This is how you spend your weekend if you are publishing a role-playing game on your own: correcting typos —and yet knowing it won’t be 100% perfect. And then you wake on Monday at 5:00 AM so you can tell the world you still have work to do.
But it is great to have the game finished and complete; or at least the first edition of it. I still need to fix a few issues and add a couple of features, which I hope to have solved soon. Yeah, I say soon, I have learned the hard way that on your first attempt to publish anything you should not promise any deadlines. Basically because you don’t really know what you are getting into, so you can only guess.
Anyway, this is what I need to fix and add
Fix: Red Links. Newsies & Bootblacks is hyperlinked alright. Just click on the heading of the Table of Contents and it will take you to your chapter. That’s a lovely LyX feature; however, somebody thought that the default link colour should be red; which I hate when it goes beyond one word or two.
Fix: Misaligned Text. I added illustration to the draft as I was writing it. The reason that’s a bad idea is that you don’t really know how they should be placed until the text has reached its final state. Even correcting a couple of words can change the entire outlook of a chapter. So you fix your image manually, adding a few spaces here and there. That worked for school essays and you suppose it would work in a book too. No way, it only becomes a bigger mess.
Fix: Fonts. Apparently somebody thought that the default font for the heading of a definition list should be a “sans-serif” font. To fix that I need to edit something called LaTex preamble and add a few lines of code. I hope that doesn’t take very long to figure out.
Add: Illustrations. I finally gave up and deleted each and every illustration. So, once I fix the text alignment, I’ll have to add those again.
Add: New Paris Map. This is a special case of a illustration, because it will be two pages wide. I’m considering offering it, or a larger version of it, on a separate file.
Add: Cover. Which should not be a problem, yet still it needs to be done.
And that’s what I need to do before calling the game done and contacting the guys at rpgnow so you guys can buy it. I hope that will give you a better idea of how long it will take me to put it on market. Could it be two weeks?
Ah, I was wondering how you were making out with Newsies, Miguel. You are making progress, though — one step at a time. It really is amazing how much work goes into these projects. The end-user is rarely aware of this until they actually are involved in a similar process. Good luck with the rest of the journey.
Hi Davina, thanks for showing up. I’ll have great news to share, but let me do it after I end my shift