Thursday, December 10, 2009

Another Chapter Completed...

...and it was a real son of a bitch.

Finished Part 7: Treasure of my Companion, today. It was the day of our annual "WinterFest" at work today, which means most of us were cycling in and out of the conference room eating desserts or mingling...basically slacking. I did some actual "work" work today, but much of the day was also spent wrestling with the goddamn MS Word, trying to get various charts, columns, and chapter pages to all synch up nice and neat.

I got a Mac a couple Christmases back because I wanted to be able to use it for projects like this...you know, creating documents with graphics and charts and stuff. Producing product. Unfortunately, I know next to nothing about my own Mac software and I haven't taken the time to use the on board tutorials to learn. What's more I've already invested a ton of time into learning MS software (like Word and Excel) which I use at work pretty much every day (I don't work in a field that requires a lot of media or graphics interface and the PCs work just fine...'course we're not on Vista yet, either).

So now I have MS Office on my Mac and...well, whatever. At work I can only use MS products anyway, and I was able to finally put together the whole treasure chapter. And it's about 10 and a quarter pages long.

Unfortunately, I only budgeted eight.

Which means that other parts of the Companion will be shorter. Hopefully this won't be too bad, but I have a feeling there's going to be some over-run in the Combat chapter...those damn charts just eat up so much space! Plus I decided the mass combat system is going to go into that chapter as well (what are field maneuvers if not simply another type of "encounter?") and they were four pages long (and in need of a couple extra paragraphs) the last time I checked. Perhaps, I'll work on that tomorrow...well, between vet appointments, car tune-ups, and driving my wife around (forgot to mention...she did NOT have to travel after all). All the other chapters are budgeted to be shorter than the three I've completed (Spells, Monsters, Treasure), though this is as much by necessity as design. We will not go over 64 pages!

Some cool things: I did figure out a lot of groovy technical stuff today with regard to page layout...I am totally excited to get this thing finished so that I can print it up!

4 comments:

  1. I like how you set yourself that 64 page limit!

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  2. I agree: a 64-page limit is a terrific idea and one I plan to adopt in my own future old school products.

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  3. I am totally looking forward to this Companion! Is there an estimated completion / release date at this point?

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  4. @ Carter: Man, I'd love to have the text, proofing, and formatting done by the New Year. But I'm entertaining half a dozen in-laws over the next ten days so it will be tricky...Christmas, you know?

    @ James and Alex: 64 pages is the hard limit and one it looks like I can make. It certainly helps me edit.
    ; )

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