Infinite Dark - Design Blog 1 - The Three-Dimensional Battlespace

My starting place for a design is always visual.  I try to imagine the cinematic version of what I'm trying to capture on the tabletop.

Tabletop wargames are necessarily cerebral affairs.  For all that we can make miniatures and terrain help immerse us, we aren't all Crystal Brush-level painters and don't all have the time to do more than yoghurt pot buildings and book pile hills.  So I try to write a game that is as immersive and imagination-inspiring as possible by trying to paint the pictures (in my head) of what I want the game to look like.

With Infinite Dark this is especially challenging.  There are so many great starship settings out there, but most of them leave something to be desired.  This is partly because they abuse the physics of space travel, but also because they tend to essentially treat space as two-dimensional plane, rather than a three-dimensional one.

The setting for Infinite Dark is only four centuries hence.  This is intentional.  The idea is to make it far enough into the future that we could conceivably have space-folding superluminal travel without relativistic effects, but not so far that science has become hand-waving magic that does whatever we want.  In design terms, a key part of what I want to set Infinite Dark apart from other spaceship games is for players to face some of the dilemmas, challenges and opportunities that the three-dimensional Newtonian universe presents.  I don't want it to be another "Age of Sail IN SPAAAAAACE" game.

However...

There are very good reasons why designers of the past, who have wrestled with the same aspirations, have abandoned them in favour of the 2d-place approach.  And these two reasons boil down to the fact that 3d mechanics have been complicated to include and have added next to nothing to the player's experience.

Because something I left out of my list of priorities in my last blog is that Infinite Dark does need to be fun.  I can indulge my intellectual pretensions all I like but, at the end of the day, people need to want to spend money to buy the game and, then, spend time to play it.  As a game designer, I like money, but I like people playing my game more than I like money, despite the fact that battle reports don't feed my children.

So...

Fortunately, I do have a little bit of form when it comes to 3-dimensional battlespaces, because the aircraft rules in Horizon Wars did exactly this.  However, it also needs to be acknowledged that a lot of people don't include aircraft in their battles, because the rules are complicated (they aren't, guys, really, but they are more complicated than the rules for non-aircraft elements, obviously).

So, just as I took the d12 mechanics in Horizon Wars and turned them up to 11 for Zero Dark, so I plan to take the 3-dimensional mechanics of Horizon Wars and turn them up to 11 for Infinite Dark.

There are a lot of ways to do this, if you want to get into fancy stands or stacking cup arrangements.  But suffice to say - I don't.  The principle of ensuring players have to spend as little money as possible on the game, means that such things are anathema to me if I can possibly avoid them.  So, for the purposes of playtesting, my starting point is dice (it's almost always dice - we all have loads, they are cheap, accessible and not copyright).

I should admit that there's a good chance that the 3-dimensional battlespace will be a something I have to murder eventually.  But I don't want to - not because it's a darling, though.  The idea of "murder your darlings" is attributed to William Faulkner although, as usual, it's more complicated than that.  Essentially it means that, as an artist, we often create something (a passage of writing, a piece of art or a wargames mechanic) that fills us, the creators, with glee and delight but which, seen objectively, isn't right for what we're trying to do.  So it needs to be killed.

In this case, I see the 3-dimensional battlespace as an important contributor to making Infinite Dark stand out in the marketplace.  Currently, it lacks a mechanic that fills me with glee and delight and if I kill it, it will be because I never found a solution that I felt made the game more fun for its existence.

If you have any bright ideas, feel free to share them.  Next month, we'll be looking at manoeuvre - another part of spaceship combat I think is vital - and how to do Newtonian physics on the tabletop.