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
