The Echoes of Heaven Developer's Journal

[defendi]

Hi. For those who haven't been following this in other venues, I have a running journal where I discuss the trials and tribulations of an e-publisher. I pull up the carpets in this, letting you know some things that other publishers would keep hidden, because I want this to be an open window into the process. The only thing I don't do is give out info that might compromise the secrets of other publishers.

Here is todays entry. For back enteries and the RSS feed, see the blog at http://defendi.livejournal.com/.

August 2, 2007

Okay, a lot has happened since I last posted. I think I’m going to try for smaller, more frequent posts.

Let’s start with the plug. The Ennie Judge “Master of the Game” blogged two great bits about the products, for those who missed it. First, he blogged that if I’d submitted the entire line as one entry or if Battletech Classic hadn’t, I probably would have gotten a nomination for best electronic product. More recently he blogged that product 2, The Last Free City, missed the Best Setting nom by only a slim margin. My blushes. Check out his blog at: http://enniejudge.blogspot.com/.

Back to brass tacks. The master version of product four is edited, proofed and essentially finished. I have some minor notes on other versions that might make it back into the master, but other than that, it’s done.

The HERO Version went to Hero Games in June. That puts my new target release date as August 28th. It might just barely be doable.

The HARP version took a long time. This is the nightmare product (the Bestiary, for those just joining) after all. All those stats for all those monsters over and over again. At times, I think I’m going mad. At to that increased demands on my time from ICE products and you have quite the bit of stress. My job hasn’t been helping either, more on that later.

HARP and RM versions have been submitted to ICE and approved (I think). Heike responded with “That’s a wrap” and I responded that I’m assuming that’s a good thing.

I decided to have a little fun and start building a PC Gen dataset for the d20 version. All the monsters are programmed as races now and I’m building them as characters to check the math. I expect to have the d20 version in a decent state around Friday morning. Possibly even finished. For the credit, you should really applaud my stat monkey. She made the so much easier and I couldn’t have made even this late release date without her.

So that leaves me with Maps, Pagemaking, and Release. I think I can do it in three weeks.

The “think” comes from my job situation. My little cushy night job at the motel is becoming busier and busier and I’m just finding so little time to write these days. Right now I have a resume at Verio web hosting. I’ve been interviewed and they liked me and say that they think it will work out, but we have to get the schedule approved (I have to work it around a very important Saturday meeting for Final Redoubt Press) and I have to pass a background check. I’ve volunteered for one of the hardest weekend shifts at the job so I think the schedule will work out, but if the background check dings you for credit history (which it might), then I might not make it through.

If I do, I all but lose two to three weeks to full time training. However, after that I work Saturday and Sunday (hard hours, but just for two days) and I make more money than at the motel, even considering they withhold more taxes (that’s a good thing since the company earns me a bit of a tax burden). Better yet, I get five days off in a row to write. One of those days is still fiction day and one has a rather long play test in the middle of it, but still, my productivity should increase dramatically.

Another final note. ICE has asked me to write another book for them. Assuming that it goes through, I’ll be taking a month off after Product 4 to bang it out. I’ll be doing the print version during that time, but little else. Then we’ll be into Product 5.

I got confirmation for my second artist on product 5 today. She’s tops. She did a lot of work on 4 and I want to cover her art in chocolate, I like it so much.

Okay, I think that’s all for tonight. Have a better one.

 

[lmpjr007]

Welcome to the world of publishing!

 

[defendi]

Thanks. I've been slowly branching out thw word of the product. Jeramy's kind words on his Ennie blog have helped.

 

[Ulric]

Bob, you're da man<--cool street talk.

Here's a link to my Echoes of Heaven review.

http://www.enworld.org/reviews.php?do=review&reviewid=3497812

Great Setting.

Thanks for posting your developer's notes.

 

[defendi]

Thanks man.

 

[Urizen]

Thanks for sharing this!

 

[defendi]

Thanks for reading.

 

[defendi]

So, I haven’t quite finished the d20 version yet. There was a lot more checking numbers than I anticipated and PCGen slows down after a few characters so I lost some time to that (it might be JAVA, not PC Gen). Anyway, all the monsters are rebuilt as characters so the math is all on the up and up. Tonight after this I start actually building all the stat blocks. I expect that to take longer than I have tonight. I’ll finish it tomorrow night or Tuesday (currently my big work day.) By Tuesday night bedtime, I should have d20 put to bed as well.

On the Lulu front, I’ve had Josh (my editor) proof all my back covers. I’ve built wrap arounds for the paperback and hardbound version of the d20 copy. I haven’t sent those to Josh yet. They had a baby last week and I think it’s lousy to give a guy work for his moonlighting job the same week he gained a new addition to the family. Gotta gaze into those baby eyes before they change color.

I’ve already reread the entire d20 version of the first book hunting for typos and those inevitable tiny inconsistences that crop up over the span of a year’s worth of products (“I said they were what?”) I’ve typed those all into the raw pagemaking files but that screwed up all the formatting. So I’m spending a little time (about an hour) every day I’m home adjusting the formatting back to the original pagination as much as possible (it’s easier than when I have to make new pagination and move artwork around). I did the first three chapters, but chapter four is a big project for another reason.

See, I did all the art for Chapter Four in Campaign Cartographer. I then output it as one huge bitmap and chopped it up for individual countries. For the large countries like Uzarâg and Ludremon, this is pretty good. For little countries, the resolution came out terrible because you’re more zoomed in on the page.

A bigger output would crash my computer every time (I’ve tried), but CC3 has a neat little feature that helps. Basically, I can output a bitmap of a specific rectangle with a specific resolution. So I’ve been going through all the art in Chapter Four, figuring out how big the images are in inches, rounding up a half inch, then outputting that size at 300 DPI (I can do 600 in Lulu, but the blur I put on the rivers fades them too much. You’ll lose them completely in black and white interiors). I’ve done through F and also redone DD3 versions of all the dungeon maps so they look a little snazier.

Essentially, in building the print versions I have to first fix any niggling issues in the PDF versions. When you see the PDF versions updated, you’ll know I’m in the final leg of getting the Print ready for Lulu.

At the same time, I’ve been reading through all the mechanics sections of the other versions. HARP is done (although there might be an edit or two I haven’t typed in yet). RM and HERO are both done through Chapter 7 of the sourcebook. I’ll probably give a new version a complete re-read when the first print proofs come in, but I think they are pretty clean. Honestly, almost all the typos are inhouse formatting violations. Many of them Josh can’t even spot because they are just me being picky about something in the pagemaking (he picks them up and checks them whenever I have one lying around to see if it was something he missed. It almost never is).

The expanded Appendix II for the d20 version has been edited but not proofed.

So that’s where all that stands. Now I’m going to wax poetic about Dragonlance. Give me a moment.

As you probably know Margaret Weiss lost her license to produce more roleplaying books for the product line. So I’ve been buying up every book they produced before they can’t sell them anymore and I have to swim with the sharks on E-Bay. I’ve been reading and rereading as they come in and I’ve fallen in love with the story again. But I noticed something.

It’s a truism of writing fiction that often the more you want to pull away from something, the more you shouldn’t. I wrote a chapter in a book that’s sitting on a desk in Tor right now which involves a woman handling two children who have just lost their mother. When I wrote that, I had the hardest time, because I had experienced a great deal of loss between ages seven and eleven. I was, essentially, writing about this fictional woman dealing with me. I don’t know how much you’ll like the scene if it’s ever published, but for me, it was cathartic. I got great positive feedback on it. The reason is, I hit this great block of pain while I was writing it, and I forced myself not to turn away.

This is fresh in my mind because one of my readers objected slightly to a part of adventure four, The Tainted Tears. He felt that part of the tragedy was too much like what we experience in the real world and might be too much for certain players. I take suggestions like that as reason not to change it (especially since you can change this one at your table very easily) and so after much deliberation (because I take this reader’s advice very seriously) I left it alone. Product Four is meant to generate big emotions in the players. When one of the characters screams the penultimate reveal to the party, it usually shocks everyone silent (of course, that could be my fabulous acting. ). If a GM wants to back off because it might cause a player to relive something painful, he should, but it’s easy to pull back from something that’s in the text. It’s hard to add something that isn’t.

So it’s in.

What does this have to do with Dragonlance?

You might want to stop reading if you aren’t familiar with the basic Dragonalance story. There are spoilers below.

That said:

Dragonlance is an incredibly spiritual story. I don’t remember the novels as well as the adventures, since I’ve done the adventures two or three times since reading the novels, so what I’m saying likely does not apply to the fiction, but the original adventure writers completely chickened out. Think about the basic plot of the series. Man finds the gods, save the world from dragons through his faith, bringing a golden age. The golden age is ruined when man tries to command the gods in his arrogance, causing the Cataclysm. Man, feeling abused, turns from the gods, telling himself the gods turned from him. Then evil creeps back into the world. Right when it’s about to destroy everything, the gods lead a group seeking the truth back to the information that will restore all the good churches. Just in time. The knowledge of the true word spreads before the evils of the enemy, and where it touches, it takes root and the enemy finds strength, not weakness. Essentially, Dragonlance is about man finding forgiveness from a supreme being and in doing so, saving the world. But it’s more than that. Man didn’t need forgiveness. He already had his punishment and the gods were waiting patiently for him. Beyond forgiveness from a supreme being, it’s about forgiveness for one’s self.

I think Hickman was the one with this vision (I’d bet all my money on it). As I said I can’t speak for the novels, but in the adventures, this is all glossed over. The disks of Mishakal are little more than cleric making machines. The new adventures mention stuff like this in passing in the themes, but even they hold back a little, maybe allowing a GM to find it on his own. It might be a good call. That might not be a story a GM can tell unless he feels it enough to find it for himself. There’s one scene in Dragon’s of Autumn where it’s all spelled out and where one character takes on the role of all humanity symbolically. I won’t say who or when (I’ve spoiled enough, but I assume you all know the basic plot), but the author is kind enough to draw attention to the fact, pointing it out as a potentially intense roleplaying moment, should this be the type of thing your group might like.

I’ve thought of writing a story like this for Echoes, long before I got back into Dragonlance. If the Herald returns during the campaign’s history, I don’t think I can avoid it. On a more personal level, I’ve thought of doing a personal version of this story for a group of PCs, but I haven’t convinced myself I can present it in an original fashion. Still, the theme of redemption is common in the fiction I have planned for the setting. That might be enough.

We’ll see.

 

[defendi]

It’s been a busy month or two. Let me try to get it all down, so you can catch up a bit.

My last job was becoming a nightmare, and it had destroyed my ability to work. The hours a day I was able to put toward writing had plummeted. It was a good job in the early days, and I took it despite the poor pay because I was often able to do four hours of work on the company in a single shift. However scheduling issues and, more importantly, a rise in business made things more and more busy. I couldn’t begrudge them any of this, and I’d never shirk my duties on shift for other work, but things were getting difficult. I still love everyone there and value the time I spent there. I gladly go in to help them fix little problems and will continue to do so until they’re up to speed.

Recently a new job opportunity came up at Verio Web Hosting. The job was only two days (though I sleep a third just to recover). In that I work 22 hours and earn more money than I did at my old job. This leaves me 5 days off in a row (four with the day lost to sleep) to work on writing and publishing projects. So once that started moving forward, my path was set.

That left some new time issues. I had to teach my old boss how to do my job. Then I had to do full time training for my new job. Things have finally settled and this week I’m getting quite a bit done. I’ll brief you on the final state of things at the end.

Since I’ve last posted, Wizards announced 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons, I’m sure you all know. At first, I was a little worried. I’ve spoken to people at wizards since and while licensing stuff is still up in the air, I’ve become relatively certain that the new system will work with The Echoes of Heaven (the bit about martial adepts had me a touch worried at first, but it seems I can make it work). If I can get a timely look at the SRD, this could even make the company. Being able to release early enough might even launch the company like the early adopters of 3.0.

It’s too early to tell if that’s likely, or even possible, but I’m working on it.

Here’s the status of everything else.

I finished the master pagemake of product 4 today. If all goes well that puts us within two weeks of release. I have one proofread still outstanding but that should be done before I pagemake that version.

I had proofed, edited, and pagemade the first product for print release. I made the HARP version first this time and ordered soft and hardcover versions. The softcover looks wonderful. The hardcover has slightly poorer quality on the interior grayscales, but the hardbounds physically look to be great. I intend to contact Lulu about the grayscales when I have a new version ready for upload, so that minor changes will be reflected in a new copy.

This morning I finished re-proofing the softbound from cover to cover. I’ve input those edits as well. Tomorrow (I work an hour a day on the print versions), I hope to have first runs on the new interiors ready. I go over them several times before I declare them done, usually spotting new pagemaking flaws each time, so that will probably be up next week. After that, I’m guessing, we’re within a month of me ordering a complete set of proofs of all four versions in preparation of going live.

So, that puts Bestiary (The Hell project) out around the end of the month or beginning of next and the print versions for product one for sale sometime around Halloween, barring major disaster.

Tomorrow I should finish pagemaking the RM version out of the master. I hope to have the HARP version pagemade as well before I launch into the weekend, but half-done is probably more likely.

Well. That’s it for now. I’ll be able to update more often now.

Here’s the countdown of stuff to do before product 4 release:

Get d20 doc back from proofer.
Pagemake RM Version
Pagemake HARP Version
Pagemake HERO Version
Pagemake d20 Version
Pagemake CC Readme
Get CC Readme proofed
Get all the maps ready for packaging (some them out, hide one of the grids, etc.)
Build the Zip Files
Upload the Zip Files
Build the Product Pages
Get Product Pages Activated.
Announce release