Tag: maps

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Steam Highwayman Moble App Corrections

I’ve been in contact with Cubus Games recently and I’m happy to share that they are again working on the Steam Highwayman app, which they originally released back in 2021. I was very happy to partner with them in producing a full digital adaptation of Steam Highwayman, as Jordi and Quim are great at what they do and have a real interest in gamebooks and interactive fiction.

Cubus’ Steam Highwayman app – looks great!

However, despite a fabulous quality of design, the difficulties of translating such an ambitious gamebook into a digital format, with the hundreds of variables that Smog and Ambuscade uses, meant that the resulting app was buggy and struggled to take off. It’s been hard to find the time to hunt and correct mistakes in the intervening few years – on my part, because of a steady stream of young children arriving, the need to earn a living and the other gamebooks I’ve been trying to write, and on Cubus’ because of their need to produce profitable software to keep their business growing. But the time has come to do justice to the project, and I’m reaching out because I would love to have help from any of you who did purchase the app or would be interested in a digital version of the Steam Highwayman adventures – I appreciate that that’s not all of you.

I’ve created a new buglist spreadsheet to share with anyone who wants to contribute in the interests of getting the app to its best possible state. One of the difficulties is that when correcting a physical gamebook, passages are easily identified by their number, but in an electronic format, this is one of the paratextual details that is removed… So how to identify a passage with an error? My simple solution is to identify the passage by the first three written words.

People frequently ask me whether there is an electronic version of Steam Highwayman available, and I normally explain that, firstly, the large amount of interactivity prevents a simple pdf conversion, and secondly, I’m very wary of pdf piracy and, thirdly, a full digital conversion would do better. So my hope is that now Cubus are able to devote time to improving the app, with your help (and some more hard work from me), the app could soon be in a state that allows people to really enjoy it. I have no hesitation in recommending Cubus’ other work – for example, I’ve really enjoyed their adaptation of Dave Morris’ Necklace of Skulls. Cubus also find great artists and musicians to work with; I love Ramon Sole’s theme to Steam Highwayman, which Cubus have been good enough to allow me to use. It really captures a sort-of Sunday afternoon tv serial vibe – just the right side of cheesy, melodramatic, adventurous and catchy!

Cubus’ Necklace of Skulls app

Another treat about Cubus is their commitment to regional culture. The app of Steam Highwayman was in part funded by a grant to translate new works into Catalan, and I think the Steam Highwayman would certainly approve. Self-determination and independence are very much part of the brand… Perhaps one day there will be a Cornish translation of Princes of the West, which is coming to Kickstarter in July.

So if you bought the app and wanted to see it in a better state, or have never had a look but like the idea, please join in using this link. The app is available on the Play and the Apple stores. Otherwise, do watch out for more posts here on my site. I have a few more things planned to share with you before I launch the Kickstarter for Steam Highwayman: Princes of the West in July…

  • Writing an open-world gamebook – a how-to series
  • Creating an open-world gamebook map – an analysis of Legendary Kingdoms: Pirates of the Splintered Isles
  • Creating the maps for Princes of the West
  • Earlybird rewards for backers of the July Kickstarter – watch out for this one!
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The original and best

I’ve been working hard on Steam Highwayman IV over the past months – having reached about 50,000 words last week. Some rearrangement in my work schedule means that I can now spend around 5 hours on both Monday and Tuesday in the library at East Ham, where there is a ‘silent study’ (‘work-from-the-library’) zone with a great, productive atmosphere. My daughter and I take the bus up to her school, I drop her off, take a fast fifteen-minute walk and set down to work until it’s time to collect her. Some days I even manage to eat lunch.

But looking ahead to your adventure through Cornwall and Devon doesn’t mean I should ignore the beginning of this whole saga. I was recently reminded of the biblical ‘law of first mention’ – that where an idea is first mentioned in scripture is the best place to start with your understanding of it. Well, the Steam Highwayman was first mentioned in Smog & Ambuscade, as was the Ferguson velosteam, Dr Smollet, many of my mechanisms and much of the world-building. In short, this is where it all began.

So I hope you can forgive me if I don’t yet think that enough people have met the Steam Highwayman, or realised that they themselves can don the tricorne and spend an evening robbing the rich and riding the midnight roads. If they did, surely many more would put aside their mesmerising devices, stop scrolling and start rolling!

In an attempt to boost sales, I’ve decided to make a short-term, limited offer. I have multiple A2 maps and some custom dice remaining from Kickstarter rewards, so increased printing costs have forced me to increase the price of the gamebook, I think I’ve made a great package in the Steam Highwayman Starter Pack. And who knows, perhaps this is a great opportunity for you, my long-established supporter, to buy a book, map and dice for that friend you’ve wanted to share the adventure with for all this time?

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Steam Highwayman IV progress

Does that sound as if it is written from personal experience? Ha! Sleepless nights and runny noses are a bigger part of my life as a father than ever before.

Three years ago, when snow lay on the ground and my daughter went outside with the cry ‘Dig, dig!’, my last Kickstarter for Steam Highwayman III was still in progress. It feels like far too long since I rode that particular pony… But then two years or so developing a Viking-themed adventure will do that for you.

Steam Highwayman IV: The Princes of the West has just reached 40,000 words in draft. That’s about 4/15 complete – call it a bit more than 25% written. That’s taken me 30 writing days, spread over a complete project length of 122 days, although I began planning looong ago. Even back when there was snow on the ground and my daughter spoke in mere monosyllables.

What are the standouts for SH4? Well – the interplay of several key characters, their rivalries and power-play is one. I committed to that with the plural ‘Princes’ back when I drafted the titles of my six book series in 2016… But Cornwall is proving excellent fun to write. I’m also seriously considering adding submarines.

The map for SH4 is wonderful. I’ll draw up a giant one, like I published for SH1, 2 and 3, and probably some smaller, regional ones too.

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The Atlas of Harkuna

Over the last couple of weeks I have mapped the original and best open-world gamebooks, Fabled Lands. These choice-maps are now compiled in the Atlas of Harkuna, here on my website. You might be interested to see how they compare to my maps for Steam Highwayman I and II, available here.

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The Gormley-Watt Velosteamer’s Touring Guide

I loved making the maps for my recent Kickstarter. They took a lot of time, but they were worth it. Now all fans of the series can get their hands on them!

The idea of the maps began as enlargened versions of the maps found at the front of Smog and Ambuscade and Highways and Holloways. These were originally based on Ordnance Survey maps of the area I used to live in – bought from the WHSmith on Marlow High Street – but had been drawn with the interests of my gamebooks in mind and were, to massively understate it, simplified. If I had merely scaled these up, they would have looked clumsy and dull, and some readers had already suggested improvements to the maps.

On top of this, I needed to make a fresh map for The Reeking Metropolis. The process for that was to use a digital copy of a 1:1056 Ordnance Survey map series of London published in the 1890s and to digitally trace it on an ipad Pro. I learned a fair amount in the process and so I decided to do a similar thing with the historic maps of the regions in which my first two books were set.

Tracing can be a very meditative job, and between January and March I spent many an evening drawing away. I had actually begun the job long before, but had restarted a number of times and the maps begun in January became my final ones. Colouring could be done in the ipad, but lettering was added in Microsoft Publisher (2007 edition!)

I promised a Guide Booklet as a stretch goal for my project. This was really fun to do: the cover image is a development of the Ferguson schematic I made back in 2017 for Smog and Ambuscade, together with some styling mimicked from early 20th-century bike and motoring maps. The contents took a little while to get right: I had to check through the three books fairly carefully and make sure the beer tally was correct, as well as referencing plot points for many of the pubs.

My plan of assembling and printing the guides was set long before I had final versions. Essentially, this was an exercise in mimicry once again: I set out to make something resembling The Streets of Ankh-Morpork and the Discworld Mapp. So the final order for my printer in Southend was 250 A5 booklet folders with pockets, 250 stapled guidebooks and 250 of three A2 colour posters (the three maps).

The guidebooks came in two boxes; the folders in seven and the three posters each came in a whopping A2 flatpack. They took up a corner in our living room for several months (I still have three boxes now as I write this) as Cheryl and I folded and folded and folded. Then we had to stick the guidebooks into the folders with double-sided sticky tape and tuck a set of maps into the pocket. It turned out that the printers had sent us far more than 250 of each of the maps, but exactly 250 of the guidebooks and folders, so there were going to be enough for the backers who had pledged for them, about 70 full sets left over and then around 120 sets of just the three maps.

The final product is really neat. I’m not a graphic designer by any means, but I have spent my entire life in books and printed materials, so I’m fairly savvy at putting something like this together. In some ways, it reminds me of the nonsense post my brothers and sisters and I used to send each other during long summer holidays in a family postbox, demanding prompt payment of invoices or offering spurious and over-priced correspondence courses, such as the Sternly-Blythe School of Pachydermalinguistics. Double-barrelled names do possess such a weight of Englishness, don’t they?

You can order the guidebook and maps, should they still be in stock (or possibly reprinted) here.

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Steam Highwayman III Kickstarter Update 36: The Book is Ready

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.

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Steam Highwayman III: Update 35

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…

Folding and packaging maps.

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!

The maps, they are a-folding.

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Steam Highwayman III: Update 32 live

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!