I’m very much looking forward to it! The WoD games and Hexfinder too in particular.
Right, now that I’ve posted a load of lists today, I’m going to… post another list in a minute.
I did do Chapter 7, and some edits to earlier chapters! Secretly despite my modest “that will be a major bonus” I was hoping to race ahead and do a load of coding on Chapter 8 and that didn’t happen because there are some complexities I need to untangle - probably moving some planned scenes to a later chapter - and, well. Frankly, winter has been kicking me a whole lot even as there have been very lovely things going on at the same time. But as mentioned I have been able to get out into the fresh air and do various other things that improve my health and happiness, amidst a lot of tricky points and stress. In the latter half of next week I’ll be back on the metaphorical horse (in real life I am not very good at horseriding).
This year has been really huge because it was my first year of mostly working with Choice of Games (I did some other contract work but CoG was the main work thing going on). I was very nervous going into it, but it’s been more successful than I could have possibly hoped even in an awful year for the field of games at large. And I’ve written… so much. What I did on Honor Bound and the Royal Affairs epilogue alone was over 330,000 words, and I can’t easily count up what I did on Elite Status but it was big. It’s truly been a massive year!
Some things I’ve done:
- Creme de la Creme and Blood Money now both have hints and cheats to help you find the obscure paths you really want;
- Creme de la Creme, Blood Money, and Noblesse Oblige now all have save and restore points (so do Elite Status and Royal Affairs, but they had it from launch);
- Elite Status: Platinum Concierge , for which I wrote and edited additional content, came out after being dormant for many years;
- King of the Castle, the brilliant medieval monarch multiplayer game I worked on last year, came out and got 4 stars in NME;
- I started and wrote seven chapters of Honor Bound which has been a total treasure to work on, and I’ve been learning huge amounts from it and falling in love with the setting and characters;
- I wrote a bunch of short character studies for Patreon and really enjoyed it;
- and of course Royal Affairs, came out after having been in progress for three years, with the extra epilogue coming soon in 2024 which I’m very excited about!
My goals next year are to get Honor Bound out, start another project (maybe two… heh), and set aside a bit more time to myself along with the work. Right now I would really like another year of freelancing, as the flexibility has been just what I need to help sort out my work/life balance, but the longer-term sustainability remains to be seen.
I hugely appreciate the community here and many thanks to @Eiwynn for setting up these monthly threads and to everyone who participates. It’s really nice to be able to chat with other writers in this space, as well as everyone else elsewhere on the forum, and learn from what people are doing and everyone’s different approaches, and what different people do and don’t like. Thank you for another year of discussion and support!