It’s been quite some time since I last posted an update on Winds of the North. Some of you reading this might not even know what it is!
What is it?
Winds of the North is my upcoming solitaire gamebook set in Viking Age Scandinavia. It’s a huge sandbox game with lots to do like crafting, building, hunting, exploring, raiding, trading, and farming.
It’s a campaign game you can play in small chunks at a time, where each in-game Week allows you to do 2 Activities. You can easily play a Week at a time (around 5-10 minutes on average) or a Month at a time (maybe 30-40 minutes) or a full Season (around 1 hour+). These times are, of course, once you’re familiar with the game and more comfortable with the systems. You’ll want to take your time when first playing since it can get pretty complex.
Progress
Earlier this year, after I had finished my last playtest, a couple of my playtesters reappeared with more feedback! This was very unexpected, but gave me some more information to work off of. I’ll still never feel like I have enough feedback, but at some point, I need to finish the game.
The past couple of months have been spent doing final re-writes and edits to the text. It’s a lot of text. I’ve currently gone through about 45,000 words, but I have quite a bit left to do. The whole game is basically a full-length novel! It’ll take a while to finish the editing, but I can tell you, the game has benefited greatly from this last pass. Once editing is done, then it’s on to rebuilding the PDF and finalizing everything else.
But I’m not crazy enough to promise a timeline on when it’ll be done. I’m pretty far along with editing, maybe 3/4 the way through. And I don’t think putting it all together again will take nearly as long, but I don’t really know! It’s done when it’s done.
That’s all for now; just a quick update on where I’m at with the game. Don’t worry, I’m hard at work trying to finish it so it can finally go out into the world!
-Thomas
Thomas P. King, author and game designer 