18. Brumaire, and the Consulate.

The Consulate is an exceptionally complex period, one which involved a lot of civil and military changes. It is effectively the point where the last substantive elements of the First Republic are dismantled (with massive popular support) and the foundations of the Empire are laid. By the time Napoleon puts the crown on his head in Notre Dame at the end of 1804, all he really had to do was change his job title – from “First Consul-for-Life” to “Emperor of the French”.

The dynamics, motivations, and the individual changes which are behind this process are the kinds of things which would require a game of its own to cover, and given that Shadow of the Eagles is primarily about the military experience of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, it’s something I kind of only go over in broad strokes. The interlude which covers it is still something like 30 000 words, but if I were to really do it justice, it’d probably have to be ten times that size at least.

But if things go well, I would like to go back and expand on the Consulate, among other things. Depending on how Shadow of the Eagles does, I’d like to consider post-release DLCs covering the gaps which I’ve left for the sake of practicality and getting this game to the finish line in a timely manner – as well as some alternate paths which might be worth exploring.

That’s a thought for the far future though. For this month, I’m working on the opening stages of the Austerlitz Campaign, culminating in the battle often considered Napoleon’s tactical masterpiece – a battle which you’ll be able to experience from multiple perspectives, depending on your character’s rank, and branch of service. Needless to say, it’ll be a lot of work – but hopefully something I can finish by the end of the month.

If you’d like to help me out by funding additional art and music – and get access to the development Discord (where you can suggest new features to add to the polish list) and the playtest versions, take a look at the Patreon page for Shadow of the Eagles here.

In the meantime, my first Patreon’s still chugging along. This month’s Soldier’s Guide to the Infinite Sea and Creator’s Guide to Writing and Worldbuilding, are now also up for general viewing, now that they’ve been up for a week for existing backers..

Act 3 of Shadow of the Eagles is finally done, and it is perhaps the biggest single chapter of anything I have ever written. No, seriously, it’s like 250 000 words or something, larger than Sabres of Infinity, Mecha Ace and The Hero of Kendrickstone – possibly even longer than the two-part (four part, technically, but who’s counting, right?) endgame segment of Lords of Infinity.

More than once, I’ve been tempted to put together a flowchart to demonstrate just how sprawling Act 3 is – and I still just might.

Needless to say, this month is going to be a bit slower, after the breakneck pace of the past two. I’ve been getting as much exercise and fresh air as I can before this year’s Strong El Niño and the seemingly inevitable march of Saudi Aramco and Sinopec’s shareholder maximalisation strategy climate change makes it impossible to run outside for longer than ten minutes before dying of heatstroke. I’ll mostly be focusing on polish – especially polish for Act 3, adding some additional choices which I’ve missed the first time around, more reactivity, and so on. I’ll also be working on the two interludes which bridge the gap between Act 3 and Act 4: the Coup of 18. Brumaire, and the Consulate.

Which means I’ll also be doing a lot of research, because this time period: from about 1799 to 1807 (when Act 4 ends) is both one of the best and worst known periods of Napoleonic history. It’s the period of Austerlitz and Jena-Auerstedt, but it’s also the point where Napoleon goes from General to First Consul to Emperor, forges the Grande Armée, sets in motion the administrative reforms which lead to the Empire, and the drafting of the Code Civil.

At the same time, it’s also a period where a lot of what we would consider the unambiguously positive gains of the Revolution are rolled back. Women’s rights are curtailed, slavery is re-legalised, and Napoleon sends his brother-in-law and a gigantic army to re-impose direct rule over Haiti in a campaign of unspeakable brutality via methods we would now almost certainly consider genocidal.

So needless to say, I need to get this stuff right, which means I need to do a lot of reading. Up top, you can see some of the books I’m using to support my writing for this project. A few of them I had beforehand to feed my personal interest, but a lot of them I bought recently, with the monetary support from my Patreon. If you’d like to help me expand this library even further – and get access to the development Discord (where you can suggest new features to add to the polish list) and the playtest versions, take a look at the Patreon page for Shadow of the Eagles here.

That doesn’t mean I’ve been neglecting my first Patreon. This month’s Soldier’s Guide to the Infinite Sea and Creator’s Guide to Writing and Worldbuilding, are now also up for general viewing, now that they’ve been up for a week for existing backers..

I am now waist-deep into the Syrian Campaign, the climactic and penultimate segment of Napoleon’s Egyptian Expedition, which takes up all of Act 3 of Shadow of the Eagles.

Here, Napoleon’s megalomania reaches its (for now) height, as he begins to consider himself a master of the world in his own right. Two decades later, in exile on Saint Helena, he admitted that at this point, he was thinking of building an empire to rival Alexander the Great’s, and leading a vast army of Frenchmen, Egyptian Copts, Arabs, Druze, and Black Sudanese troops across the Himalayas to attack the British East India Company’s holdings in Bengal.

He might have gotten a little carried away.

Syria is where his ambitions smash headlong into reality. It’s where he overconfidently leads an outnumbered, undersupplied, and unsupported force deep into the heart of the Ottoman Empire, against a British Royal Navy which controls the sea, and a ruthless and highly experienced Ottoman governor who opposes him on land. It will culminate in the spectacular – but pointless – victory at Mount Tabor, and the grinding failure of the Siege of Acre, the first time Napoleon is handed a real strategic defeat.

It’s a lot to handle, and it will be a hell of a job to do it anywhere close to justice. It’s an ugly, terrible episode in the history of what is now half a dozen countries, filled with exchanges of atrocity and counter-atrocity, with primitive horrors and innovative new ways to make humans suffer, with moments of incredible daring and points of immense moral cowardice.

But it’ll be finished this month – probably at about the same time Shadow of the Eagles as a whole hits the 500 000 word mark.

If you want to support the project – and get access to the development Discord and the playtest versions, take a look at the separate Patreon for Shadow of the Eagles here.

In the meantime, my first Patreon is still going. This month’s Soldier’s Guide to the Infinite Sea and Creator’s Guide to Writing and Worldbuilding, are now also up.

After spending most of March working on polish and bugtesting, I am now about 70 000 words deep into Act 3 of Shadow of the Eagles, which covers one of the most mythologised – and ultimately most controversial – parts of Napoleon’s military career: the Egyptian and Syrian Campaign.

This is a complicated topic, in more ways than one. Napoleon himself was able to control the narrative in his own lifetime, framing the whole campaign as a military triumph which – just as importantly – expanded the limits of knowledge, kickstarted the field of Egyptology, and brought inestimable benefit to the future of human civilisation.

A more detached – or more cynical – observer might just as readily characterise it as a colonialist pipe dream spun up as a way for the French Directory to get rid of one of its most successful and popular (and therefore dangerous) General, who proceeded to lose a critical proportion of France’s naval strength, ruthlessly suppress the local populace, and spiral into megalomania and self-destruction to the immense cost of the people of Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and the soldiers under his command.

I’m going to try to examine both these perspectives through the course of Act 3 – although that doesn’t mean I consider them equally valid. At the same time, I’m going to try to mechanically demonstrate the sheer complexity of the Egyptian Campaign at a strategic and operational level. Unlike the First Italian Campaign, this wasn’t just a matter of an army being deployed to a theatre of war with a set objective and a well-defined enemy, this was Napoleon essentially getting carte blanche to conquer and rule vast swathes of land which nominally belonged to a power at peace with France. The result was a sprawling theatre of war which included multiple concurrent campaigns against local rebellions, and multiple enemy armies.

There is also the question of the Egyptian Campaign’s end – because when Napoleon left Egypt, he notably didn’t take the vast majority of his army with him (he even left his mistress behind), instead opting to sneak past the British fleet which had annihilated his own aboard a single frigate with some of his most trusted officers. If you play your cards right, you will have a chance to be one of those officers – but if you don’t, or choose not to, then I want to have fully defined paths for those outcomes. Do you find a way back to France on your own initiative? Do you stick it out until the end, surrendering with Menou when the British take Alexandria in 1801? Or do you “go native”, becoming one of Muhammad Ali‘s first French advisors (though naturally, this will end your campaign)?

Needless to say, all this is going to be a lot of work, and I expect it take me most of next month too. I may be 70 000 words in, but I suspect that this is only the first third of the whole act – at best.

If you want to support the project – and get access to the development Discord and the playtest versions, take a look at the separate Patreon for Shadow of the Eagles here.

In the meantime, my first Patreon is still going. This month’s Soldier’s Guide to the Infinite Sea and Creator’s Guide to Writing and Worldbuilding, are now up.

Given that February’s supposed to be the shortest month of the year, I sure got a hell of a lot done. In this case, ‘a hell of a lot’ means just about all of Act 2, which means Shadow of the Eagles is fully playable all the way from the beginning of the War of the First Coalition in 1792, to its end in 1797.

Of course, just because it’s all playable doesn’t mean it’s ‘complete’. By blasting through something like 120 000 words in a month, I’ve left a lot of little things unfinished or unpolished, and it’s those things I’m working on this month.

My first priority has been polishing up the earlier sections of Act 1, which were written when I was still coming to grips with Twine and still trying to figure out what kind of game this was going to be. That’s because no matter how much planning you do before you kick off, you will always learn new things about the story you want to tell and the ways you want to tell it as you get a handle on actually making your game. As a result, much of the first half of Act 1 has been vastly expanded, with new characters (read: interesting historical figures who were there at the same place and the same place as your player character can be) and new approaches which fill out the historical context of the Revolution and the Terror more completely.

This being done, I’m now focused on polishing up the two acts (and one interlude) I have more or less done. This means hunting down formatting errors, bugs, and anything else which might have slipped through during my ‘learning’ phase with Twine. Once that’s done, I’ll have a firm foundation with which to build Act 3 – which will be in many ways as tonally different to Act 2 as Act 2 was to Act 1.

I’ve also been making progress on locking in a composer and a portrait artist, which means hopefully, I can start implementing original sound and music into the development builds as well.

If you want to support the project – and get access to the development Discord and the playtest versions, take a look at the separate Patreon for Shadow of the Eagles here.

In the meantime, my first Patreon is still going. This month’s Soldier’s Guide to the Infinite Sea and Creator’s Guide to Writing and Worldbuilding, are now up, thanks to its supporters.

An Adventurer’s Guide to the Fledgling Realms is currently on hiatus. It’s been nearly a decade since the last Fledgling Realms title, and after polling the Patreon backers, I’ve decided to put it on pause until I revisit the setting sometime in the future.

In the development plan I posted late last year, I made the educated guess that I would be finished Act 3 sometime around July or August.

It is currently the middle of February, and I am almost finished Act 2. At this rate, I may even finish the interlude that follows the end of Act 3 by the beginning of June.

A lot of this has to do with the new medication I’ve been taking for the past two months. For a long time, I really did believe that my inability to focus on almost any task was a normal thing which everyone dealt with and that this was really all just a lack of discipline on my part. I didn’t really consider that it might have had something to do with the chemical state of my brain until relatively recently – and it’s only been even more recently still that I’ve seriously considered getting a professional assessment and a prescription to manage it.

But now that I have, the results have been nothing short of phenomenal. Throughout my entire writing career, I’ve been stuck at a sustainable rate of about 40-50 000 words (counting code) a month. If I were really pushing myself, I might be able to manage 75-80 000 words, although I’d be more or less in a state of mental exhaustion after that.

I’ve written 80 000 words (not counting code) in the past two weeks – and this is accounting for the fact that I’ve spent two of those fourteen days solely on outlining and plotting. It used to be that 4000 words a day was the upper limit of what I was capable of in a 24 hour period. I’m now beginning to consider 4000 words to be a “slow day”.

I am genuinely not sure what my limits are right now, and sometimes I feel like I’m still testing them. I can only imagine how much I’ll be able to get done in the long-term, once I find those limits and become comfortable with them.

And yes, I will be making lamb chops tonight.

If you want to support the project – and get access to the development Discord and the playtest versions, take a look at the separate Patreon for Shadow of the Eagles here.

In the meantime, my first Patreon is still going strong. This month’s Soldier’s Guide to the Infinite Sea, Adventurer’s Guide to the Fledgling Realms, and Creator’s Guide to Writing and Worldbuilding, are now up, thanks to its supporters.