August Update

"The Briefing" by Mike Doscher, used with permission.

Midnight Dark

As some of you may have anticipated, I'm little behind schedule on Midnight Dark for a few reasons. One is simply life. I had expected to be finishing a contract in August, taking a month or so off to finish and then going to publish in late September. Instead, I found myself leaving a contract earlier than expected and starting a new one to finish in early September... only for that contract to be extended. I could, of course, still walk away... but the money is good.

The other is that the cost of original art, like so much else in this life, is going up, which meant that my relatively meagre reserves of cash simply couldn't pay for the art I wanted to commission. So I've been running some sales on Precinct Omega products on Wargame Vault to boost sales and try to raise the capital to pay my cover artist. In case you're wondering, I'm paying about 50% more for art than I was when I commissioned the cover for Infinite Dark.

This is, by the way, no reflection on David. He is actually giving me a substantial discount on his usual rates thanks to our long history and mutual fandoms. The fact is that he has done well over the last few years, picking up a lot of work in publishing and media, and he can afford to charge well for his work and pick and choose the projects he takes on. I have always wanted Precinct Omega to be fair and reasonable supporter of good art, and I'm very pleased to have him as the cover artist for the third volume in the Horizon Wars trilogy.

However, despite the obstacles, progress is excellent.

For those of you interested in wargames design, let me tell you that this part of the process is by far the most boring, most frustrating and most stressful. Game design is complete, but that doesn't mean that the game is perfect. I am reading and re-reading the text again and again to make sure that nothing has been left out this time, to make sure that everything makes sense and is fine-tuned to make it the best game I can.

The other part of game design that they don't tell you about is fine-tuning layout. Now, I mostly use art and photography for this part. I intersperse lots of placeholders in the text whose size and shape I can tweak to make sure that the layout is nice and even. But there are always awkard bits. Widowed subtitles or single lines that just break across two pages and look weird. That sort of thing. And tidying these up often requires more than just fixing the size of a piece of art (because you fix one and then the whole page layout five pages later goes weird).

Affinity Publisher, by the way, is a fantastic tool. I love it. Jake Thornton recommended I jump to it from Adobe Acrobat and it was a very good move.

Anyway, I'm licensing more of Mike Doscher's art (who also did the interior art for Infinite Dark) for the interior. And I'm finishing up some new terrain and minis for the interior photography which will consume a weekend or two very shortly.

My plan, for what it's worth, is to extend my contract, full-time, to the end of September and then to work part-time (3 days a week) for October and then finish my contract. This extends my support to my employer, but gives me time to finish the book in October which means we should be published in time for Christmas.

Speaking of Christmas, I will be sharing a pre-release edition of the rules, in PDF, for all of my patrons - probably by the end of August or in early September. In principle, this should be a fully-finished rules set but just with some of the art and photography missing. My plan is to release this document to reviewers and influencers to hopefully build up interest and chatter and I could see no reason not to include my most valuable enthusiasts and supporters in the process.

On release, there will be discount codes for patrons to get PDF copies at deep discounts (free for some of you), and hardback editions at cost, or signed copies for only the cost of shipping to wherever you are. There will also be unique codes for all of you to share with friends so they can also get discounted copies so you can persuade others to come and play with you.

Zero Dark: Operation Kurgan

I have finished recovering this text and it's looking pretty good. My main effort is on Midnight Dark but, once that gets down to administrative minutiae I shall be turning my attention back to Kurgan. The writer's block that prevented me from moving on with the mission design two years ago seems to have cleared thanks to the small breakthrough of CIVPOP last month. Although originally intended to improve the PvP game, I realized that some new things could be done in the solo/co-op game with a non-hostile Red Force, such as espionage missions - which perfectly suits the Kurgan theme of spies and journalists.

Anyway, that unlocked several new missions that pushes me significantly closer to moving out of the Google Docs version of the book and into the Affinity Publisher version.

Life Etc

For those of you interested in professional game design and the process of building a business upon its shaky foundations, let me tell you this: when you know you can earn ten times in a "normal" career what you could from game design, it makes it a very hard sell to your family.

I would love to throw in my HR job and do nothing but design and play games all day long. Who wouldn't? But until and unless I publish the game that is so popular and successful that it rockets to the top of the Adamantine Best Seller list of WGV, I will always have to balance the expectations of a conventional lifestyle with game design work.

There are, in life, some things we should not be prepared to sacrifice, even in pursuit of what we think are our dreams. So, sure, I could come home from work and dive straight into writing and testing. But I don't. I come home, and I cook the dinner, and I do some exercise, and I finish the ironing and I vacuum and room or two and pick up after my sons and I spend some quality time with my wife before I head to bed early and start it all over again the next day. Making time in that schedule for game design is hard and, frankly, not worth it.

But doing that stuff and planning ahead means that I generally get six or seven hours every weekend that I can spend on wargames. And then I have to carefully aportion my time to design, testing, playing, researching, painting, terrain building, photography... and that's before I also have to make time to reconcile my accounts, complete my tax returns, pay my accountant and ship any of the (very) rare orders I get in.

I don't say this by way of excuse for the delays. Life is lift. But I thought it was worth being up front that I can't commit as much time to design work as I did during the heady days of coronavirus unemployment.

But who knows? Maybe Midnight Dark will be that game. Maybe it will be this one that really breaks out and makes the prospect to putting long days of human resources behind me a realistic one.

I love you all. New patrons, I see you. Thank you so much - your support, however long you stay, is treasure to me. Long-term patrons who are still here, you are the reason that anything gets done on this project. Please don't underestimate what your contributions mean to me every single month. And to those who've left us along the way - I know you can't read this any more, but that doesn't mean I didn't appreciate you while you were here and I understand why you had to step away.