Writing and Game progress

Hello again! No, it hasn’t taken this long to recover from MCM London, but I have been busy with other work as well as trying to finish book #3.

I’m current hovering around 75k words (I write some, I cut some, I’m still around the same word count – the eternal writer’s lament) with only a handful of chapters to finish. Then I will be doing an edit pass, where I know I need to add a lot more detail, as this pass is primarily dialogue in many places.

I’m happy with it though. There are a lot of characters in it, but it seems to read OK. Of course, I already know who everybody is and what they’re doing, the real test will be when Beta readers get hold of it and tell me they have no idea who is speaking in conversations 🙁

Outside of book #3 I’m currently doing some pre-production work on a narrative videogame. It was originally in Unreal Engine using Blueprints and a free dialogue plugin, but although I am familiar with making Blueprint logic flows I didn’t have enough control over many aspects of the dialogue. A bit of a killer when making a narrative game.

So I switched over to the Unity engine, which seems to have more specialised tools available, plus the workflow with their tools is much better in my opinion for the type of game I’m creating. It took a couple of weeks to recreate the same scene I had in Unreal, but now it’s all integrated I’m much more easily getting dialogue in and working out the game logic.

Don’t hold your breath for the game though! This could take years and will be a back-burner project until it’s at a much more advanced stage, but it’s something I’m very keen on pursuing.

Anyway, back to writing about Martin and Hayley and Ruth for book #3. “Ooh, who’s Ruth?” you ask? All will be revealed in the coming months 🙂

Tony.