For the month of January, I’ve been focused on playing games more than development, but I’ve spent a lot of time finishing putting together two home-brew variant games of GURPS.
The Worlds Playground
One game focused in the prohibition era of 1920 America, centred in the locale of Atlantic City, the game style focuses on resource management and collaborative player interaction. To this end, along with a lot of GURPS focused home-ruling I’d developed a character sheet specifically for the theme and detail of the game, an example of which can be seen below. (click the image to zoom)
For this game I went to great lengths creating a huge play map from historical maps I could find and some photo editing magic I came up with one of my most precious creations to date, a poster sized print of Atlantic City circa 1924… with a few artistic liberties taken for the same of the game-world. While I’m not prepared to share a high-resolution image of my work here I’ll share this much lower quality version, believe me, this thing shocked everyone that has seen it in person. Very proud of this!
To somewhat protect my effort and work on this, the map is resized here to less than a quarter of the actual size and quality of the final piece I’ve had printed!
Origami Unicorns
Another game I’d done similar home-brew development for was a game set in a Cyberpunk/Shadowrun world for a Roleplay game with a little mystery and adventure, along with a scenario I’ve written myself featuring plot-twists and visions of a dystopian future-hell with some frenetic action thrown in to keep players on their toes!
Again, along with a lot of home-brew GURPS focused rules I’d come up with to fit the game, I spent time developing a custom character sheet specific to the game needs for the players. Once more, an example of the sheet is shown below.
Free “D”
Along side these not too diminutive efforts, I’ve spent a copious amount of time 3D modelling a lot of assets for Tabletop Simulator. Most specifically my efforts have been aimed at assets for Battletech. Nearly two weeks of February have been sucked away by an intensive Blender-Render session. I’ve even been giving some mild tutoring to a couple of friends that had decided to help me get some things done.
The greatest project I’d completed in my Blender efforts was a scaled map of Antietam, with the ground broken into 30 meter scaled hexes and 5 meter height details.
A shame I do all this essentially for ‘nothing’ really, with the “official” fallout game in the works, sigh…
This game has done one very important thing for my ‘game development’ interests, ever since the Gangster era game, and then again in my Cyberpunk game, and now in my current Fallout game, I’ve used a damage system which has been refined over time, and I think, if I can make it fluid and faultless- I’ll be publishing as possibly the first actual AFour Games “release”.
The core of the idea is that damage can only ever be a ‘maximum’ within known parameters. That is to say, a character in a game can only be so dead, before any additional numbers and calculations become pointless…
With this little bit of concepting going on I’ve otherwise been busy enjoying playing games rather than coming up with complex nonsense. The Fallout game has essentially been a mutated version of the Cyberpunk game, change a few names and details and it’s all quite the same, but I’m ever more reliant on the core rules of GURPS even if there are still parts I choose to avoid and ignore.
And so, for the rest of 2021, I look forward to getting back into the swing of things.
