I saw a screenshot of the custom campaign editor's interface and was intrigued.

What will the narrative part of the game look like? Is it a text-based game, like the ones you see in Space Rangers or Pathfinder: Kingmaker, where the core gameplay can look completely different, but then there are these large segments entirely composed of text and dice rolls?
The interface resembles the Twine text-based game website — how similar is it to that? Will there be support for variables, pilot triggers, dice rolls, and the ability to track player choices, their mech build, and its condition?
How customizable are NPCs? Can they be assigned different behaviors (holding position, rushing, bodyguarding another NPC, change tactics on certain turn etc.)?

Or am I daydreaming too much?

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.

Sounds amazing! For me, this is the most anticipated release of the year