We have a team of around fifteen keen playtesters and proofreaders currently at work, already exploring Devon and Cornwall through the passages of Steam Highwayman: Princes of the West. It was a great feeling to have other eyes – and enthusiastic ones at that – on the text again, after many months of solo endeavour.
What’s the point? Well, along with getting some feedback on macro gameplay like difficulty and pacing, I hope to squash as many of these as possible…
The dreaded broken link – every gamebook enthusiast’s nightmare. In a book of 2251 passages with almost 10,000 links, there is a lot of opportunity for mistakes.
The proofing and playtesting window is two months, which gives me time to work on all the other parts of your reward bundle. This week I have been working on the Adventurer’s Logbook…
That means revisiting Highways and Holloways and writing out a Hints and Achievements list like I did for Smog and Ambuscade. It’s not a quick job but it’s very enjoyable – I get to enjoy reading all the quests I wrote in 2018, many of which I’ve forgotten. I mean to do something better than a simple printed list – perhaps a table layout for one or more dates or ticks to say, yes, I achieved this on this date during my fourth playthrough or something… It’s not quite certain yet. For the sake of originality, I was looking at a fun paper size (eg long and slim, like DL) and maybe ringbound, but due to cost of both postage and printing, I’m more likely to go for a stapled A5 booklet at the moment. But we’ll see.
Perhaps something like this – this was the DL layout. Either way, the list of achievements is a great way to advertise the book. What can you do in a Steam Highwayman adventure? A lot more than defeat some fantasy monsters, rob a dungeon and defeat a wizard, that’s for sure, in both variety and length. These lists of achievements don’t tell the whole story of the adventures in the books – both the prose and the gameplay are needed for that – but they give a great flavour.
What next? In the next fortnight I mean to…
- Complete the Adventurer’s Logbook
And that will be plenty to get done!
Next update due: 27.3.26