Infinite Dark Design Blog 7 - New Thoughts

To help better inform my thinking for this game, I've been hanging out on the Starship Miniatures Gaming FB group, getting a sense of the ships people play with, the games they favour and all sort of other little details.  For example, I've been fascinated by the range of different bases you see on starship miniatures, and the different approaches to the use of dice, counters and "terrain" - space stations, satellites, planets and asteroids.

Some of my early design assumptions for Infinite Dark have been challenged by this, taking me back to my drawing board.

My thinking has also been challenged by my own work on Zero Dark.  Deciding to become my own graphic designer, with no experience, qualifications or training (and, I hasten to add, a full awareness of the arrogance implicit in believing I could teach myself to be a graphic designer) has also given me some interesting perspective on what can be done with clever graphic design (not by me, yet, I hasten to add - I've been looking at what better designers have been achieving in a range of games and other products, to learn from experts) without it needing to be unnecessarily expensive for players.

Unnecessary expense is a real "thing" for me, at Precinct Omega.

I'm all in favour of necessary expenses, like paying creators a fair sum for their work, be they artists, writers, game designers or miniatures manufacturers.  But I often feel like some companies unnecessarily pad games with features or required purchases that add little to the experience, simply because they can.

I try really hard to make sure I eliminate such expenses from my games wherever I can, but thanks to my learning, I'm starting to see ways in which a game can add features without it needing to add cost.

All of this brings me to what I hope will come to be a key feature of Infinite Dark in my next design phase.

A question I was asked by a number of people when I first told them I was working on a spaceship game was whether it would be fleet scale or fighter scale.  My answer was "fleet scale" - first, because that was the scale that interested me; but second, because I didn't see any "hard sci-fi" mileage in fighter scale space combat.

I have had reason to question both of those assumptions lately and I am working on a concept that would allow players to use - broadly - the same set of rules to play both fleet and fighter scale space combat.  Not, obviously, at the same time (although in theory you could have two mats and use one to have a fleet scale battle and the other to resolve any fighter combats that arise in the main battle).  But the whole point of the core Horizon Wars mechanics is that they are scaleable - as I proved in the transition between Horizon Wars and Zero Dark.  So it makes sense to exploit that feature to give players a single game system with both fighter and fleet mechanics in a single set of rules.

These rules aren't "the same".  In particular, the rules for manoeuvrability are quite different.  But they sit on the same framework.

Right now, I'm painting up some ships from the Strato Minis Stratojager fighters and fleets line so I can test these concepts more immersively.  With luck, I'll be able to share an early beta set of rules in around November.