Thank you
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Thanks, folks. @11110, I’m not at all offended by your request, and thank you for phrasing it so politely. You should be aware that other authors probably would find it unpleasant and stressful to be repeatedly asked for something they’ve already said no to, however politely the repeat request is worded. Fortunately, I’m a grumpy old man, and fan pressure to do anything I don’t want to do pretty much rolls off me. And I’m grateful that you care enough about the game and the world to take such an interest.
Feel free to present ideas and kick them around on the forum. As upthread, if there’s something that feels gameworld-inconsistent to me, I’ll say so. Past discussions on e.g. blood transfusion and pneumatic tech have been interesting, even if in the end I don’t think those are areas where big advances are going to happen–and this thread’s discussion on explosives has actually changed my thoughts on the world tech.
But I’m not going to make a list of possible innovations now, because the options I eventually write will be ones that grow organically out of the game – potential partial-fixes to problems the protagonist encounters on their way through the world. And it’s worth emphasising that I expect them to be part-fixes, ameliorating problems, not silver bullet solutions that make the problems go away. As we’ve discussed above, the wreckage of a totalitarian empire isn’t promising ground for major technological leaps forward; and the theme of the game is not “technology will deliver us from our dilemmas.”
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Hmm, I see. Now, I’d like to open up the free discussion in the thread.
What about the Empire’s water supply and sanitation, especially the waterworks and sewage systems?
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“Meanwhile, I’ll make tweaks to the existing material without big announcements. If the date at the top of this post changes, it’ll be because I’ve added something major like a new chapter. I hope to finish writing Stormwright in 2023…I’d love it to be in time for next year’s Christmas rush, but if not, in time for publication in 2024.”
Hi Haven, first off, want to say I love your work and I’m very grateful for it (both the Christian charitable work and your writing work). Your book is probably my favorite IF, period, either that or Infinity Saga, and I enjoyed the book 2 demo when I played it.
Checking in after ~ a year, and I see you have made plenty of updates, with examples on the writer’s threads (though I think the public beta linked above is largely unchanged, could be wrong).
Given the updates you are making, is the timeline quoted above from the original post still roughly the plan (i.e. remaining chapters added to the demo over the next several months, full publication this year)?
Thanks!
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My understanding is that Havenstone will probably be releasing a new chapter in the next month or two. He is going to rework the first chapter into two chapters and then there will be a final chapter to write in this book.
It’s worth keeping in mind that because of the high reactivity of Infinite Sea and XoR, each book is really the length of several typical books because of the different choices and paths that are written.
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Hey Vernon, thanks for the encouraging word! The public beta is unchanged since the revisions of last June (mentioned in the first post). That will soon be changing, when the Irduin bit of Chapter 2 is done…I’ll post a big update then, without waiting to finish all the bits where you’re remotely guiding your rebels back in the Rim.
I’ll also take feedback on the plan I’m currently leaning toward, which is to wrap up Stormwright in Irduin rather than Grand Shayard. If the general consensus is that Xaos-plus-Irduin makes for a satisfying enough game, I’ll press ahead to finish it with a few tweaks on my original plan (like introducing Erjan’s sister Dilek in Sojourn rather than Grand Shayard) and try to get a complete draft done in the next couple of months.
That should hopefully make it possible to publish the game in 2024…whereas if I kept to my original plan of having a million-plus word game that ends in Grand Shayard, I could hopefully finish the draft in 2024, but the process of sensitivity reading, beta testing, copy editing, etc. would push publication into 2025.
All of this is later than I’d hoped when I started the thread, or indeed when we started 2024. After spending most of 2023 making a gameworld model that can serve as the backbone for all future games, Ch 2 has taken longer to write than I’d expected. But I’m happy with how it’s been coming together, and hope it’s not too much of a mess when I finally share a playtestable version. 
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Not to mention that two games means twice as much money. 
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Sounds like a great plan to me!
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Considering no patreon, Haven probably spends the most time writing per dollar made on all of HG, lol
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There’s a lower price point for shorter games, so not twice as much. But yeah, I’m kind of hopeful that a 700k-ish sequel will feel like less of a crazy commitment than a 1.4m-ish sequel, and get more people to give it a try.
I have to confess, I’m also giving a Patreon some thought – one along Paul Wang’s model, where any content generated on Patreon becomes publicly available soon afterward. I enjoy the exchanges and community here way too much to pull behind a paywall, but it would help pay for the Havenpebbles’ school fees (and my coffee consumption) if I had a little bit of a steadier income from my writing.
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This is definitely true. Zombie Exodus, both games, are each 3-4 shorter books masquerading as 1 big book, and I definitely wouldn’t have bought them for ~$28 or whatever they end up being. But since I had to buy each installment for $7, I did it.
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@Havenstone
I’m sorry to repeat myself, but I’d like you to answer the two questions I asked you before.
Will there be a “conservative minority” in this game? This problem is also a major problem in actual social reform movements. Also, if you plan on making an appearance, please don’t portray him as a simplistic villain or ignorant person.
What about the Empire’s water supply and sanitation, especially the waterworks and sewage systems?
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Conservative minority as in they think Kleitos is awesome or as in they just want it lop off the Karagond administrative top layer of the social strata and keep everything else the same? It’s already indicated that lots of well to do free persons will be in the latter category.
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I would like to ask a question and give some feedback on a few points that I personally found interesting.
Based on this, let’s change the question: What are some of the problems that MC will encounter in this second game? Of course, I know I can’t make an exhaustive list, so just the ones I can think of right now will be fine.
I have no objection to ending the game with Irduin. However, if that is the case, I would like to see some of the ideological warfare mentioned at the top of this thread added to Irduin, even if it’s just a quick skirmish. I look forward to a war of pens, not swords.
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Hmm, I see. It seems that the definition of “conservative minorities” is a little different from what I thought. What I had in mind was someone who accepted the “small evils” of the social order and passively affirmed the current order. It’s not that I think Kleitos is great, or that I want to overthrow the top.
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I think if you define conservative as “desiring maintenance of the status quo” then you would probably find a conservative majority among elites and in a plurality of the empire’s general population. What triggers the revolt is not dissatisfaction with the status quo per se but a gradual then sudden degradation of the status quo due to a breakdown in the blood economy. Suffice to say there is probably something to the centuries of stability that the Hegemony was able to maintain prior to the events of the game.
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Yes, that’s exactly what I was thinking. I don’t know if it’s an appropriate analogy, but I think it would be interesting to have a character like Uncle Tom or Sidney Poitier, a moderate reformer among minorities, and a helot who is more blatantly pro-hegemony.
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IDK is mass media has the same impact it does today IRL in the Hegemony. The Theurges control information flow much much more readily as they operate the presses and serve as the couriers. The Hegemony has much more state control over the economy than the early modern US did.
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I’m sure you would, mon frere. Mike Shan and Sowe also have unanswered questions since the last big roundup answer post I made. They’re not forgotten; I’m just trying to keep my time on the forums to a reasonable level.
I’ll occasionally make a response to something else out of order if I think I can do so quickly and/or it seems time sensitive. Anything else waits until I’ve got the time to do a big sweep of all q’s since my last big response.
I’ll say that I think Irduin and Grand Shayard will offer plenty of examples of conservatism, and the MC will have the option to judge those with either sympathy or angry scorn – I don’t intend the text itself to convey scorn for that approach.
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Thank you for paying attention.
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