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.

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.