Photo by Robert Anasch on Unsplash

Publishing the Dream

World Builders!

Welcome back, and I hope those of you who've had a cold and blustery winter are finally seeing some signs of spring in your neck of the woods.

I've been warm inside my Game Lab (aka my home office/spare bedroom) cooking up the final manuscript for Legacy of the Cage 2 and it's been a real adventure this time (in a good way!).

One thing I've made use of, not sure if you've heard of it yet, but it's this thing called "AI." Let me let you in on a little behind-the-scenes publishing stuff. Maybe you'll get some ideas on how to use AI to launch your creative projects to the next level.

Later, MS Word. I used Claude and ChatGPT to discover a Python script that would translate my sloppy Word doc into Markdown.
Then, I took the output of that and ran it through Claude to strip out all the insane cruft from the Word translation.
Next, I broke the chapters out into their own Markdown files and imported the whole project into Obsidian (which is a sweet open-source Markdown editor. Once you try it, you'll never go back.)
After I did that, I worked with Claude to find a library that would translate my text into printable copy (aka a "PDF") and we located Paged.js - see ya, InDesign.
Now, all I have to do is finish editing the copy, and import the data tables that we know and love (and there are going to be a LOT of awesome tables in this edition).
Click "Go" and the AI will stitch it together and create the final output that you, fight fan, will hold in your own hands.

Six steps to self-publishing? Can it be true?

It is.

I didn't believe it myself, but then again, I didn't think I'd be a published game designer either.

Sometimes, you have to get out there and try it to really find out what's possible.

If you want to learn more about any of the above processes, please, send me an email - I'd be thrilled to show you around.

To future worlds, Matt Ventre