Obviously I've not posted on here in a while.

If you want to see what I've been up to lately, check out my itch page where I've been posting RPG stuff. Notably What Big Teeth, my game of minimum wage werewolves.

Resource systems in card games

I want to talk about resource systems in card games. I apologise that there are no pictures. When I say "card games" I mean games like Magic and all its spinoffs and clones. I'd call the genre CCGs except there's no reason they have to be collectible and no reason collectible games have to work like this.

For my purposes I’m going to define a genre like so: “Having a hand of unique cards that you pay costs to play.”

The traditional system is that on turn N you can spend up to N energy. Next turn you will have N+1 energy to spend. Most games tweak how exactly your N rises turn to turn (in Magic you play lands, in other games you play cards face-down as resources, in still others it goes up automatically) but the fundamentals are consistent. And anything so uniform across so many games is very successful; functional and robust but also boring. This is a challenge.

General features of the genre:* Having some cards stronger than others is fun and cost is a good balancing factor for that.
* Keeping the early game simple is fun.
* Ramping up to play expensive cards is fun.
* Drawing cheap cards late-game is annoying.
* Making a deck with the correct ratio of cheap to expensive cards is far more important than it is fun.
* Successful games find ways to work around those issues, usually with card mechanics.

Interesting exceptions:
An outlier I enjoy is Fluxx. The rules of Fluxx are “on your turn, draw a card then play a card”. All cards have the same cost – one play. And some of the cards you play will increase the number of plays that can be made on subsequent turns.

Epic was a short-lived magic-clone with one interesting feature: Like Fluxx you played one card per turn; any card. There were also some cards with lesser effects that didn’t cost a play. That was interesting.

What I like about those two games’ model is a hand of any random cards is always playable. There are duff hands, but none that leave you unable to play the game.

Resource systems:
I have some mechanics that I think would make resource systems for a “hand of cards with costs” game.

Debt system:
By default you have 1 energy on your turn. You spend energy to pay cards’ costs. Your turn ends when you have no energy left to spend. However you are allowed to overspend and go into debt (this will always be the last play of your turn as it leaves you with no energy left). Any debt is given to the next player as free energy.

So, if you have 1 energy and play a 6-cost card, your turn ends and the next player starts with 5 extra energy.

Problems:
* Maddeningly difficult to explain concisely.
* Difficult to track energy in play (counters that go back into a shared pool? Player positions on a wheel?)
* For more than two players, it needs to be played all-against-all with no alliances.
* Not as much sense of escalation when you can play anything on turn 1. I have thoughts on this, but I won’t ramble.

Charge meter system:
Cards have two modes, free and charged. You play one card per turn. When you play a card for free, after it’s done its thing it becomes a charge in your charge meter – a row of cards in front of you. You spend charges in order to play a card in its charged state, which has a bigger effect than when it is played for free. For example, a card might let you draw 1 if you play it for free, or draw 2 if you spend a charge to play it.

In this way, you never have enough resources to play everything in its charged state, and it requires a lot of decision-making.

I think there would be colours of card, and cards would usually require charges of the same colour. There could also be cards that have no effect when played for free, but add special effects when spent as a charge. Eg: a creature paid for with this charge comes into play larger.

“Creatures” and other cards that stay in play would only go into your charge meter when destroyed. Or perhaps you can spend them from play? This system has a lot of room for fiddling. Too much to cover over all the possibilities. But I’m excited by it.

Quite a few games have tried putting two effects on each card, but I’ve never seen it pulled off convincingly – usually the minor/secondary effect feels stapled on and unrelated to the flavour of the card. I hope that this system makes them closely related enough to feel natural.

Yin & Yang:
Every card has two modes, a yin and a yang mode. Each turn you play exactly two cards, but one must be the yin mode and the other in the yang mode. This gives you a large number of potential plays even with a small hand of cards, and every play has trade-offs.

There’s a few ways you could take this. If the yin mode was always a small effect, and the yang mode a major one then it would play out like a simpler, faster version of the charge meter. But I think it would be more interesting if they were roughly equal in impact, but different in type. For example:

Give/take –Give something to the opponent vs gives something to you.
Help/hurt – Helps you vs hurts an opponent.
Macro/micro – Improves your resources vs affects the board directly.
Fire/ice – Speeds the game up vs slows it down.
Reap/sow – Harvest crops vs plant new ones.

I like all these systems really. Just need an interesting board system for them to manipulate. The charge meter’s decision-heavy enough that it could make the start of an engine-building game

Drawing generic cards was fun

The CCG model of selling randomised booster packs of cards with some common and others rare is an exploitative one. Its exists to bleed money from you, creates competitive spending amongst friends, is poisonous to game balance and turns buying a game into an extended gambling session. If the game blossoms it creates predatory secondary markets and if it folds you’re left holding half a game that nobody plays.

I take all that for granted. It’s all true, but it’s old ground. What’s interesting to me is all the incidental positive features the booster pack model has.

Ease of stocking.

Random blind packs is a great way to distribute a large set of cards from the point of view of the shop.  There’s no danger of people cherry-picking the desirable packs and leaving them with half a box of shite they can’t move. It’s easy to order in and keep in stock. They’re priced low enough to be impulse buys, but big spenders will also buy them in bulk. And anything this good for the shop is good for the consumer that wants to be able to buy their cards somewhere.

Hiding complexity.

Specialised cards that only work in very specific decks, or deceptively strong cards with big drawbacks are fun, but you don’t want them in every deck. The common/rare model allows you to put your simple and versatile cards at common, and your weird stuff at rare. This ensures that people don’t end up with a collection of theoretically powerful cards but unable to build a playable deck.

(Yes, I know they also hide the most powerful simple cards at rare, but I’m concentrating on the positives, remember?).

No information overload.

A set of CCG cards can easily contain over a hundred playable cards, even after you discount the unplayably bad ones. That’s a lot to take in at once. Exposing people to a booster pack’s worth at a time lets you ease them in without scaring them off.

And duplicate commons mean that the amount of extra information you’re exposed to with each pack falls off, while at the same time the rare slot makes sure that at least one card in the pack might still be new to you.

Lowers barrier to entry.

To someone with a decent collection, the commons are worthless – they buy the booster for the rare, and maybe the uncommons. The business knows this and has priced the packs accordingly. The price is based on game value per pack, not just the number of pieces of cardboard. The commons are filler.

But to someone just starting in the game, every card is new and playable. Commons, even crappy ones, are freebies that fill up an otherwise empty deck slot so that they can get playing as soon as possible, even if their decks are a bit duff. New players get more value from each pack than experienced ones, allowing them to buy-in at a bargain price.

Duplicate commons also mean that the more you spend, the less value you get for your money. This monetises your biggest fans and makes sure that they spend ten times as much as the casual player, rather than just 2-3 times as much. Clever. Sleazy, but clever. On the other hand, experienced players with boxes of duplicate cards tend to donate them to new players to help them into the game. Which is nice.

Drafting/sealed deck (aka Limited).

These are a way to play that takes advantage of random boosters. They limit the card pool to a number of unopened boosters and test your ability to make a deck using a limited collection of uneven cards. And they’re really, really fun. And a huge skill-tester. The people who are good at limited play are much, much, much better than the people who are bad at it.

And it’s not like you just throw the cards away after you’re done with them. It’s a way to get extra play out of your purchases. In fact, some players like limited so much that they don’t even play the “real” game – they sell their cards on to pay for more unopened packs.

Limited play is a big enough deal that the makers of Magic: The Gathering design their sets around it. And if you’re really into the game, this can almost justify random packs as something other than a money-spinner. It adds that much play value, and it’s not an experience you can get anywhere else (deck builders like Dominion are inspired by drafting, but don’t scratch the same itch).

(But Limited is also a game that you have to pay to play *per play*. Ouch. Unless you play cube draft…)

There’s other pluses too, like how surprises are intrinsically fun, and randomisation encourages trading which builds community. But those are more obvious and so not as interesting to me.

So.

 In my head the question is how you might use these good points without the exploitative business model. (I’m aware of living card games, where packs aren’t randomised and you expand your collection with honest, simple purchases. But I’m specifically talking about the randomised booster model, not customisable deck card games in general.)

The only thing I reckon justifies the random booster model is that without it some damn fine games wouldn’t be profitable enough to exist. But then there’s also shitty games that can coast on how profitable a CCG can be so flip a coin, omelettes and eggs.

Pagemages and Boozehorns

These were me getting back in the saddle after a while away. They started with the pose, pulling something out of a book. The scarf was to add a little character beyond generic wizardliness. The robes are lazy I confess. I too often go with shapeless full-length robes, but I think the shading here gives them a bit more definition. I feel good about those creases. They're not great, but my first effort was so much worse. And I feel I've imrpvoed from recognising the problems and fixing them.

I'm sticking with doing vector colouring/shading, and I made the linework for these with that in mind. So I knew I'd be putting a coloured pattern on the scarves, and that I could demarcate #1 and #2's hair without needing to blackline it. Which is new. I used the "spare" lines left in the budget to put a little more expression on their faces. Not sure about that. I wonder if it would be better to do it on the shading layer. I think it's only a matter of time before I give up on the no-mouth line-eyes look. Style erosion.

The unlined spell effects are also new and I can see myself doing a lot more things along those lines. For these guys I deliberately avoided any sort of elemental theming. #1 has flames, yes, but they're blue so they're passable as a generic magical effect.

Next there's these satyr things. I had something else in mind while sketching, but the drunken faun is far more interesting to me. Very fond of the various boozes and goat-beards. The horns were an enormous pain in the arse. One of the downsides of vector colouring - that horn texture would have been much easier in photoshop.

I think these satyrs are knights who have gone questing into the woods and been cursed for their unchivalric vices. In this case, the knights were drunkards. I could easily conceive of gluttonous pig-monsters and maybe slothful bear-men?

These cursed knights would fill a good niche in the theoretical game these are never going to be used for. I didn't feel like the forest witches were actually evil. Cursed monsters gives you something you can feel good about fighting, also making the witches more of a credible menace without making them evil.

Megabots

Super-units in RTS games. They're tricky.

The units with strange or unique abilities/roles like super-artillery or cloaking fields or missile defence are fine. But the generic megabot that's just big and tough and covered in guns is problematic. Lovely idea. Giant stompy robot crushing lesser vehicles under foot. Spectacular. The questions is what function do they serve that an equivalent amount of regular units doesn't? Why build them?

The thor in Starcraft 2 is a lovely example of this problem. A large, impressive super-heavy mech. Like most megabots its primary function is looking impressive. The thor was big, tough and dealt high damage to ground and air targets. But they didn't do much that a bunch of marines couldn't do just as well.

In Supreme Commander 1&2, gameplay niche matters much less. But in general, the megabot units are a more concentrated way to deploy your resources. The megabots are so big and so powerful that an equivalent army of basic units can't be concentrated in a small enough area to be effective.

In the vanilla RTS paradigm units don't perform worse when damaged, so a megabot at 50% health is much stronger than an army with 50% of its units gone. And conversely, you can attack or defend with half an army of tanks, while a megabot that's only 50% constructed is worthless. (Supcom2's "launch half-baked" option excepted). But these differences aren't exactly tactically rich.

So I was thinking about this and I had a weird idea. What if megabots were cheaper than an equivalent army of tanks? Costing maybe half as much as the amount of tanks it would take to kill them.

But taking much longer to build. Really long. That way the megabot's strategic importance isn't what it can do in combat, it's what it requires economically. It requires a different resource to regular units - time rather than money.

So a megabot is an investment, or maybe a gamble. You're accepting a loss of resources with the promise of a massive payoff if you can survive. If other players can scout the in-progress megabot, then it becomes a strategic objective with a tim-limit.

I think about games a lot.
 
Bioshock Infinite is much more linear than any of its predecessors. The flow reminds me of Half Life 2 more than any prior *Shock game and I wonder if it might have been a better game if they'd gone all the way. But they didn't.

Later in the game there's a few more explorable hub areas, but even then there's a ghost-town feel if you go somewhere before the plot needs you to. It's a little jarring after being otherwise rewarded for exploring every nook and alley.

 
Anyway. There's a trick they use to disguise the linearity that's quite interesting. It's this layout:

When you leave an area, you'll often find that the corridor forks into two, both of which have a sharp corner that prevents you from seeing down them. But if you backtrack after following one to try the other, you'll find that both corridors go to the same area. 

It's a truism than non-linearity usually equals skipped content. By keeping these corridor sections short, they minimise wasted level design. But by knowing that there's a corridor you could have gone down but didn't, it makes you feel like progress is down to your own choices.

Except that The Wizard trains you to look behind the curtain. Bioshock Infinite consistently rewards you for exploring with tangible in-game rewards, and offers no benefit for pushing ahead quickly. The same trained behaviours that give you delicious voxaphones, unstable tonics and loot, also reveal the illusion of your choice. And it was a bit frustrating every time I fell for it, going back and expecting a new area to explore/pillage and finding nothing but a switchback.

And it's interesting to me how a clever technique to make the levels feel more open, clashes with the way the game encourages you to play. 

It's more successful when the areas look like this:

 
It's almost the same trick - whichever way you go you'll reach where you need to be - but on a much larger scale. The corridors are long enough to be interesting, and exploring the alternative route will have enough action to be rewarding. These areas are also large enough that the circular layouts don't feel like corridors. And when they're used as hubs, with different exits unlocking one by one, you might be approaching the action from a different direction each time, which wrings more mileage from the same scenery.

Another game is Darksiders 2. It has a lot of mini boss fights. There's a small cutscene where a giant monster makes a dramatic entrance and then you have to murder them. But it does something clever.

Sometimes you'll get the little cutscene and slay the giant undead scarab hulk or whatever, but then two more of the same monster jump down, sometimes with minions. Holy crap - the game just served you up one as if it were a boss, and now you need to take on *two*? And it makes you feel like a badass when you win. It does this a lot, but it always feels good. 

Of course they're not bosses, they're just a new monster type that then gets added to the normal rotation. But what a way to introduce them! Great showmanship. 

And clever too. The first fight is exciting because of the uncertainty - you don't know what this monster can do. It's also a teaching aid that allows you to learn its attack patterns in a simple one-on-one fight. The followup monsters require you use those skills in a more dangerous and complex situation.

Like the *Shocks, the Darksiders games also reward you for compulsively exploring every corner. It's the Zelda thing where there's collectibles everywhere if you look for them. And finding collectibles is fun, but as a completionist I find myself compulsively looking behind me after every doorway, and carefully inspecting the ceiling of every room. Which is slow and not enormously fun.

Here's a thing:
 
The game is more fun to play when I'm not actively looking for shinies. And when I *do* find a shiny, it's more exciting when I haven't been compulsively checking every square inch. Obviously that would be the most fun way for me to play, except for the gnawing anxiety about missing shinies. And that's interesting to me.

Compare it with Minecraft. I get that same thrill when I see an emerald or diamond block. The layout of caves usually prevents 100% exploration - there comes a point where it's more efficient to find a new cave to explore. But I don't get that horrible feeling that there's diamonds left unmined. I feel no urge to strip-mine the map chunk-by-chunk down to bedrock. Why is it different?

I suspect that it's because Darksiders/Zelda/Bioshock are finite. I know that if I miss a voice recording or health upgrade, that's something lost to me forever. The game will end and I won't have gotten full value out of it. In Minecraft I know there's always going to be more diamonds in the next cave, so there's no stress. It's impossible to complete a collection so I feel no urge to try. It feels so liberating.

Of course the problem is one that exists inside my head. I couldn't argue in good faith that one way is better than another (or even perfectly analogous). But it's fun to examine these things.

Icon style guide

I've made a lot of icons, and I've tried to keep them to a particular style. That's a little pretentious - my style is a crutch to hide a lack of ability. Still, it's hard to draw over 1600 little pictures without getting better at making them, and so I've suffered quality-creep. The ones I make now are often more illustrative and less symbolic. I include details that, back in the first hundred, I might have abstracted.
  Every good icon I make makes its predecessors look worse, and as I get better I'm making more better icons. 

Still, there's some consistency. From the start I developed a set of unwritten rules about how my icons should look. There's a few exceptions, but they're almost all due to oversight or moral weakness.

White on black
Everything is white shapes on a black background. If I want to do something in black, outline it in white, or put it over a white shape. When actually using the icons for something I can invert them if necessary, but for consistency when browsing the base icons, they're all white on black.

Sharp black and white only
It seemed silly to bother with colour permutations (red heart on black background, black heart on yellow background…) for the icons when that's so easily accomplished in a paint program. I can colour, paint over, use as masks on a gradient or anything else. The simplest possible base icons enables the greatest freedom when using them.
This is why I'm always a little annoyed to see them used as-is; just white shapes on black squares. They were never meant as ready-to-use icons. They're stencils.

Border
Nothing touches the edge of the frame. There's an invisible 1pt no-go zone. Again, this is just for consistency amongst the base icons and ensures I have some bleed when I cut out the icon to use elsewhere.

Fill the frame
The icons are always as large as I can get them within the frame. They'd be much less useful as a set if they were all drawn to different scales. If I need a small heart (for example) I can just scale down a large one. If I really wanted a small heart icon I'd give it some kind of framing detail.

Left to right
Consistency. If an icon has a direction, it's going left to right. Up vs down is more flexible, but when it's isn't common sense I tend towards top-to-bottom.

No lexical symbols
These are meant to be illustrative. No letters, numbers, currency symbols or overly specific symbols. If I needed a letter or a number, I could raster it from a typeface. And if I do one digit I should probably do all of them. Likewise letters. Hash marks are illustrative enough that they feel ok. There's an omega too.
 
Not too specific
I don't want twenty different flavours of axe. If I need a specific icon for a specific variety of thing, I can make it to suit. One or two axe icons will fit most needs. And the icons are supposed to be symbolicaly illustrative rather than perfectly specific anyway.
I've bent this one a lot, but I ration myself. There's a lot of different swords and botles for example, but I only do them every now and then so they don't take up too great a fraction of the total. And I try and make sure they're all sufficiently different from each other to be worthwhile. I'm not interested in doing ten different helmets with only slight differences.
I suppose this one includes other people's trademarks and logos too. No Samus helmet, no buster sword and so on. For several obvious reasons.

Not too abstract
Counterpart to the previous rule. If I need a circle I'll draw a circle. Likewise an arrow, a diamond or other simple geometric shapes. The icons are meant to be illustrative and there's a point at which a shape is too simple to illustrate anything. I've done a few miscellaneous weird shapes, which could be glyphs, thingamabobs or jewellery. The problem is that they're so easy to do I could easily churn out a hundred of them. But even if they're pretty, they're meaningless. There's not much difference between having a half dozen available and having a hundred. They're not challenging to make and usually a waste of time, so I don't let myself do many.

Definition and resolution
This is the most important one and the biggest pain in the arse. There's a minimum line width of 1pt. And that includes negative space - two separate white shapes need to have a 1 pt separation between them. This is my minimum "resolution" for detail. No bumps smaller than 1pt, no shapes smaller than that.
There's necessarily a little leeway where two shapes come together to a point, but I stick to this rule hard as I can. It puts a hard limit on the level of detail I can put in and keeps things consistent.

Line standards
Lines get squared-off ends. If the icon really needs it they might get a taper. But usually not. And no taking the piss either - If there's a taper then it should be a short taper. Sometimes there's a drawn element that is only the width of a line, and then I might round off or taper the ends but, again, usually not.

By the way 
The coloured icons in this post are just sloppy five-minute jobs to make a point.

Game concept braindump

Simple three-player game. Each player secretly picks a number from one to three, then all are revealed at the same time. Each player who picked a number that nobody else picked gains that many points. Everyone else gets nothing. First to 7 points wins. Would probably work with 4 players too.

Thinking about a modular roguelike that is expanded by people playing it, which isn't new by any means. Maybe some kind of "deck-building" game where you're a summoner building up a synnergistic horde of minions from prefixes, suffixes and modifiers that you gain as you progress through the dungeon. If you reach the end of the game, then your "deck" becomes a blueprint for a dungeon floor. ie: come up with a good ice "deck" and maybe the next player will have to travel through an ice level populated with those monsters.

Or maybe the visuals are the customisable part? Make a card game ala magic that starts out with all the cards blank, but players get to draw their own art as they play, slowly collaboratively illustrating the game. After playing a round you're presented with 3 different illustrations for the same card and you vote for your favourite. The exact voting mechanism will be a bitch to design, but it's one hell of a gimmick that is sure to garner public attention from game sites.

Inspired by Star Guard, a 2d scrolling shooter where you die in one hit but have infinite lives. A meatgrinder of a war where wave after wave of disposable soldiers with increasingly outrageous prototype guns are sent to the front lines in desperation.  Each life is a new soldier and carries a new experimental gun. You are given brief uninformative instructions on your weapon when you spawn. Some will be useless in the situation where you are, others will be overpowered, others will be suicidal. Short bursts of discovery and fun, where every failure is a new opportunity. Grenades that bounce unpredictably. A fantastic plasma gun that kills you if it overheats. A super-rocket that only has one shot, leaving you unarmed afterwards. A boomerang gun whose shots you DO NOT want to catch. A nuclear grenade launcher whose blast radius is greater than its maximum range. All mixed in with varied but more mundane weapons.

Supreme Commander 2 Experimentals

I enjoy Supreme Commander 2 a lot. Many people say that the first Supreme Commander is much better, but I am not one of them. Still, sometimes I get bored of SupCom2's range of experimentals, and coming up with concepts that add something new to the game seemed interesting. So I did. I probably came up with a few too many actually, so I had to divide them into categories.

Also I sketched some pictures, which aren't very good, but everything's better with pictures.

Economy structures:

Cybran "Betelgeuse" experimental anti-matter reactor
Late game it can be hard to find room to build more power generators. The reactor generates vast quantities of energy with a much smaller footprint than an equivalent quantity of generators. Defending it is much easier, but it's an all-or-nothing proposition and (of course) it explodes with nuclear force if destroyed.

UEF "Butler" experimental supply relay
Borrowing a little from SupCom1's adjacency bonus, this building improves the efficiency of all buildings in its considerable range. Units and buildings are constructed faster and structures produce more mass/energy/research. Rather than a super-resource building, the UEF gets to make its existing ones more useful.

Aeon "Paragon II" experimental mass generator
Shamelessly "inspired" by SupCom1. After a huge upfront cost, this generates mass resources from thin air. Won't single-handedly prop up your economy like in SupCom1, but neither does it explode.

Defensive structures:

Cybran "Impaler" experimental railgun
Fires superheavy metal spikes that must be individually constructed. Low rate of fire and range comparable to light artillery, but the high-velocity spike deals massive single-target damage to ground units. Basic units will be destroyed instantly with the spike visibly stuck in their wreckage (and salvageable!). Experimentals must get used to wearing a new piercing.

UEF "Skyguard" experimental missile installation
An anti-air missile launcher with enough range to cover an entire base. It fires guided missile volleys that, once launched, will follow targets outside their firing range. It also functions as an anti-nuke launcher (albeit with regular range).

Aeon "Juvac" experimental power siphon
Fires a beam that deals drains energy and deals continuous damage to a single target, visibly flowing from target to siphon. After X seconds (proportional to the target's capture resistance) the target will be powered down. Until the unit is destroyed, its controller loses energy while you gain it.

Ground support units:

Cybran "Skywriter" experimental beam platform
A multi-legged walker with four independent beam turrets which function both as anti-missile and anti-air. Mobile defence for your army.

UEF "Mother bear" mobile support factory
A factory on treads that builds land units and stores them internally. Like the flying carrier and the unitcannon, it builds units faster and at a discount. Only minor firepower, but its two support cranes will repair nearby units.

Aeon "Chelovolt" experimental walking shield
An extra-large mobile shield generator. But don't you hate it when units just walk/fly through your shields? This shield is electrically charged and any enemy units inside it will be struck by lightning.

Ground attack Units:

Cybran "Detonator" experimental bomb hatchery
It builds and stores rolling suicide drones that deal medium damage in a large area, but can be destroyed by anti-ground fire before they reach their target. The bombs will roll over water.

Cybran "Honeycomb" experimental MFRL
A basic walker chassis mounting a huge array of hexagonal tactical missile tubes. The missiles all fire in one volley with a long re-arming delay. Long range and dubious accuracy, but barrages a large area.

UEF "Anvil" experimental siegebreaker
A massive brick of a tank, armoured in every obvious way and with a strong personal shield. Very slow, but the most survivable unit in the game. Armed with a battery of short-ranged explosive cannon and a small rack of tactical missiles. Deals less damage at a shorter range than a Kriptor or Colossus, but takes massive firepower to destroy.

Aeon "Soniwa" experimental sonic resonator
A second tracked experimental for Aeon that, like the Pulinsmash, must deploy to fire. When deployed it energises an arc-shaped array. It fires a distortion wave in a long line that damages every enemy along that line. Closer units take more damage.

Flying units:


Cybran "Commissar" experimental flying cannon
A gunship chassis built around a medium artillery cannon. Slow, but it outranges all non-experimental anti-air. Its short-ranged secondary batteries defend against ground attack, but it's very vulnerable to fighters.

UEF "Hephaestos" experimental flying gantry
An unarmed flying construction rig that that has the construction power of a commander. Cannot assist factories. Good for quick construction of a forward outpost, or just late-game base expansion.

Aeon "Herbest" experimental reanimator
A tripartite saucer with dangling jellyfish-like legs. It repairs wreckage into units, transforming other factions' wreckage into aeon equivalents. Experimental and structure wreckage is not restored, instead converted into a proportional number of basic aeon units. Can also repair ground units.

Nostalgic pixels

Today I remembered that I made these little pixel guys a few years ago. And I felt nostalgic. So I looked them up and... huh. These are better than I expected. I'd assumed they'd have aged much worse than this.

There's still some lemons of course. The gunslinger was obviously the first onto the page. The gladiator's duff and the aqua wizard is a bit forced. But the puppeteer and the ninja are cool to me and I think the monk is pretty spiffing.


I deliberately limited my palette to black, white and one colour. I can't remember exactly why. Chasing the Gameboy aesthetic maybe? I've a feeling I just thought that stark black, white and one colour was an interesting look. I do enjoy structured limitations after all (like minimising linecounts for my vector stickpeeps).

 

I also found these pixel lixards that I'd forgotten about. That was a typo - I meant to say "Pixel lizards" but I enjoy the portmanteau.  I was thinking about dwarf fortress when I drew these. I also have a sheet of lizards carrying various weapons and tools but it's boring. Courier lixard is best lixard.

Glaivers

Not exactly new. These are modified from one of the previous generation of stick figures. One of the better ones, but I was going through another detail-inflation phase so a few parts had to be scaled back.

I thought of the original as a "dragon knight", hence the scalloped armour and weapons. Don't take that too seriously though - they're generic designs. I don't have anything interesting to say about the linework. The colours on the other hand...

The top row are what I come up with if I have a blank white screen and a default palette. I always slip into default R, G and B. Boring. The green one is ok, but they're all too Lego-coloured.

After getting annoyed by the Lego colours I redid them from interesting-looking colour palettes I found online in places like http://chromaa.tumblr.com and http://www.colourlovers.com/palettes and I'm a lot happier with the look. I wasn't slavish; I kept #3's red weapon for example.

I was deliberately restrained with the shading details. I want to use flats whenever I can get away with it. However I did shade the fleshtones, for the first time. I think that's a big improvement and something I want to keep up going forwards. It fixes a long-running problem I was having with skin tones not looking like human skin because they had no depth of colour. Faces are important and deserve extra attention. I'm still sticking with the uniform oval-shape and line-eyes, but I suspect it's only a matter of time before I give that up for flexibility, expression and character.

Colour schemes

In the theoretical game I imagine being made with all these pictures, you're meant to assemble a team pokemon-style. I'm doing multiple variations ("skins") when I can, but this raises issues I have with all games where multiple character skins are available.

Firstly it messes with character identification - silhouettes and colour are the easiest ways to ID a character and messing with that takes a toll. It's one of the many things I don't understand about dota-clones: in a game with 50+ different characters, why is anything that makes it harder to ID your opponent a good idea?

Secondly it makes groups look like an explosion in a paint factory. Everyone clashes. Compare TF2 at launch to TF2 now. Pokemon itself doesn't have a big problem here because each pokemon has a very limited number of colours and they all draw on a fairly limited palette. Also you don't see more than 2 of your pokemon on screen at once.


And I know this game will never be made and it will never be an issue, but it's a fun problem to address.

So, minimise a player's ability to customise their team. Just make it impossible to field Mr Pink, Mr Yellow, Mr Purple and Mr Green together. Drawback is that this reduces a player's ability to come up with cool-looking but unorthodox combos.

Another part of the problem is that with only three skins per figure, odds are good you can't find one that goes with your existing colour scheme.

So make more skins, or just more colour variations for each skin? That involves lots of work, multiplied across every skin I ever make. I could make it easier by homogenising the palettes, so I have a "the green palette" and a "the red palette" where each colour has a clear equivalent and I can just swap them about with no creative thought necessary. But from prior experience I know this won't work - requiring a colour pattern to look good with every available set of hues is (to put it lightly) not easy.

My frontrunner plan at the moment is colour themes. You get to choose the colour theme for your guild and every character skin is tagged to indicate what themes it is compatible with and you only get given skins compatible with your theme. For example yellow, orange, red and brown skins will all be tagged compatible with the "autumn" theme. But yellow would also be compatible with the "spring" theme. I could create new themes in the future and assess existing skins for compatibility much more easily than creating whole new skins.

This strikes me as something that will be harder in practice than it is in theory, but I'd like to at least try it out. A subtle problem with retconning incompatible skins out of the world is that it messes with character rarity - but since that's a system I've barely even thought about, I'm not fussed. There will be ways.

Big issue I see is if it means there are certain characters without a compatible skin for certain themes. To a certain extent I can make sure to create a few extra "night" or "winter"-compatible skins here and there if those themes need more love, but it's still an aesthetic choice with strong gameplay implications.

I'm not sure how I feel about that. First instinct is to run with it and see. I've a feeling it might end up being an interesting feature rather than a problem.

Carrion Colours

Don't mind me. Just playing around with colouring for the Carrion. Much easier to do this with vector-colours.

RTS arms race

One of the things I liked in Starcraft was that each race had a siege unit which outranged base defences, meaning that no defence was unbreakable. In practice this didn't matter because investing in base defences would see you overwhelmed by your opponent's massed units anyway but I liked the idea.

I've been playing a lot of Supreme Commander 2, and I much prefer its gameplay to that of Starcraft1/2. However some things Starcraft 2 does very well which SupCom 2 doesn't, is leveraging upgrades to make early-game units relevant in the late game, and keeping units distinct.

These and other things have got me thinking about what my ideal RTS game would be like. I'm thinking a lot about the arms race between units and defences, and late-game obsolescence of early game units. Here's a hypothetical RTS game:

At tech level 1 your only units are raider buggies - fragile, fast-moving units. They're useful as scouts and for killing other raiders. However tech 1 laser towers are super effective against light armour and can destroy many times their own cost in buggies, so much so that a tech 1 rush attack is impossible.

Tech 2 unlocks light artillery units which outrange laser towers and make base attacks possible. Their weapons are only useful against stationary targets, this and their light armour makes them easy prey for raider buggies. This is where you use those buggies you built at tech 1 - taking out enemy artillery or their escort buggies.

Tech 3 is for main battle tanks. These will become the basic attack unit. Their weapon is effective against mobile units and structures, while laser towers and raider buggies can barely penetrate their armour. However this is also when gunships - air units that tanks can't even attack - are unlocked. Light laser towers and raider buggies can attack air (though until now this wasn't relevant) and so they remain useful. Heavy laser towers that can penetrate tank armour are now available, but cannot attack air and are still outranged by artillery.

(Should heavy laser towers be buildable at tech 2? That way you can prepare defences against the tanks before they hit the field, but because there's no air units yet the light laser tower is briefly obsolete. Perhaps light laser towers are individually upgradable to heavy lasers at tech 2, so that even though they're available they're superfluous before tanks appear and you still need to build the lights.)

Now there's a reasonably variety of units on the field and all the basic unit relationships have been introduced. Past that you can have the fun weird stuff that allows for people to be creative and require tactical responses as much as specific counters.

There's still room for expansion if needed. Cloaked units, for example, could give another tier of rock-paper-scissors relationships. If you make light laser towers and raider buggies the only units that detect cloaked units then you've wrung a fourth tier of usefulness out of them, without making them any better in any other situation. (Though I suspect that it'd be getting strained at that point).

Vector Carrion

I've been experimenting with vector colouring. Normally I export the lines into Photoshop and then colour them there. Flood fills under a multiply layer make life fairly easy. I've been getting more and more comfortable with Inkscape though and the colouring jobs I'm doing are getting fiddlier and fiddlier. So I tried a thing.

I think I like it. It means I have to do some things differently - I have to delete line sections that I want to be invisible (I used to just hide them behind white shapes). So it's a good idea to keep a source copy of the linework so i don't have to reconstruct it if I decide to make changes. Not an enormous bother.

It suddenly occurs to me that they look like a Pokémon evolutionary line in this picture. Oh dear.

The long pointy arcs of colour are much easier as vectors, which is handy because I found myself doing those a lot. Other shapes are harder - I wanted to tear my hair out putting the highlights on those intestines. The hulk and the titan have more detail than just about anything else I've done though. I wanted to test it with something meaty (no pun intended).

I've also scaled them differently. I used to use a fixed square as my scale guide, fitting everything inside it. This had the odd effect of making people holding their arms above their heads shorter than people standing upright. I'm now going to allow them to have different sizes as appropriate, and scale human figures to each other. Line thickness will stay absolute, so larger creatures will look like they have thinner lines, and all human-size figures will have the same relative line thickness.

Toyed with making another leap to variable line thickness and maybe even abandoning the flat ground-line, but decided against it for now.  For now. Also pondered giving proper hands to people. Again, not yet...


Oh yeah - the leftmost guy is new. He's a carrion zombie. Zombies are pretty boring, but I felt that this theme needed a human-scale something. I may have felt wrong. He was a valuable prototype though. Working out how to do a human-scale ribcage was a big problem and I'm not sure I've got the right answer yet. I used so much colour detail that the lines are obscured anyway.

I'm not sure I'm going to do more Carrion. They're meant to be ancient skeletons slowly re-clothing themselves in flesh. With strange masks. Not sure where else I could go. Differently proportioned figures? Not enthusiastic yet - these are cool on their own.

Diablo 3 boss modifiers

One of my favourite things about Diablo 3 is the boss modifiers and how fun they are. Molten, arcane and frozen are personal design favourites. On the other hand Reflects Damage and Extra Health are yawnworthy. Naturally I have ideas for more modifiers.

Unholy was my first idea. It came from pondering the elemental boss modifiers and how there's (for obvious reasons) no holy modifier. An unholy monster is orbited by a damaging gold/black flame whose size, damage and orbital distance increases with each revolution. (After reaching a maximum size it dissipates and spawns anew).

Things that suck about Reflects Damage include: no visual effect and a lack of interesting decisions when dealing with it. Iron Maiden was my attempt to fix this.

The monster will freeze in place for a couple of seconds (after a short spell FX) and sprout rusty spikes. While frozen it's immune to damage and it responds to attacks with volleys of very damaging spikes. This gives players something to react to and something that can be played around.

I like the metallic theme and naming it after the Diablo 2 curse, but you could also make it frost-themed as a reference to Chilling Armour.

Horde is already in the game of course, but I think it should be applicable to champion packs as well as uniques. On a champion pack, horde means that the pack has 1-2 extra champions in it. On the higher difficulties it's trading a boss ability for extra warm bodies. Sometimes it's fun to fight a larger number of slightly weaker enemies.

Arcane Enchanted is probably my favourite modifier designwise so I wanted to come up with something similar. Corrosive monsters will lob blobs of acid that slowly expand into large puddles of continuous poison damage before evaporating. This limits player movement in a similar way to arcane sentries.

My fix for Extra Health is to make it more interesting than a passive 50% hp boost. When a Returner monster dies, a spell FX plays over its corpse. After a few seconds it's returned to life at 50% hp. This can only happen once per monster. Similar overall effect to extra health, but more interesting to look at. And the first kill gives players a mini-victory to make the fight less of a grind.

The picture says Soul Drinker but I've since decided that Cannibal is a much better name. is a unique-only modifier. The unique sacrifices its own minions one by one, gaining extra size, damage and hp each time. The idea is that against a Cannibal players should prioritise the minions rather than the unique as usual. And allowing the unique to get to full strength should be one of those avoidable "oh shit" moments that makes the game so much fun.

Summoner is a cross between Illusionist and Horde. A Summoner monster does not spawn with any minions. Instead it summons a pack of spectral minions. The summoner will continue to summon minions every now and then, so players will have to fight through a constantly regenerating meat shield. You'll have to kill more minions in total than a horde, but fewer at a time.

Ruffians

At the sketch stage these were a pirate with a cutlass. After the lines were vectored it looked just like he was pulling the blade out from under his coat and I thought that was interesting enough to become the focus of the figure.

If you're pulling a weapon out of your coat, then you were hiding it. Why were you hiding it? Because you're not meant to have it. Who wears long coats and conceals weapons? City toughs! And so Mr Corsair becomes Mr Ruffian and the cutlass became improvised bludgeons.

The idea really cemented itself when I gave #2 that crazy hair. That's when I realised the OTT japanese gangster look was the way to go. #2 has it best with his bare chest and snazzy coat lining, but #3's tied trousers are pretty cute too. I think #1 looks too much like a wizard with that beard and the strange ruff - I'd hoped that the colouring would bring him more on-theme. Even tried going back to the lines to turn the ruff into a scarf, but it wasn't happening. Shame. The lead pipe is my favourite weapon though.

Speaking of which, I like the weapon variety. All things that a good leg-breaker might be carrying.Crowbar obviously coloured after Mr Freeman's, and a disquieting spatter-mark on the truncheon. And it's nifty how that little loop turns a baseball bat into a truncheon - though ribbing the handle helps make it obvious.

Modular divisions: Head, collar, belt, arms, weapon.

The colours aren't terrible, but only #2 feels right. Maybe if I had others so I could make it obvious that they're wearing gang colours? I'm missing a trick here. Not going to dwell. Plenty of time to come back to it if I have an idea.

Swamp Hunters

They hunt swamps? I don't have a clear identity for these guys. They're a revamp of a last-gen figure I'd labelled as a skull-clan archer (#1's head on #2's body is almost the original). They feel like outdoorsmen or survivalists.

Bows are awkward because they put a lot of lines across the torso. This limits the detail that can go on the figure's clothing before it becomes cluttered. Also you really ought to give archers a quiver, which you might notice I failed to do here. I don't have a good justification, I just couldn't find a neat place to hang one.

#1's has kneepads because I liked how they made his boots femur-shaped. That's not a great reason, but it is the reason. When I coloured him I was thinking "chicken".

#2 I consciously dressed up in natural materials, then gave him the compound bow to mess with that. I like his little mantle.

#3 got away from me. He still seems like he needs something more interesting than just trousers. I tried a hanging sash, flowing cloak or loincloth but it didn't stick. And the colouring stage wasn't much easier. I repainted that sash so many times... I wanted the rest of his clothes to be neutral, naturalistic colours so the sash had to be his point of interest. Nothing seemed to work right though. The West Ham-coloured pattern is ok I guess. Maybe I should have tried to give him a better gimmick with the linework.

In contrast to a lot of my recent characters, there's barely any shading detail on these. And I'm okay with that. They didn't need it.

I spent too long writing this and now my tea's cold.

Carrion Hulk

This is a carrion hulk, an attempt at making non-generic undead. Ribcages and facelessness are good visual foci. Especially given how my normal figures don't have mouths - I can go with the flow rather than against it and then have the ribs as surrogate teeth.

This guy is either the corpse of a giant, or perhaps a monstrous product of necroscientific grafting. The silhouette was inspired by some concept art for Shadow Of The Colossus. I felt really good about the sketch and was genuinely excited to get it finished. It needed some tweaking of course. The legs were originally stick-figure but it looked too much like a person wearing a zombie torso (which isn't a bad idea for a future drawing...) and giving them bulk also gave me room for more muscle detail.

When it came to colouring I was thinking about Shingeki no Kyojin and its giants with their "half-baked" biology. I don't have the chops to match that level of anatomical accuracy, but it was an important inspiration.

I think my colours need to be redone. There's no area on this figure that doesn't have detail shading. That's not necessarily bad, but to keep it in the right style I need to be careful to keep it all sharply defined. The back is looking good (though I should have used more bone-colour instead of light flesh for the ribs coming off the spine). The chest ribs though are far too messy - you can tell that's where I started. By the time I got to the hands and feet I had a much better idea of how to achieve the look I wanted.

The fingers on the right hand are too small. I made a halfhearted effort at redoing the hand to be splayed against the ground, but didn't meet any success. In the meantime I can just about convince myself that they're dug into the ground, or curled up out of view, but honestly I need to man up and fix them.

Still I'm proud of this. It's the most complicated thing I've tried for a while and it turned out better than I'd hoped. Go me.

Banshee and Bittervile

This is a banshee, because I was thinking about undead a lot. Sadly she's pretty generic. Still looking for that hook.

I feel bad about the low-cut gown. I think that was a mistake. It looks pretty classless. At least I didn't use the shading layer to define breasts. I want her to be ethereal flowing spirit, so I'm not looking to emphasise any human features. It's not immediately apparent when viewed on her own, but compared to human figures in this style she has circular "creature" eyes and actually has a mouth.

The mouth has a lot more shading detail then normal. It really needed the teeth to sell itself, but defining them with a line seemed too clumsy. However, since I ended up using a dark purple to outline them, I might redo it with lines when I fix the neckline.

My slacker approach to lightning was deliberate this time, because I wanted her to look ethereal. I'm not sure it's the best way to accomplish that, but it seems to work alright.

Now down here we have a bittervile. That's him on the top left. I like those colours; necrotic, ghosty and pepperminty.. Top right is a recolour I did because I wanted to see what it looked like in fire. The answer is "boring". The other two are just me playing around. Flamey/energy things are the easiest to recolour. Something about those flowing pointy shapes begs to be hue-shifted. Same happened to the werewolf with his jaggy fur.

Bittervile is a good name. If I'm going to have the convention that a *-vile is an elemental creature with a skeleton, then bitter is nine times more fun than "necro-" or "morti-"as a prefix.

The linework is pretty simple but I feel like there's a good energy in the twisting flames. The spinal column's unconvincing; I think the perpendicular lines should have been slightly curved. The skull's weird shape I'm ok with as it's meant to be a spirit rather than a physical skull. Those teeth are wrong though. I got confused and arrayed the lines rather than the teeth themselves. Silly me.