Progress and Crises
9 months ago – Sat, Jul 22, 2023 at 01:23:37 PM

Hey folks, 

We have some good news and some bad news for the project, so let's get to it. 

The Good

Christopher and Rae are finishing off their respective editing and review tasks currently.  Meanwhile I have been working on some minor layout improvements such as developing some schematic-style chapter opening pages. While I want to make a few more tweaks, it looks like a promising path forward.

The Bad

No workplan survives contact with the enemy and our development time took a bit longer than originally forecast. We really appreciate your collective patience with these delays and your support has been fabulous. One of the unforeseen challenges was that we have seen a spike in inflation and printing costs on a whole.  With my publisher hat on I have been securing a number of printing quotes from printers old and new to find out the best way to physically produce this beautiful book.  The quotes have given estimates as low as 9K USD to as high as 24K USD for the bare minimum print run, exclusive of the costs of actually shipping out the books. We are glad that the campaign was sufficiently successful that we should be able to manage the costs but it takes a little more effort to produce the books than we originally expected. 

The Ugly

Christopher, our noble editor, has been hard at work doing the final proofreading and editing pass for the book.  He notified me on the 11th that he had completed the revision of the first half of the book, so I estimate he is probably 3/4s complete at this point. I was unfortunately notified this morning by his spouse that he had a life-threatening medical emergency and yesterday and has been hospitalized. He has the best medical care but we expect he will be on medical leave for the next month or so at the very least.  This will likely slow down the release of the PDF and printing but hopefully his recovery will go well. 

Thank you for your collective patience and support.  Till we speak next. 

Jason Pitre for Genesis of Legend Publishing

The Proof is in the Space Pudding
10 months ago – Tue, Jun 20, 2023 at 03:21:20 PM

The Progress Update

I am happy to report that I finished off the major layout revision for Once More Into the Void this morning. This means that I have been able to send off the near-final version of the text to Christopher for his line-by-line proofreading work including finding stray commas, duplicate spaces, or tiny typos that slipped through our previous revisions.  We have all the legal text, a table of contents, an index, and our internal page references in place. We are finishing work on the chapter opening pages and we will be effectively done. This means that I get to put my publisher hat on and start getting some quotes from professional printers who could produce the physical books. 

Layout 101

 Since we have spent so much time working on layout I figured some of you might be interested in learning more about what that entails. Every layout professional has their own workflows and preferences, but there are a few common steps that we tend to follow.

Firstly, we need to figure out how the theme and setting of the game can be represented in the layout. My previous title "After the War" was limited to greyscale to highlight the harsh, post-war nature of that science-fiction setting.  For this step, Rae and I settled on a colour-scheme consisting of a spectrum from blue to purple to pink as we felt it was a good way of representing the emotional themes in play. Since we were going for something more in the science-fiction realm, we were able to pull out some lovely galaxy photos and illustrations which work to add some interesting textures.  

Next up, we need to figure out the physical structure of each page. We tend to use Master Pages which essentially make standard page templates with consistent page backgrounds, page numbers, text boxes and the like. This project actually had six distinct master pages so we could ensure you could tell which spreads had character sheets and which had minigames, for example.  Once we have the master pages lined up we create a large number of standard text styles so we can determine the specific typefaces, sizes, spacing, leding and, other typographical elements that we will rely on. 

With all the templates and standard styles in place, we place all of the text into this template. During the process, we will make new spreads in the document that fit the relevant content. I will do some very simple work with page breaks and section breaks at this point to figure out where the different chapters are in the book, but none of the subtle layout stuff. This is just putting the content into the workspace. Once all of the text is in place, I will drop in the various illustrations and start doing some basic tweaks to the layout to bring things together. This is what produced the draft layout from a couple months ago. 

The second layout revision pass is far more detail-oriented where we go through the document page-by-page to make the text as clear as possible. It's an opportunity to make little tweaks to the text sizes, adjust the spacing, add the occasional page break, and the like so that an attentive reader will be able to easily read the book in the way we intend. This is a long process but it really helps make the book shine.  After this point, we can do the proofreading and then send it off to press for everyone to enjoy!  


 

May Update - Refinements Underway
11 months ago – Fri, May 26, 2023 at 05:40:22 AM

Hello everyone, 

This month has been a busy one over on our end of things including helping to administer a local game convention, but we were able to get some decent progress on layout revision process for Once More Into the Void.  We have finished revising the layout for the first 40 pages of the text which includes the legal text, the table of contents, all of the introductory text and the crew sheets.  We reworked how we are presenting the chapter openings and Rae is writing a few more pieces of text to help fill some spaces. 

Here's what the current draft version of the table of contents is looking like at the moment. 

The content that remains to be revised include... 

• 8 spreads related to recruitment
• 25 spreads of mini-games
• 14 spreads of additional content
• An Index

I hope to dig into this task this weekend so that I can pass the proposed final draft over to Christopher for the final proofing pass. The current target is to get him the PDF in 2-3 weeks from now and let him go through the thing with a fine-toothed space-comb while I take a couple weeks of summer vacation. 

Till next month!

Jason Pitre & Rae Nedjadi

Draft layout for backers!
about 1 year ago – Sat, Apr 22, 2023 at 05:08:13 PM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Looking for Connection
about 1 year ago – Wed, Mar 01, 2023 at 08:25:45 AM

Hey folks, 

I just wanted to give you a quick update. Rae is continuing to work through some health issues, but the real challenge he has is the fact that his internet connection at home has been down for weeks at this point.  This has made his work extremely difficult and slowed things down more than we expected. As soon as he can finish up the layout revision, we will be able to simultaneously get proofreading and print buying tasks accomplished. We are dying to get PDF's out to folks asap and will give you more updates when we have them.