Paul Wang

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.

First of all, happy new year!

Second of all, holy hell have I gotten a lot done over the course of this past month. The Patreon for Shadow of the Eagles has been a huge success, and I’ve been not only able to hire a CSS developer to help me implement the UI, but I’ve also been able to get most of the final UI in place and working over the course of the past two weeks. That means the current playtest version already has a very slick graphical interface which is both attractive, and intuitive enough to be easily comprehensible to almost all players.

A lot of the assets (like the portraits) are still placeholders, and not all the elements are final, but take a look:

Needless to say, there are going to be all kinds of neat visual and auditory bells and whistles which my previous games have never had, and I’m seriously looking forward to seeing it all come together.

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 absolutely still going. 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 as well, so take a look if you have the time.