Staring into the (Liminal) Void, 2 years in

February 13, 2025

Liminal Void received another update, somehow, bringing it to its 4th distinct iteration (not counting sub-iterations and tiny fixes). It’s a neat little subset of a game about how much it sucks to live in space under capitalism, largely at this point in its development through the lens of “what if your employer just sucked at keeping you alive”. It’s also been kicking for more than 2 years, periodically updated, never completed. Honestly even the name is a work in progress, if I get a better one I might change the name.¹

So what do I see in this one?

The Story So Far #

In late 2022 I released the first version of the quickstart, along with CICP-1. It was the first Total//Effect thing I ever made, and I kind of figured I’d finish it first! But then I started Valiant Horizon instead² and carried that to the finish line that summer. Throughout early 2023 I continued to write a more complete version of Liminal Void, largely based on those early versions. It got pretty far! Like 100 or so pages in. It’s got some neat ideas in there, like a kind of achievement-based “experience”. I wasn’t wildly satisfied with it, though. I thought it was still way too combat-oriented and way too resource-fiddly. (I wrote the 2nd quickstart scenario soon after releasing a quickstart v2 with some playtest feedback around that time.)

Later in 2023 I would start a Minimalist Jam project that was intended to be a STALKER-ish thing based on Total//Effect and LOOT, EXPLOIT. It didn’t get too-too far but it had some neat ideas: chief among them, a weird marriage of spending LUMEN 2.0 attributes and Total//Effect rolls that observant developers might call “a kind of middle ground” and “wait is this just Cypher but good?”³. After that game got hit by the bus that was Celestial Bodies⁴ (and I also just decided the project was kind of petering out anyway), I decided to harvest that tech to make Liminal Void v3. (I wrote the 3rd quickstart scenario soon after that alongside v3.1.)

v4 came out this month, along with one of the earliest ideas for its setting. The most obvious change is the layout - I changed the font from mono to sans and leaned in harder to make the black-color 100K instead of RGB #000, for instance - but a big thing beyond that is that I changed how ammo/weapon charges worked. Instead of tracking individual ammo/charges on a per-weapon basis, using one makes you check against its discharge rate to see if the clip/battery will run dry. Additionally, combat got even more de-emphasized by removal of Prime enemies. (This was something I realized should happen while writing Total//Effect v2.0 to further de-emphasize that kind of combat.)

What do I want from this? #

Picking up on themes, my general priorities from the above fixes have been:

• Streamline. No points for guessing this correctly.
• Figure out a visual identity. HARDPLACE helped me nail down IBM Plex Sans as a suitable body font and the rest backed into the fonts I’d already been using (Monomania, IBM Plex Mono, and JetBrains Mono). I’ve also grown a soft spot for 100K as the black portion of B&W - it’s got a warmth to it that gets the point across without feeling so stark. I don’t think that’s the extent of it and there’s way more room for embellishment but I like where it landed so far.
• De-emphasize combat. Over each edition, the degree to which anyone can easily do combat has been relegated more fully to explicitly chosen weaponry and combat-ready outfits - which was the goal from the start, but at the time I’d been coming off of LUMEN so I was still kind of thinking in the combat-game sense.
• Ground that sci-fi. This goes along with the above to some extent, but the goal of the game isn’t to be a set of extremely competent heroes: it’s to be normal people thrust into a bizarre economic situation and having to figure out what that means over time. This means all of it has to be kind of plausible and to some degree, “harder” sci-fi to hit what I want it to.

The last two especially are important thinking about the question: where does it go from here?

I’m going to lay out some pillars that from the start have affected how I approach this. Part of these are some of the source material, but part of these are intentional influences from sources I’m intentionally stretching a little towards because I think they thematically fit (especially more OSR-adjacent stuff).

Grounded (And Not Just Cassette Futurism) #

I like laser guns and lightsabers and space horror and space psionic bullshit as much as anyone else - I mean a major influence is System Shock 2 and boy howdy are all of those present there. But that’s not what I’m trying to make here.

Part of my intent is also to not tie the game to a very specific retrofuture defined 40 years ago. If you want Alien or whatever, go play that. Instead I’m influenced by a more modern technopessimist vibe. Everything isn’t cool dials and awesome physical switches: everything is touchscreens that barely work or voice commands that do the wrong thing, half your shit is phoning analytics home and fucking up your bandwidth, and you’re drowing in debt all the time. It sucks in a more familiar way of “we know a better way to do this and the powers that be will do everything in their power to make sure it never happens”.

Another big part of my intent is that the setting is just the solar system. And that’s enough, frankly! If it’s good enough for The Expanse (well, the start of it anyway) it’s good enough for you. Most of it from Jupiter inward is pretty well explored but it’s also huge, full of space trash dumped by unscrupulous corporations, and easy to conceal anything - prime territory for the kinds of stories I want to tell. There are 3 major powers - Earth, Mars, Ganymede - but they’re pretty loose and have mostly settled into a “free trade makes all of us more money, we’re fine with a kind of cold corporate war rather than hot war” equilibrium. (For now, anyway.)

Layers of Tension, Inequality, and Lopsided Incentives #

The idea is for the moment-to-moment to be tense on several levels, and only a few of them “direct”. At the lowest level the day to day life-risking tension: it sure sucks doing odd jobs in space! It’s not good! I wrote a lot of games where dying is explicitly opt-in only and this isn’t one of them. If you survive that, you have the less direct, just as real short-term economic tension: how do we make ends meet? What does it mean if we can’t? If you manage to do all of that, you have longer-term philosophical tension: is it feasible to NOT become the problem while thriving under space turbo-capitalism?

I had been hoping to introduce a few subsystems/procedures/whatever you want to call them that, among other things, emphasize these pressures as well as emphasize the unfairness of the situation with the aforementioned achievement-based “experience”. Doing things that make you a weird corporate stooge give you little bennies alongside them while doing cool-guy things like starting a union or making a station independent get hits put out on you, that kind of thing. (You can do either, of course, your choice.) I also want to similarly force the issue by having achievements that come with things like having a large crew come with Threats like “your large crew wants a say in everything”.

I could just do something like CY_BORG’s rule zero⁵ and leave it at that, but that’s too emotionally easy, honestly. I think it’s way more interesting that if the gravity of the game’s upward progression pulls you towards being just as much of an asshole as your former employers if you just go with the flow. Ideally it’s hard to pretend that it was the only option: my goal is that you have to look at the road not taken every time you interact with advancement. I want the game to somewhat force you to reckon with the fact that you had a choice.

How successful will this be? Well, we’ll see. But I want to make an attempt.

I make a lot of Combat As Sport Games and this isn’t one of them #

This is a game with combat, but the idea is that it isn’t strictly a combat-focused game. (Basically any game I’ve made that a fair number of people have actually read or played is like this so I need to make this very clear. This one takes cues from Valiant Horizon for obvious reasons of “it’s the same engine” but it’s not intended to be exactly that.)

The biggest idea I have for this is the equipment system. Being kitted out for combat a very opt-in thing by making it very tied to equipment. Bringing a gun and coming kitted out in a bulletproof vest or something similar is a statement of intent because of how limited inventory is: both of those are significant sacrifices of other resources or opportunities.

Speaking of, this isn’t purely a game about being gritty space mercenaries or whatever! You should be able to take jobs that don’t involve fighting (though of course, this doesn’t strictly exclude violence). If someone wants this to purely be a Citizen Sleeper-ish game about disassembling wrecks, dealing with specific problems related to those, and having to deal with various other pressures at the same time: that should be doable. Categories of types of tasks I identified for it that it should support:

• Extraction: Salvage, mining, and retrieval.
• Mercenary: Anything that involves sending an armed squad or ship to either do or imply violence.
• Delivery: Escorting VIPs, general cargo delivery, smuggling.
• Investigation: Solving mysteries, digging up dirt.

Of those, only one really directly necessitates combat-as-such, and even then not strictly and not always.

Now, it could be weird to have a tactical combat system still exist in a game that’s explicitly just not about that; but frankly, this game IS intentionally about the violence suffered by everyone under capitalism even if it’s not the direct/physical kind. So having that be a prominent feature in the back of your mind is relevant even if it’s not being directly used.⁶

Multi-Domain Play #

It would be really easy to make this just a one-shot system where the Level 0 quickstart is the whole of the game and I just make a Trophy Dark thing where the rest of my energy goes towards scenarios. People love those games. But I think the concept deserves a little more flex than that. Ideally the scope expands over time if you let it progress: you start with immediate survival, figure out what kind of crew you’re becoming, develop a network and reputation, start making Power Moves.

I like focused games with one extremely tight loop. I mean that’s APOCALYPSE FRAME to a T. But this feels like one that can stand to stretch out a little: the key is never being able to be fully free of strings pulling at you, but instead to make sure they change over time. Start with debt, exchange that for favors and reputation, exchange that for reputation in a political sense.

So what’s the approach going forward? #

So I think we’re in a situation here where I have a lot of very modular ideas that can be fit together. Thinking about the excellent HARDCASE (which has slowly leaked into my influences for Liminal Void), I can lean way further into that and treat it all as mostly separable. If only there were some kind of physical model I could potentially use for this…

I like the idea of aiming for both booklets and a hardback - I could probably manage both if I’m smart about it, especially by leveraging POD resources to avoid having a lot of lesser-book stock.

I could easily split this into divisions like:

• Core:
  • Basics: Quickstart but without tactical combat, explicitly statted weapons, or explicit equipment. The game should technically be playable with this first half and not anything from the second half.
  • Advanced: Include all the stuff I omitted from the quickstart plus Level 1 chargen, advancement, debt economy.
• The First Step: The existing 3 level 0 scenarios, maybe a little guide to writing your own.
• Work: Some Extraction, Delivery, Mercenary, and Investigative tasks/jobs/scenarios, hooks for slotting ’em in, maybe some guides to writing your own.
• Ships: What it says on the tin: getting further into everything to do with ships and living on them, outfitting, ship combat/pursuit.
• The Solar System: The solar system of the 24th century, its points of interest, and some more specific jobs, backgrounds, and hooks related to it.
• Politics: Changing the debt economy into favor/reputation economy over time as you advance.

I think the plan might be to do a gradual-rollout digitally once I have at least Core done (which isn’t too far off from the current quickstart). A good model is something like Wolves Upon the Coast or a season pass: start cheapish, raise the price with every extra bit added, and at the end combine it all into one product.

Or it’ll just be my white whale forever as yet another project hits it with the bus. Seems about as likely at this point! Who can say.

Comments