Another fortnight of good, steady progress: about four days’ work in total – typically Mondays and Tuesdays during the day, before I do some tuition in the evenings. I also try to spend every other Friday on the project – but have to accept a half-day.
So what has been done?
- Quest 1X: the siege of Tintagel is now completely written. Finishing this quest creates some wide-ranging changed game states, so it’s taken time to write these into various locations too.
- Quest 2: Glo Rhydd is now butted in. The main part of this quest will take place in Steam Highwayman: Dark Vales & Dark Hearts. It isn’t necessary to complete the main objectives of Princes of the West, but it will be helpful.
- Quest 34: Friston’s Mistress has been “reconnected”.
- Quest 20: Landacre Farm has been entirely written from scratch – there was only a placeholder here previously, as it impacted the next big module and I had not yet worked out exactly what I wanted to do.
- The Smuggling Module is well underway. Princes of the West introduces a key new velosteam upgrade that allows you to carry two smuggled barrels or packages: these larger items, all associated with liquor or arms smuggling, have their own network, values and exchange rates. In the absence of the “open-sea module” I cut – about a year ago, I think – I’m creating a more direct series of smuggling voyages, which will nevertheless be repeatable. Quite a big piece of work.
- I rearranged and checked all of the subsidiary quests that input into Quest 1 – which includes the smuggling module, which is the last piece in that puzzle.
- I’ve balanced the Rebellion tracker with inputs across Cornwall. This is key to the final outcome of the main quest.
- I removed a redundant set of trackers – I was tracking the individual Power of the several (five!) Princes of the West – but this is better served by a single Rebellion tracker without weakening the story.
- I removed or repurposed several redundant codewords (including Dancer, Discriminate and Dissert).
- I added in a successful defence in court, preventing arrest from leading to a short drop at Execution Dock.
- I removed some passages left over from the interplay between the long-abandoned open-sea module and a major secondary quest – these are saved for another time, since I liked the writing. They might surface in Dark Vales & Dark Hearts.
- I have completed another beer description – based on the excellent Sea Fury I drank at Holywell Bay.
So why has it taken so long to conclude the writing of the major quest in Princes of the West? Well, one of the criticisms I’ve received about the first three volumes of Steam Highwayman has always been the lack of a single main storyline – something to draw the reader forward through the vast world. Of course, this is itself an artefact of the open-world gamebook model I inherited from Morris and Thomson – whose Fabled Lands are often criticised for the same thing. Now I love the experience of pottering around, making discoveries and stumbling upon plotlines, but for a long time I have wondered whether it was possible to do both: to make gamebook that is an open world but that contains a large, compelling story.
Princes of the West is my attempt to do that. In an rpg like Skyrim, Baldur’s Gate or Fallout, there is a key quest that moves through chapters, while other smaller quests can be played out of order – independently. This is the model for what I’ve tried to do in this book – and it is an ambitious one. Why? Because to make a main quest compelling, it must change the world around it, and coping with state changes in an open world is complex.
There are around fifteen ‘chapters’ in the main quest of Princes, which largely happen in a predefined sequence, guarded by codewords that track the game condition. But in the central phase of the gamebook, there are around fifteen spur quests which each effect one key tracker – the level of support for the Cornish rebellion – and the interplay of conditions and states here is complex.
This is what I have been looking over – and it was a good thing I did. Among the logical errors I found (and corrected) were key characters dying in one branch and simply disappearing in another, and multiple conflicting causes for the same event. These errors result from a very long (now over two-years-long) writing process and the complexity of the conditions I have tried to include – and I don’t think I’m going to do anything quite like this again! It has pushed me to the limit of my ability to track, remember and maintain consistency, and that has slowed me down and taken some of the pleasure out of writing the book. But on the other hand, I am looking at a degree of freedom and responsiveness that I have never achieved before… I hope you’re going to enjoy what you can get up to as the Steam Highwayman.
All of this hard-thinking has really got me keen to write down my thoughts on the structures and mechanics of open-world gamebooks – and I mean to add to my beginnings with a series of posts once Princes of the West is done. Coincidentally, Dave Morris has done some of that himself recently, even referencing Steam Highwayman as a development on the Fabled Lands model.
Lots to think about – and lots more to do. What’s next?
- Completing the smuggling module
- Fix the Favour trackers with the princes
- Correct and streamline the base for one of the Princes
- Continue to check and correct the other quests
Progress on these seems realistic! Next update due: 7.11.25