I had one job last week.
Afterglow
But I went above and beyond; I edited it and then published both Afterglow and Outer Dark. They're both in the wild now. Since Afterglow was one of the first things I spoke about when I started this website, and it's been a near-constant fixture in the Milestone Mondays for nearly a year, it's kind of weird to cast it off, but I'm done with it for now. Go and buy them both please. Afterglow here and Outer Dark here. I'm even running a nifty promo for the first month where anybody who buys Afterglow can get Outer Dark for half off! I had a lot of ideas left over from other games and ended up synthesizing them into Uncommon Valor (UCV). Mostly, the game is centered around the Momentum mechanics, but I ended up throwing all kinds of stuff at the wall to see what would stick. I have a bunch of documents with snippets for mechanical concepts in games that I've never fleshed out, and I often write down ideas as they come to me and then just leave them in the document, waiting for a chance to bring them out. As UCV was mostly made so my friend and I could play with miniatures that are unrelated (like ogres and trolls against super soldiers), I also decided I had nothing to lose with throwing lots of these ideas into the mix,
One of these ideas was delayed threat resolution. I like this idea a lot, and this seemed like a good context to add it in. But I ended up cutting it, and I'll examine why in detail. This will be brief, because not much got done with week with work and overtime.
Afterglow
I'm going to try to record and video tomorrow. It's all I plan to work on this week. The Uncommon Valor stuff has been codified. I played some X-Wing and Aeon's End. That is all. A baseline of power is important to establish in a game, and maybe even more important to stick to. When you have obvious aberrancies outside the typical power curve, they stand out and end up distorting games. It's one think to have a tier list where most items in a game gradually get sorted into: this is mostly inevitable, and not even a bad thing as long as all the options have their own niche that makes them worth considering to most players. If the list is relatively compressed (the best options aren't way ahead of the bottom), then this is inevitable unless the range of choices is tiny. And this can be further mitigated by having the bottom options function as conditional counters to the top, which hugely increases their value and power against first-order strategies. But when outliers are identified and they start having a negative impact on a game by monopolizing player choices, how do you correct the issue? There's a few ways to approach it, but a big one is deciding whether to retain the option or discard it. Discarding is extreme and outside the scope of this rambling. Instead, I'll be looking at two contrasting philosophies: balancing up or balancing down. A very good week for testing, though it was a swerve...
Uncommon Valor
I didn't do this. Instead, I played my Monster Mash against some Star Marines. It was very productive. Afterglow comes with some pretty nice (I think) printable templates to use as your stellar obstacles to complicate your tabletop hyperlight warfare. But I'll always advocate for using 3D obstacles because they just make the game look way cooler. Fortunately, Afterglow doesn't need a whole lot of "terrain" like most skirmish wargames do. In fact, I only own about ten real pieces and a bunch of spare templates. I made them all over the course of two leisurely days, so there's not a huge time commitment for these either. And of course, they're super cheap to build.
You can make or buy nicer-looking pieces, but this is all stuff anybody can do without breaking the bank; it might end up costing you ten dollars total. The other benefit of these is they're 100% functional; you can simply pick them up and remove them from the template marking their boundaries on the table, then put them back as needed. This lets you measure more accurately or move markers anywhere you need to, preserving both the integrity and aesthetics of the game. Czech this out: Uncommon Valor
I did get to test this game, a lot. It produced a giant set of notes with corrections and suggestions that have already been integrated to the rules document. It was very, very productive. It was also actually quite fun. A departure from my usual ramblings about game design, this week I'm just going to talk about using miniatures in Afterglow and where you can get them. I don't own ships from most of these manufacturers, but they all produce product that people have vouched for I know and that would be a good fit with Afterglow.
Mmmm... wouldn't wanna mess with it Afterglow/Outer Dark
I had a pretty dogshit week and was sick to boot, so I didn't get much done on these fronts. I was able to do some assorted hobby work, including magnetizing this very sweet Caprice mount from Heavy Gear. I'm just including it because it was fun to work on and I like pictures. |
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