Introduction
Over the past few years, I’ve gotten into the habit of writing up post-mortems for my projects, ones which evaluate what I’ve learned, what I’ve done wrong, and how I’m going to move forward.
Obviously, Shadow of the Eagles isn’t done yet – but at nearly 900 000 words, I have reached well beyond what I believe to be the halfway point. Furthermore, in working with both a new format, and a whole bunch of new mechanics and systems, I’ve also learned a lot about how to make games and tell stories outside of the Choicescript template I’ve become so familiar with. After ten months of active, full-time development, I’d like to step back and take a look at some of the things I’ve picked up along the way – and speculate about how I might move going forward.
Normally, in a post-mortem, I’d also talk about what’s worked, and what hasn’t when it comes to mechanics and narrative design. I can’t quite do that yet. While my playtesters have certainly given me more than enough feedback to keep the game and its narrative branches in a state which I think will be received well, I won’t know how it will do until the first reviews and sales figures come in. That means these will be more like personal lessons learned about the process of development, rather than a reflection on the reactions of the general public.
Of course, that doesn’t mean I haven’t internalised the lessons I’ve learned so far. It just means that those lessons are more internal, and about the processes and best practices when it comes to the craft of game development, rather than the art of writing, worldbuilding, and storytelling. Those lessons are still useful to me, especially since they’ll shape how I approach the back half of the development of Shadow of the Eagles.
I’ve titled this retrospective a “Mid-Mortem”, which only really makes sense in context. Ultimately, you can consider it more like the kind of memoir that some public figures write in the middle of their careers. What I’ve learned so far might still be invalidated by the process to come, or might be refuted by the actual public reaction Shadow of the Eagles gets on release. I might come back to this in a year and realise that all of my conclusions are wrong, but that will be for the future to decide.
Now, with that caveat out of the way…
Shadow of the Eagles – Lessons Learned
The Medication Helps:
I’ve mentioned on occasion that at about the same time I began active development on Shadow of the Eagles, I was finally diagnosed with ADHD and given a prescription for medication to manage its symptoms. The amount I’ve been prescribed is a fairly low dose – the lowest available, as I’m given to understand – however, the difference it’s made to my ability to gain focus, regain focus, and retain focus when working has been tremendous. I’ve gone from writing about 2500 words on a good day to 5000 on a bad one. There have been days where I’ve been able to put down 9000 or 10 000 words. One time, I even managed something like 16 000 within a 24 hour period.
Needless to say, this does an enormous amount for my actual productivity. At the same time, it also makes me considerably more willing to commit to risks and push myself in creatively risky or ambitious ways. When it felt like I had to beat my head against a wall to write 2000 words a day, a lot of branching paths and features and relatively minor additions felt like they weren’t worth the time and effort. Now, instead of having to beat myself up for hours to even get started on them, I can simply just sit down and get it done. Instead of feeling the need to cut features which seem like they would take too much time and effort, I can fairly easily just implement them – at least so long as I’m doing it in the 10 or so hours of the day in which I’m medicated. It’s a very liberating and empowering feeling.
However, it can also be a dangerous one.
The Medication Also Has Limits:
I’ve met creative burnout before. I was on the edge of it by the time I finished Lords of Infinity. However, that was after four years of uninterrupted work – and I really do mean uninterrupted. I was spending five days a week writing 2000 words a day for Lords of Infinity, then switching to writing 2000 words a day for Burden of Command on weekends. It wasn’t always a great routine, but I was able to handle it – along with a whole bunch of personal issues – non-stop for a very, very long time.
This is no longer the case.
As I’ve figured out over the past few months, burnout is less a factor of your mental state in the moment, and more the accumulated fatigue which comes from creative work – and the faster you work, the quicker that fatigue accumulates. So while I’ve been able to work harder and work faster, I’ve also been burning out faster, which means I’ve started scheduling myself longer multi-day breaks in a way which I’ve never had to consider before. These breaks are also needed to prevent myself from building up a bodily tolerance to my medication, since the last thing I want to do is be trapped in the addict’s spiral of having to take more and more medication for the same results (which will eventually lead to unhealthy and dangerous places).
What this means is that while being medicated lets me work harder and faster, I also have to set limits for myself. I can’t push too hard, I can’t push for too long, and I can’t make overambitious plans with the assumption that I’ll be able to write at the same accelerated rate over the long term.
There’s another reason for that as well, one less related to medication.
More Systems Mean More Overhead:
Shadow of the Eagles is the most complex game I’ve made as a “solo” project. I put that word in quotes because while all of the story content is mine, I’ve hired other people (including Chris Scribner, the composer for Burden of Command) to work on the things I can’t, like sound, portrait art, and backend coding. In theory, this means I should be able to devote all of my time to writing. In practise, this means I have to spend a significant amount of time coordinating and implementing new art, sound and gameplay features. For the first time, I’m operating not just as a writer, but as a producer as well, coordinating the contributions of multiple other specialised artists to create a cohesive whole.
In previous projects, this was something which Choice of Games handled for me, so I never really had to worry about it. In this one, these new tasks – and the work of marketing and publishing, which I am bad at and not looking forward to – are on my shoulders, and success or failure will rest solely with me, especially since the others who I’ve commissioned have done far more than I could have expected from them.
Adding to that is the fact that I’m also handling quite a few new systems myself: UI design, internal organisation, elements of sound design, and the parts of the backend stuff which I can do for myself – all while still learning the ropes of a system which I’m still not entirely familiar with. Shadow of the Eagles will be my first game in Twine, and I went into it with the same level of experience and familiarity that I had with Choicescript when I started on Sabres of Infinity. The difference is that Shadow of the Eagles is also a much larger, much more ambitious game, both technically and narratively, which leads to the next item on the list.
So Does More Branching:
Shadow of the Eagles is probably the most heavily branching game I’ve ever written, although you might not see that the first time around. After a first playthrough, a player might not consider themselves to have been given the same breadth of choices as they might have gotten in say, Lords of Infinity – but there’s a reason for that.
The Dragoon Saga has a fixed progression when it comes to power and responsibility: you’re a junior officer in Sabres of Infinity, a mid-ranking officer in Guns of Infinity, and a Lord of the Cortes in Lords of Infinity. While there are certainly grades of success or advancement which affects choices and narrative threads, you’re in the same rough category of authority.
Shadow of the Eagles is very different in that regard. In the most recently completed act (Act 4), the player character could be anything from a Lieutenant serving as a junior aide, to a Marshal of the Empire commanding over twenty-five thousand soldiers in the field. The freedom to advance as far as talent and luck and intrigue allow you is a driving theme of Shadow of the Eagles, and that means letting you advance to the very top of the pyramid (and yes, that absolutely means what you think it does – although not quite yet) if you’re willing to take the risks and accept the costs.
However, this means I need to write branches for every single one of those levels of responsibility. Randomised battle events give me some leeway, but not as much as I’d hoped. While it might be fine for a mid-ranking officer in command of a battalion to have their contribution to a lesser-known battle summarised by a random event, I can’t exactly do the same thing for a Marshal commanding the entire French force at Auerstedt, or reduce a battle as famous as Austerlitz to just a randomised event. For the sake of historical authenticity, as well as underlining the different perspective which high rank forms, I’ve more or less had to write four separate versions of Act 4 – which sometimes splits even further to take into account differences between the experiences of an infantry or cavalry officer.
The end result is that Act 4 is about 300 000 words – or nearly the size of all of Guns of Infinity.
Coordinating all of this branching is not easy. It means more or less that for every two or three days I spend writing, I spend another plotting, charting, and otherwise setting up the branches to make sure they’re all still moving in the right direction. I have an entire notebook filled with what are basically flow-charts, which I turn into code skeletons which I then fill up with the actual story content. That’s not counting the time I spend on research to make sure that I’m staying within the bounds of history – and that I’m not missing anything interesting or important when I tell the story of these events which ultimately did happen to real people long ago in our world.
The end result is that, proportionally, I spend a lot less time writing than I’m used to, and I’m not quite sure how to feel about that. I feel like I’m moving both much faster, and quite a bit slower than I’m supposed to, and that while Shadow of the Eagles will certainly be an expansive game, it might not necessarily be expansive enough.
Thankfully, I got people to help me with that.
Good Playtesters Will Tell You Where to Go:
The development of A Time of Monsters was my first time using a Discord server to coordinate and solicit feedback. This was out of necessity more than anything else. With the whole thing under NDA, I needed to have a space where only the few people who’d been vetted as playtesters could talk openly. The results were fairly mixed. I got plenty of good feedback, but not necessarily enough. Compared to the relatively freewheeling and expansive discussions which exist on the Dragoon Saga forum threads, the feedback of less than a dozen people – all with day jobs and other obligations – wasn’t quite enough, especially since I only had about a month after finishing the last epilogue to polish and edit.
Still, when I committed to funding Shadow of the Eagles over Patreon, I decided to set up a Discord server, if only because it meant I could limit membership to Patrons with access to the playtest builds.
Needless to say, I wasn’t expecting the sheer scale of the response that I would get – or just how much of a difference that scale would make when it came to the volume of feedback I got. A Time of Monsters had – as I’ve mentioned – less than a dozen playtesters in its server. Shadow of the Eagles has over four hundred.
These four hundred playtesters aren’t all regulars, of course – but they don’t have to be. Between the perhaps several dozen regular posters, there rests more than enough time, effort, motivation, and knowledge to provide a level of feedback which perhaps even exceeds what I’m used to with the Dragoon Saga. The end result is a highly engaged community, often with access to sources and background knowledge which I lack – who are willing to commit a great deal of time and effort to offering suggestions when it comes to balance, pacing, characterisation, and filling the gaps with historical anecdotes and important context. It gives me a cross-section of the intended target audience, from those with just a casual interest in the subject matter to genuine experts on the Wars of the Revolution and Napoleon. Their suggestions come in hard and fast, at a rate which I might not have been able to handle before I got medicated.
But that’s obviously changed, in more ways than one.
Experimentation Usually Works Out:
I’m used to saying ‘no’ a lot, especially in the context of fielding feedback and suggestions for additional content and branching. As I’ve mentioned before, a lot of this had to do with brain chemistry and what turned out to be an unusually skewed sense of what was worth doing and what wasn’t.
This time around, I feel like I’m saying ‘yes’ a lot more, especially when it comes to relatively minor alterations. Being able to make those alterations or additions on the spur of the moment, instead of after minutes or hours of trying and failing to work up the motivation means I can be a lot more responsive – and being more organised internally means that for those bigger changes I can’t do right away, I can easily file into what I’ve been calling “polish lists”, collections of relatively major additions and changes to be done all at once after the completion of an Act.
At the same time, I’ve been less disciplined with my own bright ideas, especially when it comes to technical features. After years of suppressing the urge of ‘hey, wouldn’t it be cool if-‘ which had previously so easily derailed my workflow, I am beginning to experiment a bit more when it comes to the technical aspects of game design and development, which I think has already borne a great deal of fruit. Shadow of the Eagles is definitely a bigger, wider, and more ambitious game than the one I set out to make – but I think it will also be a much better one.
Next Steps:
When I started active development, I created a tentative roadmap which took me to the point where I believed it might be wise to consider Early Access. I thought it would take me about a year to get there.
I passed that point about three months ago.
Looking at that roadmap now, I can say for certain that Shadow of the Eagles is not ready for Early Access. While the majority of the core story content is complete, several important features are missing: the custom portraits are still a work in progress and have yet to be implemented, there are still major UI elements which have not been finalised. There’s no ingame help/reference system which might be necessary to onboard new players or give a hand to those without a baseline knowledge of the time period and its major events. Metaprogression isn’t implemented in the least, and the current utility which I’m using to create an .exe wrapper for the whole thing isn’t quite working as well as I’d like, lacking functionality for supporting the save system among other things.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, there is no marketing for the game yet. While word of mouth has certainly spread, I don’t have a formal public presence for it. Any Early Access release will have to come with polished-looking screenshots, a trailer, and a whole bunch of other stuff which I’ve been neglecting in lieu of actually making the game.
Speaking of which.
Act 2 took a month to write – but Acts 3 and 4 took three months each, especially if you count for the week-long breaks and the time I’ve been reserving for polish and editing. While I’m trying to make both versions of Act 5 as efficient as possible, both versions cover extremely complex and consequential time periods, which I plan on getting right. Act 6 will be much shorter chronologically, but I don’t think anyone’s going to be too happy if its version of the Battle of Waterloo ends up being anything other than the grand finale of the campaign, regardless of the player’s rank and position.
Then after that, there’ll be the matter of adding the metaprogression features, polishing the text further, setting up a public presence (trailers, presskits, etc) and all that as well. I don’t know how long that’s going to take, but I think I’d be an idiot if I didn’t budget at least a few months for it.
So, roughly speaking, here’s the plan going forward.
Version 0.5.9: This is where we’re at right now. Act 4 is finished, and it covers up to the Peace of Tilsit. The next interlude will cover the following four years (I’d like to cover the War of the Fifth Coalition, but it’s probably going to end up being some kind of expansion or DLC), up until the leadup to Napoleon’s Russian Campaign. By the time this Mid-Mortem goes live, I’ll have that interlude either nearly finished, or complete, as part of Version 0.6.0.
Version 0.7.0: This will be the milestone marking the completion of Act 5A, which covers Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and the retreat from Moscow, as well as the 1813 German Campaign, and the final 1814 Defence of France. This is naturally going to have some major battles which I’ll need to give a lot of attention to – Borodino and Leipzig being the most prominent. I expect it to probably be another 200-300 000 words, and take me to the end of the year.
Version 0.8.0: This will be the milestone marking the completion of Act 5B, which will handle the latter half of the Peninsular War, from the player character’s arrival in 1811 to the final defence of Toulouse in 1814. It may not be quite as expansive as 5A, but it will definitely include some major battles as well (Salamanca and Vitoria come to mind). Another 200 000 words – and probably at least another two months.
Version 0.9.0: This milestone will mark the completion of Act 6 – The First Restoration, The Hundred Days, and the Waterloo Campaign. It will also mean the completion of the epilogues, for those characters which qualify for them. With this version, Shadow of the Eagles will be story-complete, but not feature complete. After the perhaps two months it’ll take to finish this, it’ll be on to implement metaprogression, any additional tutorialisation which might be needed, and any further minor additions and edits which will make the narrative more reactive and immersive.
My ideal launch date for 1.0 is June 18th, 2027 – the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. If I hit story-complete sometime in March or April, then that should give the time I need to implement all of the remaining features with time to spare for testing and polish.
But I’m not counting on that. I’ve blown deadlines before, and although I work a lot faster, I also know I have to pace myself. Overwork leads to burnout, and burnout leads to worse quality of work and more mistakes. If my choices are to release a rushed and incomplete game on June 18th, to overmedicate myself to make that deadline, or to delay, I’m going to choose the last of those options.
That’s why I’m setting an alternate release date to aim for: December 2nd, 2027 – the anniversary of both Napoleon’s Coronation, and the Battle of Austerlitz. If I looks like I can’t make the earlier date, I will opt for the later one – and use the time to polish, to add, and to otherwise make the game better.
These plans are, of course, all vague ones. There are still lessons to be learned going forward, and for all I know, life might still get in the way. I can’t be entirely certain I’ll even make that second, more permissive deadline, but I do think I can promise a release by then with a substantial degree of confidence.
But, as the Zen Master says, ‘we’ll see’.
