With A Time of Monsters, I have done something truly remarkable: for the first time in my life, I have set a schedule and a word count, and actually adhered to them. That is to say, I set myself a deadline, and I guessed how many words I’d need to write before I finished the story, and I managed to hit both.
Needless to say, this has filled me with all variety of unnatural hubris when it comes to what lies ahead.
So, without further ado, the production plan for Shadow of the Eagles:
Phase One – Levée en Masse [I AM HERE]
Before anything else, I need to establish two things.
First of all, how much of a budget am I going to have to work with here? Unlike in previous projects, I won’t be able to do everything on my own. Twine allows for the use of music, sound, animated graphics, and graphical user interfaces, but if I want to take advantage of those features, that means I’m going to need to hire an artist, a sound and music person, and a frontend developer to make all of those things work – because aside from UI design, I don’t really trust my own competencies in any of these systems. Naturally, skilled creators don’t work for free, and I will only be able to commission what I can afford. What I’m able to afford will partially be determined by how much A Time of Monsters makes in the short-term, but long-term, it’ll need a more reliable source of funding.
That’s where the Patreon comes in. One of the two key pieces of infrastructure I’ll need to establish is a separate Patreon for those who want to support the development of Shadow of the Eagles. That means I’ll need to throw together art, backer tiers, and so forth. I’ll also need to put together some backer rewards.
The first of these will be a Discord server. My experience with A Time of Monsters’ (unfortunately rather truncated) beta test has demonstrated just how much faster the turnaround on feedback and discussion can be when on a Discord server. Likewise, I already have plenty of experience in knowing just how much feedback – the earlier in development, the better – can improve a game. Access to a development Discord server will be one of the key backer rewards for the Patreon (with specialised development feedback channels intended for those in higher tiers).
But of course, to get feedback, backers will need something to deliver feedback on. This is the last, and most important part of Phase One: the creation of a prototype for Shadow of the Eagles.
Be forewarned, without music, sound, or graphics, this will be an extremely rough draft. It will look ugly, it will probably be buggy as all hell, but it will include all of the story content I plan on including for the first act of Shadow of the Eagles, with all of the core features (Battle events, campaign events, historical events, promotion, skill training, reputations, and interpersonal relationships) all implemented.
Altogether, this phase should take about two months or so of work. I expect to have everything – prototype, Patreon page, and Discord server – all up by the middle to the end of January.
CORRECTION: This is almost done, and I’ll probably be able to move on to the next phase before the end of December.
Phase Two – Code Napoléon
Once a community hub and an operating budget are established, I can move on to phase two.
There’s two parts to this. The first will be exposing the Act One Prototype to Patreon backers for feedback. I’ll tweak core features, add requested content, and cut the stuff that doesn’t work. I want to nail the gameplay and the feel down before I move further.
At the same time, I’ll be using the money coming in from the Patreon to seek out contractors to help with the parts of the game I can’t handle. My top priority will be a frontend developer who knows how to work with CSS. This is the stuff behind the pretty UIs you often see Twine games boasting. While I have plenty of experience (thanks to my time in Flash games) designing UIs, I don’t have any experience in implementing them. I’ll need an outside expert to make this game look pretty.
I’ll also want two more outside contractors to handle sound and additional art, although this stuff can wait. So long as the UI gets put together and the basic gameplay is finalised, I can keep moving forward. I expect this phase to take about two or three months, although it might take longer, depending on how much work I need to put in and what kind of feedback I get. “Finding the fun” is the most important objective here, because it won’t matter how good the art or music is if the basic gameplay loop doesn’t click.
Phase Three – Coronation March
With a UI implemented and core gameplay finalised, it’s time to commit to writing work in earnest.
This phase will involve the writing of Acts Two and Three, as well as their associated interludes. These cover the events of 13. Vendémiaire (the “Whiff of Grapeshot”), the First Italian Campaign, the Egyptian Campaign, and the Coup of 18. Brumaire, when Napoleon seizes power as First Consul.
This will probably be a protracted process, especially since I’ll not just be writing the events of the main story, but the relevant campaign events and battle events as well. I expect to have to write at least about twenty to thirty campaign events, and probably about forty to fifty battle events, hardly a small task. On top of that, I still plan on delivering new development builds to Patreon backers – once a month at the lowest tier, and probably multiple times a week if not daily for the higher backer tiers, all while incorporating feedback as I get it.
I’ll be giving myself about four months for this, which will put me well into summer.
By that point, I should have something in the range of 200-250k words, with a game that should take perhaps 2-3 hours to play through once. I’ll also be considering additional features, things like meta-progression for increased replayability. It’ll be at the end of this stage that I’ll start polling my backers monthly with a single question: “Is this game ready for early access?” When I get enough people saying that it is, I’ll start making preparations for a general release on Steam (of course, it won’t be anywhere near as regularly updated or as fully-featured as the development versions the backers will get, at least until I hit 1.0).
Phase Four – To Extend the Limits of Glory
At this point, the game is feature complete. The art should be commissioned, if not finished. The music and sound likewise.
All that is left is to write.
Four acts will remain: Act Four and the two versions of Act Five will be long. Act Six will be short, but highly consequential (in between you and me, the Battle of Waterloo will probably be about 60% of it). Then, there’ll be a modular epilogue to handle, as well as achievements, meta-progression features, balance and gameplay tweaks.
This may take me six months, this may take me a year, but at the end of this process, there will be a fully featured, polished game to release – at which point I will hit 1.0, evaluate sales and the possibility of DLC (I have several possibilities in mind)…
-and start work on Wars of Infinity…
Paul Wang 