Author: martinnoutch

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Update 18: Continuing to format

January has shot by – and progress is good.

– I paid Ben for the finalised internal illustrations.  I’m now only holding funds for the printing of the books and the extras.

– I’ve spent four days and several late-night stints formatting the book – so far, I’m up to passage 722.  This is essentially a long, careful paste-up, as I take sections of 100 passages from my gdoc and paste them into Microsoft publisher, and then work through them in order, checking lineation, reformatting bold and italic fonts, which I use a lot, adding in a lot of invisible tables and setting in the minor and major illustrations.  I think I’m now about ⅓ of the way through this long and painstaking job.

– Rather than correct the rumour engine from the outside, I’ve been correcting it as I go through the formatting: each time I reach a beer or other rumour passage, I can select which of the rumours to link in from a list of nearly 60.

– Likewise, as I’ve reached shops and places to trade, I’ve logged the items to be bought and sold so that everything needed can be accessed somewhere.  Prices are high in parts of Cornwall, cut off behind the Imperial blockade – but there’s money to be made if you know where to offload your loot!

– I’ve checked the codewords to passage 700, but there are more to do.

– I’ve checked the inter-book links and written a missing link that takes you on a railway journey to London.

The plan is to continue working at this pace until the book is formatted.  It’s taking longer than I had hoped because the book is … longer than expected.

But being so careful as I go does have the benefit of giving me the chance to comb my way through the passages.  I’ve made plenty of corrections as I’ve gone along – typos, bad links, duplications and so on – but also edited and improved the clarity of the writing in some places and, I think, improved the game in a few minor ways.

It’s been pleasant to re-read sections that I wrote a long time ago and enjoy the story from the inside as well.  There is a broad distribution of sections across the map too – passage 300-399 in one area and 400-499 in another – so it’s a bit like travelling across the region as well.  Coupled with memories from our trip to Cornwall and Devon in September, I’ve really been in the saddle in my mind.

What next?

– I’ll be continuing to format the document!  This is probably another 10 days work – so it may be March before I’m ready to send or share it with proofreaders.

Next update due: 13.2.26

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Update 17: Formatting and Fitting Cornwall In

A happy new year to each of you faithful backers!  Thanks for your support and patience through 2025 🙂  Here’s a New Year and an approaching end to this project.  What have I done and what is still to do?

Since last update, I:

– recovered from the flu.  Thanks for all the messages of sympathy and support, the prayer and wishes for our recovery.

– completed the massive item survey which lists every instance of each item used in Princes of the West.  There are 321 unique items so far in the series and keeping them in order is an ever-growing challenge!  Some are one-use quest items, gained in a single location and tied to a specific event, while others are useful for both quests and trade, can be collected in different places and have importance differences in prices or availability tied to the story of your adventure.  I have tried not to bloat the book with more stuff for the sake of it, but a certain amount of crucially Cornish and Devonian content has crept in…

– completed two black-and-white internal maps for the book.  These are adapted from the large map that flew as a background in the adverts and videos for my Kickstarter, but it has taken some time to get them right.  It goes like this.

Every gamebook needs a map, but an open-world gamebook needs one even more.  While I, the author, know exactly where I am at any given time, feedback from readers tells me that navigating the world of Steam Highwayman is both challenging and rewarding – but certainly a big job.  Very well.  That means that a map has to be clear and unambiguous.

A black-and-white version of the large map (which is not completely finished) would be hard to read – least of all, due to the need to shrink it.  In fact, the shape of Devon and Cornwall is also an issue – I struggled for a long while before landing on the current solution – which is an idiosyncratic re-arrangement of the Cornish peninsula, proudly skewiff.  I hope it doesn’t end up being too confusing to navigate with.

I took the outline from the big map, chopped it up, relabelled the towns and other crucial locations and then sent it back over to the ipad for bordering…  Then I did the same for Devon, which didn’t need spinning by 45 degrees and added in a few scrawled notes for flavour.

I think they are what I need.  Legibility is key – a map that fits on a 10” x 8” page simply can’t hold as much as a big A2 spread – and that means that there is certainly a benefit to ordering the big maps beside their beauty.  Some more playtesting will, I hope, reveal whether there are other changes that need to be made or more information that should best be added.

– completed a skill survey to see which attributes are tested most frequently and to try to balance their difficulty.  This is not my speciality but I have had some good advice in the past which is getting baked into this stage.

– fitted and formatted the first 50 passages into the document that will produce our print copies of Princes of the West.  This means fiddling with all the margins, the arrangements for tables in shops, dice rolls and other options, ordering the early pages for the introductions and maps and getting it ready to import the other 2200 or so passages.

That brings me to a couple of things I need to tell you!  Firstly – the book is going to be bigger than expected.  Probably nearer 400 pages than 300…  The increase in print cost is covered by your pledges and the contingency built into the funding, but it might make some of the postage costs increase.  I’m looking into this.

Secondly, I’m several months behind where I had hoped to be.  I could rush and try to get the books to you by the end of February or March, but it is very likely that they will contain errors that we will all regret.  No-one wants a big page of errata to look at on a website when they’re trying to play a paper gamebook.

My current thinking is – press ahead with the formatting of the pdf and squash as many bugs as possible; use placeholder images where necessary – although Ben has completed the illustrations, some of them need re-formatting before I can use them; get a pdf copy to any of you who would like to playtest it as soon as I can.  This is different to how I’ve done things before and it would not be a real release of an e-book – but it has a couple of upsides.  Firstly, anyone who wants to get started on the adventure can do so, importing a current character or continuing a current game.  Secondly, that means more eyes spotting problems – whether typos, broken links or other issues.  How does that sound?

I really want to do the book justice after more than 2 years of writing, so rushing it out now is not a great option.  I also need more time to complete the other pieces of the project, such as the logbook and the two standalone stories I promised you!  I thought I’d be able to write those while the book was in playtesting, but all my writing time has been taken up with finishing Princes of the West and tying up the many loose ends I had left.

So what’s next? I can answer that directly.  In the next fortnight I mean to:

– Continue importing the draft into the publisher document and making corrections where necessary.

– Triple-check (I’ve done it twice already!) the codeword list

– Check all connections to other Steam Highwayman books – written and unwritten

– Fix the rumour engine (I’ve had to write a lot more rumours since I first did this – so some need to be unplugged and some need to be plugged in)

– Write a little roadkill passage for section 51 (which turned out to be almost duplicate 😉 )

Next update due: 30/1/26

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Update 16: Struck by Influenza – the Indomitable Highwayman Steams On!

A painful fortnight. Last Monday (8th December), I spent several hours planning the sequence that has given me the greatest amount of trouble in the whole book: Lundy. It is based around some real history and a couple of nice gameplay ideas that have been with me for over two years, yet I’d not completed them on account of the complexity of the idea, my dissatisfaction with my various attempts and something doggedly frustrating about the whole section. But I collated all my previous drafts, cut some pieces out of the main draft, replanned some flowcharts and prepared to write.

Then on Tuesday, I wrote solidly for around six hours, putting down more than three thousand words. And as I steamed into the final passage – which is actually a fortuitous reuniting with the Ferguson after a long velosteamless sequence – I felt a heaviness come upon me. It was the flu.

Rather than being able to celebrate that the final piece of a very troublesome draft had at last been completed, I rang up everyone I was committed to for the next few days, cancelled everything and battened down the hatches. It got me – it got my wife – it got three of my four small children. Think of sleepless, feverish toddlers who can’t say what they need or want – frustrated parents who can hardly keep their own tempers – a writer kept from his draft – a mother soldiering on for the sake of her loved ones.

It was tragic. And no choice was involved whatsoever.

In the last two days I’ve been recovering. Today I managed to renumber all the passages from that blitz last Tuesday and import them into the main draft – which now stands at a colossal 2271 passages. Then after doing that, I’ve begun the final item check – testing that each of the items is where it should be. This is prior to setting the shops right – more than 50 of them – where you should be able to offload your loot and buy supplies for mending your vel and keeping your fires stoked. As well as crucial stuff like cough medicine.

I’m considerably behind where I wanted to be: I hoped to be able to release a late-playtesting version to you before Christmas – there has already been some playtesting since April this year – and I had hoped to be well into the formatting of the main book, as well as further along in the production of the extras. Nonetheless, I’m happy with what I’ve managed to do – particularly considering the flu.

Will this effect my completion date? Realistically, I think that February would be miraculous – but I don’t think it will be long after. I will need to look back at my main project timeline with fresh eyes and book in the time for everything before I can be more specific. Ben is in the process of drawing the final spot illustrations – his main pages are finished – and the main map is close to completion too – it just needs a little more labelling.

I won’t be doing anything else on the project now until the New Year – I’m taking a break from the saddle – so next update is due 16.1.26. Thanks for all your support and patience – Princes of the West is going to be a gamebook for the record books.

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Rhinos and Pills

I’ve put in several solid days and a few evenings this fortnight.  What’s happened to the draft?  I have…

  • Begun to reorganise and check the rumours
  • Complained about the quality of some copper
  • Added some rhinos, filling in a great Cornish location, connecting up a mechanic that I had pre-written and creating a new friendship.  The rhinos even get an illustration.
  • Put a trap in an otherwise-helpful location…
  • Written a party in Barnstaple
  • Created a network selling performance-enhancing pills…  This has quite a backstory.
  • Written the final beer – with some choices in exactly how you receive it, which was fun.
  • Continued the list of achievements for The Reeking Metropolis.
  • Worked on the touring guide to accompany Princes of the West.
  • Filled in a brewery,
  • Used a quay.
  • Removed some flowers.
  • Cut a fishing trip (there’s already plenty of fish)
  • Checked and corrected the border crossings
  • Checked and corrected the Solidarity Point systems
  • Cut rabbits

That means I haven’t completed some of the tasks I wanted to last update.  Lundy is still to complete, although several of the modules listed above relate to it directly.  I haven’t corrected anyone’s inconsistent accent.  That’s all to come.  But I’m getting closer and closer to the moment when I can stop.

Right now there’s a crying baby on my lap, so I’m going to stop here.

Next update due: 19.12.25

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Update 14: Giving to the poor… repeatedly!

Last week, personal matters took priority.  This week, I hit the project hard – very hard.  What have I managed?

I completed the smuggling module.  This is now built of several sequences: an introductory adventure based around one of the key characters; twenty rumours; six location-based repeatable voyages; six trade destinations; several sub-routine encounters that can affect different voyages; seven locations for stashing your loot, some with chase sequences; and many passages allowing you to sell – or try to sell – liquor to the various publicans.  There are a few links into the main rebellion plot as well as an emergent debt dynamic that I quite like…  Anyway, I now feel confident that I’ve done more justice to the subject.  This could have been a book by itself!

I’ve thought hard about the second part of my Robin-Hood-inspired hero’s mission statement: I do occasionally introduce the Steam Highwayman as one who ‘robs from the rich and gives to the poor… or just keeps it.”  Well, in the first volumes, I don’t think I really gave the reader enough opportunities to give their cash away.  Well, there is now the chance to be charitable in (almost) any settlement, and the potential for it to impact your reputation through Solidarity Points – or, in Cornwall, for it to have another effect.  This is going to effect the balance of the series, but I don’t have a great problem with that.  I think I’m getting closer to the gameplay I always wanted.

  • I removed some old stub passages I created when I was trying to write long, story-style smuggling voyages.
  • I removed a gold-panning micro-game, which might be a better fit in Dark Vales & Dark Hearts anyway.
  • I edited the pony-drifting sequence, limiting it to a single location and event.
  • I added a hotel into Harrowbeer, which is a limited, high-class sort of pub…  Unlike the hotel in Mayfair, they will allow you to enter if you stink (GAL-2), as long as you are heading off for an immediate bath, anyway.
  • I’ve fixed a few churches, some of which didn’t really do anything until now.
  • I created a railway journey that needed some detail.
  • I fixed navigation through Barnstaple, which had become needlessly complicated.
  • I fixed a few pub parlours that hosted some higher-class interactions like trading shares and playing cards.
  • I fixed the Favour dynamic and wrote its brief rule section; this also required me to survey Friendships across the book.
  • I did a little bit of work on the Achievements list for The Reeking Metropolis – which includes measuring the rarity of some of the achievements.  I’ll write about this another time: it’s quite a big subject!
  • I checked and completed the logic governing your interactions with another key character – but not one who is involved with the Cornish Rebellion.  Someone with the potential to be a benefactor… or a malefactor.
  • I even used some of the opportunities presented by improving all of these to do my very first reservations in the Dark Vales & Dark Hearts spreadsheet.

The illustration shows you my current planning preferences: I create flowcharts – in pencil first – then number them, filling in my spreadsheet as I go.  I colour the boxes in the flowchart when I’ve written them, sometimes using different colours if I’m trying to distinguish or remember something, and adding codewords or other keys in red.  It’s nice, when I’ve finished a sequence, to scrawl in felt tip so I know that the page is done and I don’t need to check it.

This is the fourth notebook I’ve filled.  I’ve landed on exactly what I like best: an A4, ring-bound dot-patterned book.

So what’s next?  I’m speeding up and there’s a lot of checking as I go now.  I need to:

  • Check, count and standardise the Solidarity Points
  • Rebuild the rumour engine (I’ve increased the number of rumours significantly!)
  • Fix Lundy
  • Check the accent for one of the main characters: when I began writing her, she had a kind of standard English, but she became more Cornish as time went on.  I need her to be one or the other – but she appears in at least fifty passages.

Next update due: 5.12.25

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Update 13 – You must never break the chain

That’s the chain of updates, of course.  But also, in a moment of genuine inspiration, I created a unique marker that unlocks several parts of the Smuggling Module (Q1h/Q165) – the chain tattoo that you gain, involuntarily, after completing your smuggling training with the Terror, Terence Kneebone, aboard his steam crester, the Swell Dolly.

Who is the Steam Highwayman?  A free adventurer, bound to no-one, riding wherever you will…  Until you accept something like Penrose’s ring or the chain tattoo and you become associated with a dreaming visionary revolutionary or a ruthless smuggler.

This last two weeks I’ve been working almost entirely on the smuggling module.  I thought I could write a short series of passages, but to balance out the scale of the trade network I’ve already built for firkins of brandy and the like, I have needed some size, length and openness.  In a way, I’ve rebuilt something like the open-sea module, but without as much freedom.  Yet I’ve still needed some passage extensions to the book to fit in what’s needed.

How does it work?  Well, that all depends where you are.  In Devon, you’ll simply need to find some smugglers on the North or South coast, win their trust, hire them to sail with you, head out to a rendezvous on a foreign shore or at sea, buy contraband and then bring it to a depot point, put it ashore, return to your port, head to your depot, get your contraband aboard your velosteam – provided you have your barrel panniers fitted – be lucky enough to escape the attention of the Constables, bring your cargo to a buyer, like a friendly landlord, avoid narks, get a good price and repeat.  Information regarding most of this – rendezvous points, willing smugglers, innkeepers happy to buy and places where you can hide your goods – is readily available as a series of rumours you’ll hear in pubs, freight yards or on the road.

And in Cornwall?  It’s complicated by the Imperial Blockade, which is meant to stop small craft bringing goods into Cornwall, so you’ll need to be lucky in avoiding their ships, or have money for bribes, or a fearless crew ready to fight, or perhaps a craft that can submerge…  And then, once ashore, your sale of spirits is carefully observed by the gangs answering to Bad Percy and the Terror – so you’ll need to pay a share whenever you do sell some barrels, cutting into your profits.

And of course, you’ll need to wear the chain tattoo to gain the trust of anyone in the network.

If it sounds complex, it is.  There are around thirty codewords that track your access to rendezvous and depot locations, the availability of the six different vessels you can sail with and the attitudes of the gangs towards you.  There are around thirty rumours that carry information about it all – and although the module is mostly standalone, it ties in, of course, with several of the key dynamics of the Rebellion.  After all, liquor is not the only contraband you can smuggle into Free Cornwall.

Why bother?  Wasn’t the book almost finished already?  Well, Cornwall without smuggling would be like a pasty without pastry – it would always have been a massive regret.  And to do it well, as I mentioned above, when there is now a network of around forty places wanting to buy your firkins of gin or lace scarves, I needed something semi-open.  I’ve done my best to limit the size and repetitiveness of the strands, but I’ve also accepted that the book will be massively improved by something that is at my standard of ‘good-enough’ – I don’t need to invent new mechanics to solve this.  Hence the proliferation of codewords, when instead some sort of map-based solution has occasionally suggested itself to me.

This is going to greatly alter the balance of the book.  The amount of money that can be made is large – as long as you have capital.  It increases the danger that Terence Kneebone poses and embroils you deeper in his nefarious network.  Who is the Steam Highwayman? In Cornwall, a smuggler of unlicensed brandy, steaming along clifftops with the Constables in pursuit, just as the place demands.

So since last update I have:

  • Fixed a roadside encounter with poor workmanship
  • Written a new pub in Helston
  • Completed Q11 – the orchestral airship quest.  This is a fun one reminiscent of the airship quests in Highways & Holloways.
  • Planned more than 200 passages of the smuggling module
  • Written around 70 passages of the module

And what next?  In the next fortnight I aim to:

  • Finish the smuggling module!

Next update due: 21.11.25

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Kickstarter Update 12: Been doin a little import-export, eh?

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

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Update 10: Steam Highwayman Goes West!

I just returned from a trip to Devon and Cornwall to help ‘colour in’ the last portions of the map where I still hadn’t got enough content – if you can believe that a gamebook of 1800 passages felt a bit empty!  This is one of the challenges of writing in an open-world – creating a map that feels broad and exciting – and then having to make sure the places you go all have things worth doing!  The emptiest bits were the toes of Cornwall – St Ives, St Michael’s Mount and the Lizard – and a few other corners.

Well, I found plenty of material to stuff the sock with.  You’ll find quality content all the way down now!

While there, I also found the time to work on:

  • Writing the end of the main quest – the showdown between Imperial and Free Cornish forces – with you in the middle!
Plotting the burning of Bude…  Sorry, Bude.
  • A new character based on genuine Steampunk history to appear in Bude.  I had heard of him before but had forgotten about him, and when I was reminded of what he did, I had to include him…
Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, Cornish inventor of the steam road car and other stuff.
  • I dutifully investigated some genuine Cornish and Devon beer… and notes will be included in the book.  I brought back another 5 bottles to research.  Special mention to Sharp’s Sea Fury – an absolutely cracking Special Ale I drank on our last night in the West at a pub that will feature in the book.  Think rich, roasted, balanced – moreish!  But my children had finished their fish and chips and we had to get them back to the caravan after just a single pint.
  • The earlier part of the trip took us to some special Devon places too, and we stayed for one night in a pub near Lydford on the side of Dartmoor…  Pure Highwayman stuff!
My daughter in a moody Dartmoor mist at the Nine Maidens above Okehampton…  You’ll want to remember this spot!
  • I’ve been re-building some of the trackers that measure your impact on Cornish freedom – previously, the different Princes each had their own power, but I think this is going to be rolled together into a Support for the Rebellion number – points gained when you help the Cornish prepare for an Imperial assault or when you stoke support for Arthur – and then the same metric will help decide what happens in the final sequence of the main quest.

I’ve been in contact with Ben some more too, and will be getting the next batch of illustrations underway soon.  In the next fortnight I hope to:

  • Finalise the main quest!
  • Return to the fight mechanics
  • Plan the next batch of illustrations with Ben

Next update due: 11th October

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Kickstarter Update 9: A Busy Start to September

Whoops!  I missed my schedule and didn’t post last night – funny, since I’ve had a draft of this update for almost the full fortnight…  

And it’s been a good one.  I’ve managed 4.5 days on the project, so progress looks like this:

  • I completed the Quest Survey!  Princes of the West contains 167 quests and encounters, ranging from the mighty Quest 1 to the diminutive fleeting encounter with a Welsh Druid.
  • I worked for several hours on the Codeword chart, and trimmed 3 unnecessary codewords.  Yes!
  • I completed the Room Survey,  and then standardised the options you have when staying in pubs, out-of-the-way farms, country houses and caves.  Rooms are crucial to the model of rob-flee-rest, and not every room gets the same options…
  • I spent quite a bit of time thinking about baths – one of the new systems I added into The Reeking Metropolis, but never really tidied up, meaning that it is quite possible that your character may still stink (GAL-2) after 5 years… There are now plenty of places to bathe in the west…
  • Seeing a gap in the far west, I created a new room in St Ives, which might yet get a spin-off quest (168?)…  As I re-wrote the pub, I joined up the passages with a sequence governed by the key codeword Dictatorial – you’ll remember this one.  It was one of the first modules I wrote for Princes of the West, almost two years ago (October 2023), and the smoothness of the narrative flow made me laugh aloud in glee.  You probably won’t notice a seam in the story, but there is an enforcer and friends who seem to move across Cornwall even faster than you…
  • I worked on the Shop Survey, which showed me I need to be very careful, as this risks becoming repetitive, wasteful and even broken!  There are more than 300 items in Steam Highwayman, and exactly where and how you can buy and sell them is crucial.  So I am considering some new buying and selling rules, including suspicious items*, item classes and an item gazette printed in the rear of the book.
  • This meant I had to look at the Item Survey, so I updated my master spreadsheet to reference all the current instances of items.  This is crucial to standardising their spellings, stats and prices…  But it can also be a creative process, as it prompts me to consider which items are currently under-utilised…  Perhaps that auto-rifle prototype you created for the Great Exhibition would be of interest to the Cornish rebels?
  • Following this, I worked on the Defeat Cycle for a few hours.  One of the inspirations behind this is the ‘chumbawumba’ loop in Sid Meier’s Pirates! Gold, which I began playing in around 1996 and is my essential standard of sandbox/open-world/roleplaying game.  I’m a hard enemy of permadeaths, really – I’ll cheat to avoid them and improve the story – so in Steam Highwayman when you are finally defeated in a battle, arrested or left at the roadside for dead, there are always a few routes open to you…  Friendships are key here – I really liked the way these were written back in Smog & Ambuscade and in The Reeking Metropolis I loved the idea that the Waterside boys might repay you with a rescue.  So there are several loops to get you back up again, both in Cornwall and Devon.
  • I’m closing in on completing a key quest that opens up when you are arrested by the Constables.  It was an early sketch but I’ve never been quite happy with it, so it’s a priority.
  • And Ben submitted drafts of four full-page illustrations…  A tiny part of one is below, to whet your appetite.

And what next, in the next fortnight?  Or where next?

I’ll be in Devon and Cornwall for most of the next two weeks, visiting a few locations that have stubbornly resisted inspiration, gathering real ideas to turn into story content.  It’ll be a family holiday-cum-business trip, and steam trains profit both.

I might manage to actually write while I’m there, but I’m not putting any pressure on myself.  If it happens, it’ll happen, and if it doesn’t, I know I’ll be all the more efficient once back at home.

And what else has been taking up my time?  This is less relevant to the project and more of interest if you want to know what sort of things influence me and…

  • Reading online:
    • Rand Roll – including a recent interview with Joseph Fry, whose excellent Lost in the City I read in draft last year, and which I recommend as an atmospheric and original modern gamebook.
    • A series reviewing the Usborne Puzzle Adventure books – these got into my head at the same time as Pirates! Gold and Fabled Lands.
    • The excellent filfre.net posted an article about… gamebooks!  This is one of my regular fortnightly reads, as Jimmy Maher’s history of computer games is exciting, nostalgic, well-researched and fluently-written.  His archives include a fantastic 10-part study of Civilisation.
  • I’m circumnavigating the works of Patrick O’Brien for the sixth or seventh time – currently in The Far Side of the World.
  • I’m reading Judges with my family…  My children are just encountering the biblical, unwatered-down account of Samson.
  • I’m reading the Gospels – particularly to inform my Sunday preaching at church – usually twice a month.
  • I recently read and enjoyed Robert Macfarlane’s children’s picture book The World to Come – if you have children under ten, take a look.  Rob went to my school and then taught me at university, so I have an interest in his writing.
  • I’ve been watching two fantastic youtube series, each of which have reached some recent highlights:
  • I’ve been listening to Eric Clottey’s UCB mixes, particulalry while working.
  • I’ve been editing a book of poetry.

Next update due: 26-9-25 from Newquay, Cornwall.

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Kickstarter Update 8: Snatching a few moments on Friday night

Title explained: the four children go to bed around 7…  My wife puts the baby to bed a bit earlier and stays with him until he’s settled…  I put the older three (6, 4, 2) to bed from about 7, but it can easily take 90 minutes before they each have teeth brushed, pajamas on, stories read, milk in non-spillable cups (not the eldest – she’s happy to just sleep)- the two year-old needs a nappy – and then we talk through the ‘Story of the Day’ and pray before they are ready to be left.  Then, if I’m not too shattered – today I was filling gaps in a 60m2 concrete floor and preparing it for a latex compound pour – I can turn the computer on, check a couple of life admin things, and write you all an update.

It’s not been the productive fortnight I had hoped for, but I’ve long since learned to accept that there are ebbs and flows in my projects.  It just means that I’ll have to adapt my schedule and be hyper-efficient when I next get down to it. Still, my commitment to update you all on progress means I’m not about to hide away – or be ashamed of a slower couple of weeks.  That’s how radio silence happens, and the slippery slope of a month without an update becomes an absent creator who stops seeing their project as a priority or their backers as deserving communication!  I’ve seen it plenty of times, and you probably have too.  Nor have I been entirely away from Steam Highwayman.  So what’s been done?

– The main focus has been continuing the Quest survey in Princes of the West.  I’ve used the opportunity to edit and improve some of the quests as I’ve gone – removing a few unnecessary codewords and other variables, improving the flow of one passage into another and checking that global changes make sense.  There’s still a lot to do on this – particularly the main quest, but you’ll get a sense of the scale of the project if I tell you that there are currently more than 130 quests in the log.

– The codeword check is also still underway.

– The funds came through – at last!  I’ve not spent any yet, though…  

– I’ve followed up with a few more late backers, bringing total supporters to 322.

– There were also quite a lot of non-SH activities – a long August Bank Holiday weekend at David’s Tent (a Christian worship festival in Gloucestershire) with family and quite a lot of time renovating the floor in the space where my wife and I are setting up a home-schooling hub…  All worth doing, but it’s been writing time that has suffered.

I need to be realistic (maybe even conservative!) about the plan for the next two weeks, judging by how much floor I have to get covered, but I do have some days set aside for this work in the next week.  So maybe I’ll:

– Complete the quest log – this is now the priority

– Improve some of the quests

– Look at fixing/finishing the main quest

– Look at those fight mechanics!

– Plan a trip to Cornwall…

Thanks for following along!  Next update due: 12.9.25