Category: kickstarter

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Update 20 – A Complete Internal of Princes of the West

Since the last update I completed the formatting of the interior of the book.  It is a whopper – currently at 2251 sections and 426 pages.  This took me so long for a couple of reasons:

– To maintain consistency, I’m using the same format and software as for the previous Steam Highwayman books.  These were completed on a copy of Microsoft Publisher 2007 on a laptop belonging to my wife that was bought in either 2007 or 2008…  Once I’m into the swing of things, there are no problems with memory, but I have to treat it fairly carefully to avoid crashes, battery issues and so on!

– I also go through each page manually, editing the layout of the options, spacing the passages in the columns and choosing and fitting spot illustrations (some call them ‘fillers’ but Russ always called them ‘spots’) to make up the space and break up the wall of text.  This is also a chance to edit and improve, either editing my writing or fixing links, filling in the shops and changing values for balance.  To complete the 2251 passages, this took around 10 days – something like 60 hours.

What then?  I have made a first stab at a new Character Sheet (or 3 sheets including the Devon Music Tour) to account for some changes in mechanics.  These are still not finalised.  Then I looked at refreshing the introduction and rules, but, to be honest, I was pretty frazzled by that stage!  These rules may need a bit more attention – and also some inputs.

One of the particular inputs I am thinking about is the fight rules.  I have two alternate fight systems – smalls changes to the essential rules – worked out with help from a backer who knows these books almost as well as I do – and I’m intending to share them with you and with anyone who wants to playtest, to see whether they actually improve the gameplay.

So my plan is to share the electronic interior of the book with any of you who want to proof it or playtest it – in fact, you should have already had my invitation to participate by email, and if not, please check your spam…  This leaves a lot still to do, but it means I can shift mode away from the very focussed writing, editing and formatting into the production of some of the other rewards.  Specifically, I will take a look at the large maps and get them printed as the next phase of the project.  They take a long time to fold, so the sooner I have them, the better!  Then I’ll move on to look at the logbook and a refreshed Companion, and also find time to produce the Harvest of Death and Dark, Satanic Mills that I promised you.

I also get to do some drawing – like the image of the Red Tiller above – perhaps reminiscent of the Blue Anchor in Helston?

Exciting times!

Next update due: 13.3.26

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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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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 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

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Kickstarter Update 7: At the keyboard on a hot afternoon

Here’s an update on progress so far on the Steam Highwayman: Princes of the West project.  What’s happened in the two weeks since the campaign ended?

– Pledges have all been collected and I’m awaiting the transfer of funds to complete – it looks like it’s in process, but my bank hasn’t notified me yet.

– I’ve followed up where I can with late backers and a few people whose payments didn’t come through.

– I’ve also had a flurry of sales of my old stock of the maps for Smog & Ambuscade, Highways & Holloways and The Reeking Metropolis – so these have been sent off in the post.

– I’ve been working on the codeword check  Codewords are a key component of the logic sequences in the quests, so they have to be right, and that also means checking codewords from other books that become relevant here in Princes of the West.  If your previous playthrough has ticked Amalgam, Amphibious or Bolster, then you’ll have some nice bonuses coming your way.

– I’ve spent a large amount of time on a quest survey – essentially, working through the entire draft, checking which passages are parts of which quest or event, and building up to checking that each one is a) finished and b) good.  I’ve already cut out a few orphan passages (without any inward links) that survived from earlier drafts of quests, freeing up about 5 passages’ worth of space.  This is also directly linked to the codeword check.

– The Item check – this has begun.  It’s a huge piece of work, like the codewords.  There are more than 300 unique items in the four books so far – some linked to quests, some purchasable or good for trade, and many that are both!  I love creating fun items, but I have to limit myself…

– I’ve begun creating and formatting the .pub document that will become the submitted print .pdf.  In the name of consistency, I’m using the same software and even the same old laptop for this that I did with the previous volumes: an old edition of Microsoft Publisher which formats things exactly how I like it – but once SH5 and 6 are done, I think it’ll probably be time to move on!  This document is key – I can reuse portions of previous documents – especially for paratexts like the copyright page, titling, introduction and epilogues – but everything needs careful changes – from as small as a change of title, illustrator and ISBN on the copyright page, right up to re-written epilogues.

There’s also been a lot of other stuff going on, including my son’s second birthday and a three-day visit from my brother and his family.

– I was meant to begin drafting Harvest of Death but it hasn’t happened yet, due to the big editing jobs described above.  Don’t worry – when the time is right, it will simply fly off the keyboard!

In the next fortnight, I hope to…

– Complete the quest check

– Complete the codeword check

– Look at my fight mechanics

– List and standardise the rooms

– Check links to the other books

– Be getting my hands on the funds at last!

– Possibly write up Harvest of Death

– Follow up some more backers who dropped out

If you have any input about the codewords, quests, fights or other mechanics, please get in touch.  My game design has improved a lot since the first book, but it’s by no means perfect, and this is one area I really want to improve for Princes of the West.

Next update due: 29.8.25

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How the Wheels Turn…

My next update for the Steam Highwayman III: The Reeking Metropolis has gone live on Kickstarter, and it looks like it will be almost the last.  Over the last eighteen months, I’ve been regularly updating my backers on the progress of the project.  Now, I’ll only need to update individuals, as a large proportion of backers already have their rewards in their hands and the vast majority are shipped and on their way.  What a lot has changed in those eighteen months!

There’s also been a great deal of change for gamebooks in that time.  Brian Hazzard’s excellent Instadeath Survivor’s Support Group podcast has appeared, providing the gamebook community with interviews and playthroughs, Alba and Legendary Kingdoms have been the two most successful gamebook Kickstarters ever (I can give them that, even if some of their other statistics are up for debate!) and countless individual titles have been released by independent authors.  There are entirely new gamebook authoring careers blossoming, like Kurosh Shadmand’s – who you can find featured as Lord Hadrian Beaufort in a duel atop the Monument in The Reeking Metropolis, courtesy of Russ Nicholson.

But as for me, I’m keen to get Steam Highwayman III fully fulfilled.  I’ll then spend a little more time working on this website – so watch out for some changes – and do some preparation of marketing materials.  Then I’ll be releasing The Reeking Metropolis for general sale.  I’m currently helping my wife prepare a book of her own for publication – I’ll certainly write more about that here – and I have a couple of stories I would like to write without the pressure of delivering them to an audience.

Oh, and there’s the app coming.

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Reader’s Companion for I-III Ready

I’ve just posted my 38th Kickstarter update for Steam Highwayman: The Reeking Metropolis.  More than half of the rewards are on their way and it’s been very exciting to see pictures of my books being unwrapped and appearing on bookshelves all over the world.

As part of the project, I promised to produce an updated Reader’s Companion to accompany the first three volumes.  It’s ready for download here.  Did you use the previous one for books I and II?  Fancy sharing the possession you really couldn’t put down?  Fancy showing how much you stashed away in Coulter’s?  I haven’t seen any of these filled in, except for my own.

 

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Steam Highwayman Coming to Mobile this Summer!

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.

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Meet the Reeking Metropolitans!

A new update for my Kickstarter Campaign of Steam Highwayman III: The Reeking Metropolis has gone live.  It’s brief, but includes some tasty images of the sort of people you might mingle with in the muddy streets of London…  Ohh, let me take you by the hand, and lead you through the streets of London…  I’ll show you something…  Ahem.  Excuse me.

And here is Russ’s rendition of that wonder of nineteenth-century prefabrication, Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, which housed the Great Exhibition.  Not bad for a gardener from Derbyshire, eh?  Paxton, not Russ.  Russ is Scottish.  And not a gardener.  Not primarily, anyway.

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Steam Highwayman III Reward Pledges

In just over a week, Steam Highwayman III: The Reeking Metropolis will go live on Kickstarter. It’s taken a long time to plan this campaign, partly because I’ve chosen to add some merchandise into the equation, as well as offering two ways in which Backers can see themselves in the finished book.

The basic pledge is exactly like in my previous campaigns; for £15, backers can receive a copy of the gamebook with a written acknowledgement printed in the back. This is a little cheaper than the RRP and, of course, you’ll know that you helped create this. If you’re looking for extras, I’ve been working on custom dice, as well as beginning to redraw the maps from Smog and Ambuscade and Highways and Holloways. These will be printed, large (at around A2 size) and folded, together with a small booklet of further regional info, much like an OS map. For £30 you will be able to receive the book, three maps (one for each volume) and two custom D6.

If you don’t yet own your own copies of Smog and Ambuscade and Highways and Holloways, or if you’d like to make a pledge as a gift for someone, you can also have all three books at a considerable saving, with or without the maps and dice.

However, for an additional cost of £10 for one book or £20 for three, you can have a custom Wanted Poster printed into the front of your book. This is made possible by the power of print-on-demand, and your books will be completely unique – these will be true one-offs. The extra pledge will pay for the additional printing cost and contribute towards the rest of the project. You will be able to submit a digital image of yourself (perhaps a photo in costume, or even in everyday clothes) that I will edit into the poster, and this will be the first thing you see when you open your copy of The Reeking Metropolis.

Finally, there is a limited and exclusive opportunity to be drawn into the book itself, featuring as a character in one of the illustrations. This is going to be limited to only 5 backers, since it impacts directly on Russ’s timeline and on the whole budget. But it’s something I’ve wanted to offer for years! As part of your pledge, you’ll receive each book, customised with a Wanted Poster, the three maps, dice and an art print of your illustration for your wall. After all, YOU are the Steam Highwayman!

If you’re not currently following the Kickstarter, head over there now. You’ll be reminded on launch and get a chance to pledge for your reward straight away.