Home of the Steam Highwayman
My latest update (number 37) is now live on Kickstarter. It gives some tasty stats about how far along the fulfillment track I am (with some much-appreciated help…)
But then it veers off, like an over-powered iron-framed velosteam on a narrow country lane, into announcing this.
Steam Highwayman will be available as a mobile gamebook app this Summer 2021.
You can read the update here. But the update doesn’t tell you what it feels like to see a little green tick next to the mini image of the book that has been waiting for release on my IngramSpark account for over a year… It feels great.
I’m also excited and emotional because of another little Steam Highwayman treat that was sent my way today. Not the two backers who already let me know that they received their maps and that they loved them – that was nice. Something even better…
Something I’m going to post about on Saturday.
In the next few weeks I’m looking forward to re-jigging this website so that Steam Highwayman is front and centre, uploading some new images and generally having a spruce-up, and also to writing about the process of making SH3. I guess this is a spring in my step.
My thirty-fifth update for the Steam Highwayman III Kickstarter project is now live – you’re welcome to have a read, even if you’re not a backer.
Broadly speaking, the project is now squarely in the fulfilment phase, even though I haven’t sent any actual rewards yet. But anyone who’s ever run their own Kickstarter project knows how this point, with the cardboard boxes stacking up in their living room, feels like a watershed. Some of that cardboard is being re-purposed to make roads for Teodora to drive her cars on as I write this…
Once this is over, I’m really looking forward to posting other writing on here again – and giving myself the time to work on other writing projects. I’m certainly not short of ideas!
My thirty-third Kickstarter Update for the Steam Highwayman III: The Reeking Metropolis is now live on Kickstarter. Writing these almost every fortnight has become a rhythm of Saturday evening at the laptop over the last year – during which time I’ve gone from being the father of one to a father of two. Sammy has been resting on my chest in a sling while I’ve been preparing the update – but soon this project will be complete. It’s amazing to say it.
One of the details to finish is the labelling on my large maps for SH1 and SH2. The little extract above shows a crucial location in Highways and Holloways – Aston Hill, an ideal place to ambush passing vehicles, and Stokenchurch, a small town in the north-eastern corner of the map with Coal Board depot, church, inn and market. The road running to the south-east heads down to Piddington and the map of Smog and Ambuscade; other roads lead to Ibstone and the Hamble vale, Christmas Common and Lane End, through Cadmore End and Bolter End. It’s a region I know very well, both from riding myself, and from poring over maps for an age. Unfortunately in our timeline, the M40 cuts through here, with a very dramatic cutting at Aston Hill, where the chalk escarpment has been dug out into a sharp-sided ‘V’. When I rode this area, my Yamaha RXS100 didn’t have the power to ride the motorway, so I learnt the backroads instead.
The issue I have to complete is with the lettering: getting the right font, style and size, together with the perfect positioning of each label so that they can be read easily, with a minimum of overlaps with all the field-lines and lane-walls I drew. I’ll get there: once I know exactly what I want, I’ll be able to correct the maps quite quickly.
This has turned into a bit of a bonus – I only intended to signpost the Kickstarter – but I guess my fingers have been missing the keyboard.
Over on Kickstarter you can read the most recent update for my Steam Highwayman III: The Reeking Metropolis project. It’s a while since I’ve linked them up on here, but why not? You’ll find out which map took me longest to draw, and how soon I hope for the book to be on its way to backers!
Over on Kickstarter you can read my most recent progress report about the Steam Highwayman III: The Reeking Metropolis project, including a little bit of background about the fine illustration you can see above these words, which is, of course, by the one and only Russ Nicholson.
Over on Kickstarter I’ve just posted my 21st update about Steam Highwayman III: The Reeking Metropolis. You can find out what I’ve been doing over the past fortnight, and what’s planned for the next two weeks as well.
When Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson invented the Fabled Lands codeword system, they created something that massively increased the interactivity of gamebook adventures. Until then, gamebooks tracked a player’s activity through a combination of several techniques: simple branching, unique possessions and player memory. Simple branching is straightforward: if the player was reading a passage that was only reachable after a choice, then the text could ‘know’ that this choice had been taken and could describe what had happened as a result. However, this is a one-time and one-directional choice: no reader can go back and ‘undo’ their choice in the same read-through, and other branches of the narrative are closed to them until they die and restart.
Unique possessions, usually noted in an adventure sheet, can also identify whether a player has made certain previous choices. If a particular horned helmet is only available within the loot of a dragon, then by asking the reader whether they possess it, the book is also practically tracking whether the reader defeated or avoided the dragon earlier in the story. However, this can be complicated if a reader has to manage a limited inventory and decides to jettison an item that seems, at the time, unimportant.
Player memory was the least sophisticated and least reliable of these methods. It was used when a passage simply asked the reader something like ‘Have you visited this place before?’ Problems here are the ease of cheating and the need to ask this question quite soon after the original event, meaning a short consequence delay, because readers can genuinely be quite forgetful.
Whereas codewords are something else. An alphabetical list of neutral, arbitrary(ish) words that can be ticked – and unticked – are unlose-able, repeatable and undoable trackers that can be used by the writer of a gamebook to note any variable they choose. Your reader defeats the dragon? Get them to tick the codeword Basket. Your reader returns to the dragon’s cave. If they possess Basket, all they will find is an empty cave and a faint smell of sulphur… but if they don’t possess it, turn to passage 701 where the dragon is alive and well. Until the reader visits these passages, the appearance of the word Basket in a list in the back of the book doesn’t even hint at the mortality of a dragon. What do these all do, we wonder. If Basket tags a dead dragon, could Burnish imply that the protagonist is pursued by a vengeful ghost? (That one is very Dave Morris).
In short, codewords allowed Morris and Thomson to invent the open-world, responsive gamebook. It’s an elegant and a powerful system, and one which Fabled Lands doesn’t abuse by leaning on too heavily. Unlike what I think I’ve done in Steam Highwayman III: The Reeking Metropolis.
In the current draft, SH3 has 98 codewords… Some of those track choices in other books and offer you the consequences of actions you took in other books – or that you will only be able to take when I write future books. Some track non-player-character’s attitudes or destinies, locations, others track quest solutions, faction loyalties, the profitability of certain businesses and a whole lot of other stuff. In fact, one of the powerful results of this system is the ability to cause side-effects: the reader kills a soldier and gains a certain codeword, meaning that when they return to that location, the soldier will be dead. But what about when the player visits a nearby terrace and, possessing the same codeword, is directed to a cottage where a wife weeps over her lost husband and cries, knowing that she and her hungry children will soon be evicted for unpaid rent? Now that’s interactivity.
But 98 is a few too many, so I’ll be trimming the fat in the next few weeks. But until then, peer at a blurry section of the entire list and enjoy your own puzzle: what do these arbitrary words actually track? What is possible in The Reeking Metropolis?
Over on Kickstarter I’ve just posted an update about the current project progress. It’s a full one, including some details about plans up until November as well as lots of remarks about work complete. Head over there and enjoy the details!
Over here is a fresh image from Russ, full of action and violence – great! You might spot the eponymous hero himself somewhere in the background (sensibly masked against infectious diseases) as well as a backer in the brawl…
I took a week (and a couple of extra days) off from working on Steam Highwayman III: The Reeking Metropolis to visit the Lake District with my wife and daughter. The project hasn’t stopped, though – faithful Russ has been churning out the good old black-and-white, as you will be able to see over on the new Kickstarter update. I’m very pleased to be able to reveal the first full-page feature for The Reeking Metropolis – so take a look at Update 19!
You can also discover where I went in the Lake District to encounter some live steam… mmm!