Shepherd Moon: Omegaverse: Volume 1 (17 page)

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These three favors I give in an attempt to repay your kind services.

I thank you.

Phani Mutha

The End of Book One

Acknowledgements

Every writer always complains about how hard these are to write. I now understand why. You don’t want to forget anyone who has contributed to the success of the book in any way, and you want to ensure that any failures are completely owned up to by the author as their sole responsibility.

Please take the second factor as a given.

First, I need to thank my parents for making me a reader and always, always, reaffirming that I could be or do whatever I wanted. That support was reinforced by my sister and brother, who I love (but would never admit to such a thing, at least to their faces.)

My brother, again, for getting me one of the coolest birthday presents I’ve ever received - a chromebook. It’s the perfect writer’s tool. The entirety of the novel was written on it. It never failed me.

Thirdly, my friends. Many of whom are characters in this series. Some you have yet to meet. Many of those characters are caricatures, at least in part. I hope you laugh - that was the intention. All have helped to read and re-read parts or all of this book and every bit of their advice has gone to making this a better story.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t thank D. Rus for his engaging AlterWorld series. As I was reading, and enjoying, the first book, “AlterWorld” I thought “Hey, a lot of this reads a bit like a Game Design Use Case!”.

I’ve been a game designer for about twenty years, much of that working in MMO’s, and a lot of my job is trying to work through how players will interact with the game environment and each other. One tool that we use to do that is to write a ‘use case’ (or ‘user story’).

Describing what the player sees, hears, and otherwise experiences gives us a good idea of what works, what doesn’t, and what needs to be added.

What a lot of LitRPG seems to be, to this game designer anyway, is a lot of solid game design work - with a larger story added on top of it.

So, after realizing that, I thought, maybe arrogantly, “I’ve been doing this kind of stuff for a long time - all I need to do is come up with a story and I’m set!”

Easier said than done.

In any case, I hope you enjoy the story so far, and want to return to see the further adventures of Duncan and his friends in the Omegaverse in “Shepherd’s Crook”.