November Update

So, another month’s come and gone, and I’m still working on that project I can’t talk about yet. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll be able to announce it for quite some time – I suspect that’s because the license-holder and the publisher would like to have a lot of marketing material ready to go before doing a formal announcement.

That being said, I can still talk about the new process I’m using to write this one. I’ve finished the basic “play-by-play” skeleton of the game, which means I know more or less how every chapter is going to be organised and laid out. I’ve since moved on to building the “mechanical” outline, something which you could probably consider akin to the sinew of the game. Long story short, it means I’m currently filling in all of the scripting which actually links all the text together. The end result should be a game which is playable, but with placeholder text instead of the actual final prose.

I’m doing this mostly as an acknowledgement of the fact that I’m a better writer than I am a game designer – something which has become a lot clearer with the dev process of Lords of Infinity in the rear-view mirror. This way, I can have a mechanically complete game which will still be easy to test and rebalance, since I won’t have to also shift around all of the descriptive text at the same time. When I start on the actual final prose, I’ll have a firm idea of how the game works, where each storyline goes, and how everything is put together mechanically. The placeholder text isn’t polished or nuanced, but it does describe the basic emotional beats of each page too, so I won’t find myself stumped on how to proceed, as I often have before.

Note that this is not a simple task. There’s some really mechanically ambitious stuff here, and it’s entirely possible that this “skeleton” alone will be in excess of 100k words – but I know that everything I write now will contribute in some way to the finished game.

As usual, 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, chosen and funded by my Patreon – which not only allows me to write these supplementary articles, but also helps pay my rent and bills so I can spend more time on polish and balance which I couldn’t financially justify otherwise.