What is this project?To put it simple, I have probably an excess of 300k words worth of documents ranging from 5-6 years of work building concept mission dialogue and such for a project known as Apex, whose world changed dramatically throughout its time of conception. The project was planned to be either an sc2 campaign, an Unreal 4 CGI (like Reboot or Red vs Blue) or an audiobook. Currently I plan to translate the more valuable of those documents to a written-exclusive format and may consider light audiobook translations if my living conditions ever stabilize and I find time.
Like all of my work the writing is extremely politically incorrect. Laconius and Wibod both contributed ideas to this project and some of its ancestors, with the former being the most racist person I've ever met and the latter being a deranged eastern Canadian. I am a crass individual myself. That said, it's a writing that takes itself rather seriously.
Where did this stuff come from?Old pet projects, some mechanical stuff was shamelessly jacked from Fate, some from Armageddon Onslaught, and the most important part, a very large number of characters are based on dramaticized versions of community member fursonas. As an example, Mucky is associated with Zerg because he predominantly played Zerg and terrorized mexican jailbreaks. Arcan is a Tauren Warrior because that's what he played. Some community members have sort of side filler roles, some just have cameos, some are mission critical.
Am I a character?If I didn't know you or had a sizable example to base off of chances are you aren't a character. Sometimes even that wasn't enough. I felt more iconic members were more important to translate over. For example, even though I never met Adun
!, he was a Protoss commander in the campaign and took priority over virtually every Star Alliance forumer.
Will you write out a tech document/document describing the world?The sc2 campaign has a huge amount of data either already written or was planned to be written for every single unit and weapon shown in the entire game, called the Codex. I plan to translate that to Gameproc but I don't know how I'll sort or format it given the incredibly spoiler-heavy nature of such content. If you have any ideas...
What writing style will you employ?Let's put it this way: my life's work, Throne of Armageddon, was a failure because I sucked at writing. I have very little confidence about my ability to finish this project if I stray too far from my strong point (dialogue) which is the only reason the scripts exist. So I plan to go rather description light on this. Hence why I label it a light novel despite the potential scale of the text. If I can supply any renders or anything to help show stuff I'll make it happen, but not necessarily when I release the text.
How will this be released?Initially, an RTF will be available for download. That RTF may get translated into the web page if some individuals find it convenient. PLEASE TELL ME IF YOU WANT THIS OR I WON'T BOTHER. e.g. if you want to read it on some device that can't open RTF. I plan to release these documents without a pass from my editor, so they're likely to be rough around the edges. I may iterate the documents as time goes on, and will track their version number. This thread will be potentially the only place I track these updates on as they happen (as well as what was changed).
How long will this be?As long as it is wide.
The campaign was going to be 6 segments, each segment containing something like 12-15 missions. The fifth and sixth segments for iterations C-U were never written, only 0-3. This is because I hadn't figured out what I was going to do with them. The fifth segment was written for Unreal 4 back before the project swung back into a CGI concept (C-H) and then eventually sc2. That segment contains around 50 ARPG (think DMC) missions. The average mission is 15-25 pages and 7k-25k words. Some are going to get thrown out in a sanity check because they served only as gameplay avenues, but those that remain will grow considerably since they are all almost exclusively dialogue with some gameplay notes.
Do you have any related work to share?I sure do.How does your writing structure work for this project?I first write out a Concept Draft. I review this draft multiple, sometimes dozens, of times before considering it a Draft. A Draft is subject to many minor changes, arrangements, and sanity checks for consistency and quality. Once a draft passes my initial QA I send it as part of the document to a minimum of two internal verifiers for generic feedback. During this period I either move forward and block out additional concepts or perform additional passes and enter what I call a Preliminary Base phase. A "base" is the foundations of a structure so to speak. The Preliminary base is a draft that is at a desirable state and is awaiting a pass that adds a lot of detail, such as descriptions about character appearances, weapons, sounds, and other such things. Details are my toughest part of writing so I take potentially a dozen or more passes on details for even the smallest portion of writing until I send it out to my verifiers for a more critical pass. At this stage the section will be officially declared a Base and will be acceptable for a Quality Pass, which ensures a final QA check is conducted before I move on to a critical polishing phase. Should this section pass all of my scrutiny I will consider it release-worthy and the section will be declared Version 1.0 of that section.
~[