Skip to main content

Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
TagsGame Engines
(+1)

Downtimes are essentially text-based scenes (though there can be “dioramas” with all your mechs and pilots in a static scene as a background) where you can go through conversations, narrative sections, and do repairs and build changes.

We don’t currently have dice rolls/pilot triggers because most of their juice in tabletop comes from human flexibility and ability to make them interesting — straight percentage-based choices with shallow mechanical juice to back them up isn’t a good addition to a visual novel engine, according to my game designer eyes. Especially with such a ready save/load system available.

But there is support for player choices ticking clocks, and triggering various Twine-y narrative tracks based on persistent module state. So narrative choices and stuff happening on the combat layer can be checked and reacted to by the module creator in whatever way they’d like. I’d like to also add easy support for discrete mechanical Reserves to gain and expend, but haven’t had the opportunity yet.

NPC capability is what you already see in the combat editor, which is to say there’s limited control the mapmaker has to tell them what to do (“stay in this zone”) but the AI controlling all the different abilities is too unwieldy to give predictable personalities beyond those defined by the gear they hold.