Kickstarter

Hi everyone!

A reminder: if you have moved or are moving, NO WORRIES. We're going to send out the backer's survey when everything's ready, so we'll be able to get your most current address then!

Yesterday we submitted the final version of To Be or Not To Be to the printer. The paper had already been ordered and the books are being printed in the States, so printing will be as fast as possible, but we're looking more at June than May for delivery. I'm sorry it could not be sooner! The delay was in laying the book out: we wanted it to be perfect and that took some time.

But this is going to be a gorgeous book.

Since the Kickstarter did so well, we could afford to make this book a little decadent. Every node gets its own page, and each ending gets a two-page spread:

(That image is by Alex Culang and Ray Castro (the artists behind Buttersafe and Katamari! It's an ending that appears if you play as King Hamlet and decide not to become a ghost. SPOILER ALERT??)

This will be a solid little book: the final page count is 764 pages, and 113 of those contain illustrations. Not bad. Not bad at all. It's such a pretty book, you guys.

The manuscript itself has been copyedited twice and gone over in great detail when we did the audiobook, but when it was laid out there was the chance of errors being introduced. The only option was to go over the manuscript AGAIN in even greater detail, and to double-check that every single page linked to the correct pages every single time. We didn't want "turn to page 45" and have 45 be the wrong place!

So I wrote a program that took the book text, transformed it into a graph, and checked that this graph was the same as the graph it also generated from the original manuscript. Or, to put it another more futuristic way, I brought a computer intelligence into the world, designed specifically to play my book and run through every possible game. The book was now COMPUTER-APPROVED. That took few hours.

But then I realized that while I thought the program worked, I only had the one test case, and I didn't want to risk an undetected bug in my whipped-together program making the book turn out less then amazing. So I went through the entire book manually, marking down node and link numbers, and making sure they were all consistent. That took an entire day. At the end, I'd produced this, which looks a lot like my notes on unraveling the conspiracy about how dogs are mind-controlling the world's leaders but actually represents a lot of hard work:

All this to say that yesterday was really exciting and this bad boy is going to be a REAL THING. We're now at the printers! We've still got to lay out Poor Yorick and get that printed, but it's a much smaller job that we're starting on first thing next week, and shouldn't take more than a few days.

Other news is that we're doing a final day of re-recording on Monday - this is clean-up work on the audiobook, redoing any line that sounded a bit off!

IN CONCLUSION, WHEELS ARE IN MOTION AND SOON BOOKS WILL BE COMING OUT OF THE WHEELS

Today is William Shakespeare's birthday, so you know that that means!!

STATUS UPDATE TIME

• again, if you have moved or are moving, NO WORRIES. We're going to send out a survey when everything's ready, so we'll be able to get your most current address then!
• first draft of the audiobook is IN MY HANDS, and I've been going through it the past few days (it's 8.5 hours long! Whoaaaah) to find anything that needs fixing. We'll have one more recording session to fix any problem and then we are DONE! In the meantime, the audio team is cleaning up the audio. It turns out there's clicks that the bones in our jaws make that can be picked up when you have a sensitive microphone right near someone's mouth? Those are being removed. I can barely hear them but I am assured that they EXIST and are being EXPUNGED.
• the Yorick skull has had a final prototype and is APPROVED. These are now being manufactured! Awesome!
• ebooks are being tested and are just about done! Now it's just bugfixes to get everything perfect in the widest array of ereaders possible.
• the physical book has had a first layout done, and we're making changes to produce the second one.

So here's what's left to do:

• finalize the physical book layout
• print the books
• sign all those books, hah hah hah, what could possibly go wrong
• send everything out

Everything else (the bookmarks, tattoos, stickers, posters) are sitting in a warehouse AT AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION, ready to go! We're still hoping to hit our May deadline for all this, but it may slide past that a bit. It depends on how fast the print layout can be finalized and turned around! I will, of course, keep you posted.

Updates!

• if you have moved or are moving, NO WORRIES. We're going to send out a survey when everything's ready, so we'll be able to get your most current address then!
• the play was insane and fun, you can view the log here!
• audiobook recording is DONE! Pretty much. The files are being cleaned up and stitched together now, and we'll probably have a few more hours of recording to fix anything we don't like, but it's SO CLOSE
• physical book is still being laid out
• and most of the ebooks are done!

For the ebooks, it turns out most authoring software is designed for baby books that only have one story and that you only ever read forward. So instead I've been writing code to generate the ebooks myself, because WHY NOT THIS'LL BE AWESOME and because I WANT THE BOOKS TO BE SUPER RAD.

I've been using the prequel book, Poor Yorick, as a test case, since it's smaller and therefore quicker to generate than the full text of To Be or Not To Be. And I've been sending out versions to friends with ereaders to test it out. It's looking really good! Here's a sneak peek at the book on a Kindle Keyboard (black and white unfortunately, but the file is in colour and will look so pretty on colour displays!) The art for this book is by Tyson Hesse and the words which you can comprehend if you read really fast or know how to pause a video are by ME.

For those interested, the books have an introductory page teaching you how to read them, and after that every node is set up as a chapter in the ebook file. Choices are also their own chapter, so they always show up on their own page all nicely grouped together.

You navigate by tapping on links, which brings you through the story!   At an ending you can follow the restart link, or use the "back" button on your device to go back to the most recent choice you made before you died. Basically it's designed to be as intuitive as possible. Basically IT MAKES READING FUN.

FINALLY

Just a reminder that the live and internet-streaming play performance of the book is today at 9 pm EDT. Full details are at Shakespeare in Busan.com and you can RSVP on Facebook!  If you're not in EDT, here's what time it will be in your time zone.

And yes, if you miss it, it'll be recorded and made available online after the fact. But you won't be able to join in on the voting to decide where the story goes next if you're not there tonight! :o

I can't wait to see this - all I've seen are the same images you have, so I'll be as surprised as you are!

9pm EDT tonight.  Shakespeareinbusan.com.  EXCITING!

UPDATES:

• the book is now being laid out!
• We're more than half-way through recording the audio book and it's going really well! A lot of the lines become funnier when they're read out loud, which, as the dude who wrote the thing, has been really interesting to see. I hope to have a clip to share soon!
• I've got the second prototype of the Yorick skull and we are in GOOD SHAPE. A few more tweaks and we should be good to go!
• Poster design has been finalized and it is gorgeous. The initial idea was to do something a lot more basic, but I've had a lot of help from Christopher Slowe and did you know that he is The Master Of The Graphs, because he TOTALLY IS. We kinda got a little... ambitious. To the level of "Hey Christopher I bet you couldn't lay out the entire flow chart for the book so that it's shaped like a stone-cold thematically-appropriate skull" and he was all "Hah hah hah AS IF THAT'S EVEN A CHALLENGE" and BAM:
• 
• When you see this at full size in real life you will say "DANG Y'ALL".

Now for the exciting thing: THE PLAY. One of our ultra-crazy unlocked stretch goals was for a live performance of the book as a play by Shakespeare In Busan and they've been working like crazy to make this happen. And now it's going to!

In fact, it's going to happen THIS WEEKEND.

This Saturday, March 23rd at 9 PM EST is when it goes down, and yes, for every choice both the live audience and the rest of us online will get to vote on where the story goes next. It may well be insane. Directors Peter Starr Northrop and Ryan Estrada are mad geniuses. Here's what time that is in your time zone! 

I'll send out another update on Saturday to remind everyone, so for now all you can do is GET EXCITED (and check out ShakespeareInBusan.com for updates!)

FINALLY, last update I mentioned how Machine Of Death: The Game of Creative Assassination had special Dinosaur Comics cards, and Story War: The Storytelling Party Game had To Be or Not To Be cards! Both Kickstarters are ending in the next few days, and now Machine Of Death ALSO has To Be or Not To Be cards and Story War ALSO has Dinosaur Comics cards. So that's special Dinosaur Comics and To Be or Not To Be cards with both projects.  These cards are exclusive to Kickstarter, so we're getting close to your last chance to get in on these bad boys!

That's all for now! Remember: Saturday is when the play goes down! :0