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Prototype Spotlight: "CRSH"

Added 2018-12-18 13:30:01 +0000 UTC

We all knew society would break. The way things were going, how could it not? But the end was so much quieter than we expected, gradual...

When JayEmBosch from ATypicalFaux reached out via the Paperize Discord to report some issues with the new version, I had no idea how prepared he was to make serious use of the tool! A few days later, I had the bugs squashed (quietly releasing versions 5.1 and 5.1.1) and Jay had 102 cards worth of PDF. He shared one of the pages with me, and I just had to share it with the patrons.

About the Game

Alliances were formed and broken, battle lines were drawn without anyone knowing. The centers of political power grew, contracted, and morphed behind closed doors, and we realized far too late that it was never as simple as the “haves” and the “have-nots”...

I asked for some more information about the game itself: I'm a sucker for the cyberpunk esthetic! But more than that, just looking at it you can tell it is inspired. In Jay's words:

CRSH is an asymmetrical engine-building game set in a cyberpunk dystopia on the edge of crumbling, where players take on the roles of various power players within the megacity using their unique skills and abilities to carve a path to control, power, and fulfilling their unique Hidden Agendas. Over several rounds, players will upgrade their engines, build their infrastructure, manipulate Citizens from six different Social Classes across the megacity’s various Districts of different Economic Classes, produce and sell Contraband to various Citizens, tweak the Citizens’ various Qualities of Life, wage open war in the streets, address different social crises or Events to try and bend the outcomes to their favor, use unique Character Cards for their special actions or recruit them to the player’s cause, increasing their resources available in one of four types, and more. Utilizing a unique Focus Cube system to expand the horizons of traditional Action Point Allowance systems, the game provides a broad decision space, highly variable setup, and many paths to victory as players struggle for Control Points, which can be spent for more powerful in-game effects, or saved to be added to their Victory Points at the end of the game.

You had me at "asymmetrical engine-building"...

On Paperize

Of course, I also had to ask him about his experience with Paperize itself:

As someone who isn’t a graphic designer, I realized that creating individual cards would be a lot of work, then I found Paperize. I knew I could make the graphical elements used in each card, and with Paperize I could easily join them all together into a printable deck using the spreadsheet I already had for the cards and a little time setting up the template. It was so much faster and easier, and it allowed me to get back to building the rest of my prototype!

This. So much this. Paperize has a long way to go before it's "feature complete", but Jay has proven that it is ready to start shouldering some of the prototyping load.

How did he actually assemble this prototype? Simple!

7 dynamic layers. 1 for portrait. 1 for the colored banner above portrait (which will be where their name goes). That color matches another dynamic layer for the left-hand side icon and color, which is the character's economic class (G = Grounded, B = Buffer, S = Strato). 4th layer for the resource icons and colors on top. 5th for skill icons and colors on bottom. 6th for the top half of the Citizen Meeples and their colors on the right-hand side, and 7th for the bottom half of the Citizen Meeples.

...for some definition of "simple", anyway. Glad I built that template editor!

Piqued Your Interest?

Jay says the game isn't ready for playtesting yet, but feel free to email him (atypicalfaux@gmail.com) if you'd like to learn more.

Leave a comment if you'd like to see more of this kind of post, and get in touch if you've got a design that's coming together better with Paperize!

The ambitions of those who wanted to control more, or simply take away that control from others, would become the driving momentum for those few citizens not resigned to our bleak fate, dedicated instead to reshaping our failing world into one that works for them, and them alone.