Machinations of Amirus
A Machination of Court and Frame
Binary Star Games
*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.
Valiant Horizon v1.0 is finally out! Some big changes:
12 incredible illustrations by Charlotte Laskowski!
Editing and revision by Marx Shepherd!
And some smaller ones:
Swarm enemies don’t exist anymore and Prime enemies are a bit different.
Relationship rolls are now reversed so high rolls are good.
Various little fixes, typos, and tweaks.
Thanks so much to everyone who backed the game! I’ll have news about a season pass soon. And for everyone’s generosity, I added one community copy for everyone who bought it (and a few more on top).
Hi there! Last class overview devlog, because after these two we’re out of core classes! Introducing the final two, Tactician and Windmagus. Just in time for the full release on January 23rd!
The Tactician
From the start, I wanted one full-support class - not just for mechanical reasons, but thematically, I wanted someone whose almost exclusive role was to support and boost allies. As mentioned in the Commander overview, I’ve had the idea of Tactician via 36th Way Weigh the Odds Commander via 13th Age Commander via 4E warlord in my head for awhile, and I knew I wanted something like it here - so tying it to full-support made sense. I styled it as kind of the “brains of the operation” or the “puppetmaster” - a lot of its abilities focus on planning, logic, tactics, strategy, or unexpected preparedness.
Once of the martial ideas I wanted to replicate was someone who is just absolutely steadfast in every sense: physically and otherwise. I knew I wanted a Knight somewhere too - I just inherently like the idea of a warrior defined by dedication. (Not in like the historical sense, of course, but in the fantastical/romantic sense.) It seemed like a good pairing, and all of its tales and much of its skillset pertain to one or the other. (One of its suggested Exhaust abilities, “Swear an oath that anyone will believe”, is probably one of my favorites that I’ve written.)
All of my mages (the -magus classes specifically) are just a little off from what people expect. “Earth” is probably the most skipped element in video games on top of that - you see fire/ice/lightning a lot, and earth sometimes comes in as like “acid” or some similar cop-out like that. This makes sense if you’re only making up elemental attacks and not trying to hit something more core to the concept/trying to make something that feels like it belongs to the world. But I don’t want any of the magic in this world to be solely for combat - they all had to feel like they were like, part of the world in some way. So Earthmagus’s Tales are about understanding, addressing and nurturing the land, and their iconic portrait is a farmer or tender of some sort.
Written for Prismatic Wasteland's "make a new mechanic and give it a name" challenge.
You have two approaches to a situation on either side of a spectrum. For example, let's say... Soundwaves and Emotions. Decide which is "high" and which is "low", then define your Number between 1 and 10, inclusive. A number skewed towards one side means that you'll have high chances of success but also high chances of consequences for the other side, and vice versa.
To get the elephant out of the room, yes, I came at this starting with the 4E warlord by way of its less acclaimed distant cousin, the 13th Age commander. More specifically, I took a crack at this idea starting in 36th Way. 13th Age/36th Way’s Commander have two resource-generating class features indicating focus: Weigh the Odds, which lets you reliably generate the resource you need, but is purely non-offensive; or Fight from the Front, which is a melee attack that generates the resource on a hit. (More on Commander here.) So we had two concepts of:
Or wouldn't want to play, I guess, if that's your goal. Basically try to make something that holds your interest.
Just feel it out, you know? You probably know what you want to do, practically speaking. Trust your instincts, they probably came from somewhere.
Unless you don't have any clue where you're going which is fine too. Sometimes it's about the journey. Sure helps to have a destination in mind though.
Be an absolute sicko about something in your work. This isn't really game design specific but it's good practice.
Design offensively, not defensively. Whenever you think you went a little too far, suppress that instinct and double down.
Every person posting about game design like they absolutely know what the fuck they're doing is a goddamn liar or has their head up their ass, including me. Just make the fucking thing. You got this.
You should always have 10 things on a list even when you can't think of 10 of them.
FREE SPACE
Your game needs at least one more railgun than it currently has. Get on that.
I know what you’re here for, mechanically. Let’s talk shop about The Grid™️.
Loadout and Construction
Every mech in this game is defined by a grid like this:
When I say defined, I mean fully defined. First, the basics:
Every frame (basically a chassis for a kind of mech) has HP (Hull Points!) equal to its grid size. So the one you see above has 12HP.
Every frame has a unique trait based on its grid’s size and shape. (This one gets more movement for having oversized thrusters, for instance.)
Each component you see listed there has a specific designation as to what it does (some of them relative to the mech’s size) as well as a shape and size. Weapons can’t be rotated but can be flipped.
