Machinations of Amirus Intro+Act 1 Postmortem*

February 2, 2024

*Does it really count as "mortem" if only like 1/3 of the game is out? I don't know but I'm sure going to post about it!

About 6 months ago I put out the intro and first act of a visual novel, Machinations of Amirus. (It's free and will take you about an hour if you want to run through it before reading this. I am simply not going to worry about spoilers, either for Act 1 or for my plans for Act 2/3 going forward.) My goal here is to think out loud about what I was intending to do, what I did, what works in my opinion, what could be improved within the confines of this basically-a-first-draft, and what's worth keeping an eye on going forward.

What is Machinations of Amirus?

Machinations of Amirus is a tie-in to a TTRPG that does not yet exist - and will probably not exist for some time if my stack of WIPs is any indication - about mecha duels and power struggles among space nobility. In this game, you take the role of a member of House Alzur, which thinks of itself as a proper aristocratic House: you're a scion, a knight, or a captain, indicating varying levels of capital-n Nobility.

Narrat is a VN engine that expects you to use skill checks to operate with varying levels of skills. In Machinations, your "skills" are your relationships with 8 important people to the plot: 4 nobles and 4 commonfolk. (Which isn't too-too far from my intentions for the TTRPG, but in that case, it's because you're intentionally influencing other characters - it's been adapted here to make more sense for a single player fixed story.) Skill "checks" are basically adding 0-2 to a static value: you either have a 0%, 33%, 66%, or 100% chance to pass a given check, which lets you overwhelm checks if you have enough but lets you reach higher if you're close.

At the end of the day, the goal is to let the player unfold and greatly influence a story about the future leaders of various houses caught up in a greater game that turns them all against each other. Think FE Three Houses, Game of Thrones, etc etc etc you get the genre I'm going for.

Goals

• Character creation that's meaningful but not much. My goal was to make approaching this game as a different background feel different right from the start, but not toss a character sheet in front of people and make them figure shit out - especially because there aren't like, stats as such!
• Establish how the main cast and how you know them, and what that means. Your "build" is your connections, as it were. So we need to establish that you know everyone, how you know everyone, and how well you know everyone. Even at early stages, it's important to make it clear that knowing people more or less well will get you different outcomes too.
• Establish the setting, specifically and generally. As you might guess from the title, we're going to be on Amirus following the chargen section. Act 1 has to establish somewhat what that's like, at least from an invader's point of view. Beyond that, we have to establish like...what each House is like at the high level, their relationships to one another, and what this setting is like in general - not like in the sense of loredumping, but in the sense of thematics.
• Sow seeds of the conflict to come. In Act 1 everyone's on the same side. But like...you and I both know that won't last. That's why we're here, to watch it all burn down. That's what this setting is for. So we need to set some of those things in motion.
• Establish that failure isn't the end. You can't die and you're not going to be able to...at least before the proper end of the game, anyway. I don't want to create a game over "do it again, stupid" situation.

So let's see how I did.

Chargen

You pick out one of those aforementioned 3 backgrounds after a brief stage-setting monologue. These don't have as much to hang on as they will in the tabletop game, so I tied them in more strongly with those characters and your mech. I elected to go with a "lifepath" method of chargen:

• The Scion goes to House Alzur's mecha academy, where they learn to fight and meet the heir to both your House and Amirus. Then, the scion attends finishing school, where they meet the two other heirs to the houses that matter, among others.
• The Captain comes up in a gladiatorial arena on a backwater world run by House Alzur. They meet two of the commoners here, as part of a fighting trio who get forcibly recruited by the various Houses and have their contracts bought out. Then, the Captain is deployed at Nilara, an occupation that goes very poorly, and meet the two other commoners who are deployed there as fellow officers.
• The Knight goes to mecha academy and then is deployed at Nilara, so they exist kind of "between" the two. (And the four people they interact with in their background are closer to "between" nobility and not-nobility than the other four.)

You have a few choices in there too:

• Your station in life defines how heavy your mech is: commoners get easy-to-kill light mechs, nobles get hard-to-kill heavies, commoners with a little more loyalty built in get mediums. (Going forward, the size of mech a given character has indicates to some degree how they see themselves acting in the world: heavies as literally farther from the conflict, mediums as up in the shit, lights as harder-to-hit daredevils or people who consider themselves expendable.)
• At each step, there's a point where you have to lean more towards one character or another: given that character affinity is your "skills", this is basically part of your "build".
• Each mech has 3 moves to start, but you get a 4th one (each kind of character chooses between two).

I did add a few "false" choices in all of these too that don't have mechanical impact: each background gets one instance of a "no-win" choice, where the chips are down and you simply don't have good options.

Establishing the main cast

In every case, you meet...most of the main cast. You meet 4/8 initially, and then after a brief introduction, it splits based on who you have more affinity with: you're introduced that way to 6/8 of the characters. You get a fairly good idea of what the deal is for those initial 4 and decent idea of the other 2, at the very least, and you'll have an opportunity to flex those affinities in the end sequence by getting them to cover for you so you can make it there relatively unscathed or egging them on to duel at the very end.

Establishing the setting

Chargen gives a pretty good view of the setting: what growing up noble vs common is like, especially. The Scion hadn't worked a day in their life at the start of Act 1 proper, while the Captain had been a gladiator and then a deployed officer for years prior. The fact of there even BEING an arena on a world that Alzur controls contrasts hard with a noble being sent to school to learn how to administrate properly. The inequality and inequity of the setting is emphasized well: the "no-win" choice mentioned prior is repeated near the end (did you catch it?) as a way to drive home that this setting is simply not fair at all, and that you can do everything right but still lose. You get some kind of idea of what kind of place Amirus used to be by nature of how you're able to invade it and the places you go to do so. Inherent to the invasion, you wreck the planet's infrastructure in some way.

Sowing seeds

A few important character points are established in act 1, especially with regards to Caterina (with the death of Roderick) and Gustav (with however the final encounter plays out: winning and losing are both huge inflection points, because either his brother is fucking dead or he isn't and is still at large as a rebel). There's a few good moments in there with just about everyone else too. And there's a ton of foreshadowing.

The "branch" in the middle of act 1 gives you a choice between taking the easy way and destroying infrastructure, or taking the hard route and trying to recapture it: this forces you to choose between depriving the people on the planet of resources or taking extra risks and threatening the invasion. This is where the ~ideology~ seeps in: you are very rarely incentivized to give a fuck about the people you're theoretically invading on behalf of, except in the instrumental sense, and this will continue to be a trend going into act 2. The various approaches that characters suggest also characterize how they'll act in future situations: conservatively or willing to take on risk for whatever reason, trying to avoid destruction or being fine with it, regard or disregard for civilian casualties. Leaving it intact, success or failure, sets you up in the future to more easily find out about the rebels and their source of funding, which is intended to set up growing tensions in act 2 that boil into act 3.

Failure is not the end

You can lose every fight except the tutorial, or fuck up every "major" skill check, and it's fine. Things keep rolling, just different now. You might lose an opportunity or two later, but in one case you might even gain an opportunity by messing up.

What works really well

• The lifepath chargen feels great. There's just enough variation going into act 1 proper to make it feel meaningful between playthroughs and you get a very different sense of who House Alzur in particular is depending on your choice.
• Act 1 has decent variation and works well to establish most characters. I'm pretty proud of the branching in general, it exists and feels meaningful but it's not a total clusterfuck on the backend.
• The combat engine exists and feels pretty good, in my opinion.
• I really like how the ending turned out, and all the twists and turns it can take, and all the variables leading towards it. Fucking up in the end is not only possible but can be good going forward, which I'm proud of.

What can be improved

• I don't feel like there's enough characterization for all 8 of those important characters. Like I'd mentioned, you get to interact with 6/8 of them, but those other 2 are left hanging, which kind of sucks - and you have limited interactions with those two you meet on the act 1 branch too.
  • There's two junctions in particular where we could fix that: one is before splitting up, which would be a good time to introduce everyone. Another is talking to folks post-branch - right now you get a choice of one person to talk to, I think it's better if can you talk to all of them. (Not least of all because I want people to see some of the better micro-dialogue-nodes in there. Mostly Theo's if you go comms because I get a chance to be extremely not subtle.)
• A few more "fake" choices would be good: these help you get in the shoes of your player character and decide how you want to play them. (I might add in "input a name", "input your mech's name", and "input a callsign" for this reason.)
• The ending sequence is kind of lazy with regards to the consequences of failure in the leadup to the TYPE-RAPIER/Gustav standoff. I blame this on needing to get the game out for the jam! That section's probably worth rewriting, or at least making it so you can't do a duel against the TYPE-RAPIER if you got whacked in the leadup - only egg Gustav on or not.
• Combat bugs and interface. Needs tuning up, I have some fixes and I was working on an interface that tells you a bit more about the state of a duel without being as verbose in the combat log.
• It's very instrumental in parts. A little more description, dialogue, etc would go a long way. I blame writing mostly essentially technical documents and not dialogue or prose, minimalism doesn't always suit the game.
• It would be so sick if it had music or sound or backgrounds or something but that costs money (and I don't expect this project to make any) or time (and that's at a premium).

Going forward

Last call if you don't want to be spoiled on future happenings.

• First, I should clean up the intro and act 1 a bit. Make it more of a representative vertical slice.
• Act 2 is going to be administration of the planet post-invasion.
  • I think the play here is to establish it as kind of a series of vignettes: as you put fires out across the planet, more and more spread as things come to a head.
  • In addition, in between, you'll have conversations with your fellow administrators, get to know them a bit better, etc. Thinking like a schedule thing: mission -> who are you hanging out with -> mission -> hang -> etc, with a few big events thrown in there.
• Act 3 is where Houses Alzur, Reyaal, and Montrant all start pointing guns at each other and shit hits the fan.
  • I think the play here is to establish 3 "ending" scenarios, one for each noble House, and plot those out.
  • Act 2 has to lead you (based on your decisions, and who you know best, and various decisions made) towards at least one of those. Probably Alzur is always a possibility but you have to put a little more effort into the others.
  • I'd like one or two "harder to unlock" ending sequences too, but the emphasis has to be on making siding with one of those 3 feel just as satisfying, especially Alzur if they're the "default" option - I don't want it to make it feel like a bullshit ending as opposed to a true ending. Very much in favor of players being able to mostly muddle through to something that feels appropriate when playing blind, then figuring out how to do more specific things if they decide to go total sicko on it and pull it apart by the seams.
• Individual character endings? Maybe!

When will I continue to work on this? Uhhhhh I'll get back to you on that. I keep having other projects take priority. But it's been on my mind lately and I've wanted to post more about game dev this year so here we are. Hope you enjoyed reading it!

(Read the original on cohost here!)