June 2022 Sitrep

What’s happened so far

Hey, this is getting done in the first half of the month! Progress!

June has been a fairly slow month, though I’ve seen some progress. Especially it’s been getting to be regular and steady progress. I was able to hit on half of my weekend schedule goals, which is better than April and May.

On the other hand, June was a bit of a cursed one for stuff happening. One incident every week. And that did a pretty impressive job of killing my drive, doubly so when I also had some vacation time cancelled by a colleague because they had a new hire scheduled to start and I’m the only person who can do part of the first-day onboarding. That wiped out a day that I had set aside for Starfire stuffs. I still got some stuff done though.

What’s happening next?

I’m on final approach for Gencon. As mentioned, panels booked and set, hotel set, flight set. About my only concern is how messy YVR’s Pearson Airport has been turning out to be. I’ve got an eight hour layover and I’m STILL not sure that’ll be enough! Might have to get some sacrifices out on the stone slab just to be safe…

2022 Goals

These goals are approximately in order of priority and in order of precedence (IE have to do #1 before you can do #2). There’s some goals from 2021 that are coming back, but a some of them are going to be brand new ones as well. As before, some of them are one-and-done, while others are big projects. There’s a couple more tasks on it this year compared to last, but a bunch of them are more housekeeping tasks; easier one-and done things that can be pounded out sometime in the year.

So enough banter. On to the list!

1) Complete turn processing for all empires up to turn 175

I’ve only done a little turn processing, but the deWulf got their turn 146 done. Some more story writing has been done to help move this forward. I’ve got notes and framework for story snippets that give a pretty good framework up to 148 or even a bit farther.

2) Update/Archive all the Sketch Sunday Worldbuilding

No progress on this one yet either.

3) Finish playtesting and balancing for Scenario Book 1 – The First Contact War

I was intending to reach out to those who have volunteered to do playtesting last month, but no dice. I’ve made a note to reach out in the next week or so to see what (if anything) has happened. Cat herding ahoy!

4) Finish the writing work for Scenario Book 1 – The First Contact War

Not started yet.

5) Introduce and post completed artwork

The two Sintillan pictures are pushed back to a July project.

6) Go do a second pass on the artwork for Scenario Book 1, incorporating new details and design concepts over the past year

Got a positive response! Contract has been verbally accepted and work has begun. I’ve seen a WIP of the new cover art, and it looks VERY good (which isn’t a surprise). It’ll take some time to get done partially due to the complexity of the work and the time that the artist has to do the work, but that’s kind of a given.

7) Start fishing in my contacts to find someone who can do proofreading for Scenario Book

This task is sitting low on the to-do list for fairly obvious reasons. Need to be done writing and my own edit pass before the work can get handed off to an editor. Need to reach out to some of my friends/contacts, see if they know anyone.

8) Rename systems/planets that do not fit the universe setting

Not started yet. A few of the systems/etc have been identified, and renames have been worked out for a few of them.

9) Look at the Solar Starfire Freight Handling Rules

Not started yet.

10) Set up a redundant deWulf data backup

At this time I’m setting up for going back to Gencon, but once that’s done I’ll be looking to shift some cash towards setting up and having a NAS hooked up to my network for regular data updates. So this realistically has a fall timeline for completion.

11) Update the deWulf Story Document

The currently available deWulf story document on the website is, to be honest, really old. It was originally done as just a backup log, but with it out and on the website it does have some amount of actual attention. So the plan is to split it into three parts and then give it some short synopsizes on the website to explain (and more importantly warn) readers what’s going on in each of them. Mind you that’s not warn them of anything really questionable…. it’s more like my early writing is kinda… rough.

Which is another reason why this is so far down the to-do list.

12) Review Sketch Sunday

I’ve been doing some more thinking on this one, and I think at least for the immediate future I’ll be doing some sketches to tie them into sort of theme “arcs” where I look at a specific place or group of places. I’ve done this a few times where I grouped already done sketches together, but I’ll be trying to make some new sketches as a series. A new thing; we’ll see how it works.

13) Designing a Space Navy series

Third article is written, fourth is in planning.