Factions & Flavour
And whether every rule can be broken
This Week’s post reveals what I’ve been working on recently, some factions for TITANIC BASTIONMECHS (the rename is coming… brace yourselves!).
As teased last week, I’ve been particularly influenced by my memories of playing Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri in how the factions are presented.
As you played through the game you'd still hear from the other faction leaders. Not just through diplomacy, but each new tech advance came with another quote, usually from one of the faction leaders. It's like they were always tempting you with which faction you wanted to try out on your next game.
I remember being most drawn in by the University at first, then tempted by the strangeness of the Gaians, and later morbidly intrigued by the Human Hive. I love the idea of a miniatures game that has the same effect, allowing players to dip in and out of various factions as they wish.
Elsewhere you can read up on a great example of what I mean when I talk about infusing flavour into as much of a game as possible. Johan is responsible for the graphic design on Mork Borg as well as Into the Odd Remastered.
Check out the full thread here.
Coming Soon
On Patreon I’ve continued my thoughts on faction design by looking at whether each rule in a game can be broken in an interesting way.
I've been trying to drill down to the identity of each of the factions in Intergalactic Bastionmechs (I really need to give this a proper name soon). Most of all I want them to each have a special rule that gives them a unique gameplay twist while implying something about their flavour.
A good way to do this is to have them break one of the standard rules of the game. This is equally applicable to designing RPG abilities, so don't run away if you're sick of hearing about wargames!
This will go up on the blog next week.
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