Ancient 198X

Short one for tonight. Might expound on this all when Uncle Sam isn't carting me around.

Here are a few development shots from the early days of Firelock 198X. It was, then, essentially a tabletop port of Zachtronics' Mobius Front '83 (a game that continues to live rent-free in my head). That is, it was a game about hexes, HP, and completely deterministic, non-random combat with a defender's advantage. The whole thing fit into four pages (army lists notwithstanding).

Federal units. The dark green is forests; yellow a deployment zone; light green, plains; blue water; gray fortified buildings and orange mountains. I'm not sure what software I used to make the map. Notice: a reference token (the Soviet rifle team) imported directly from Mobius Front '83.

Every Federal unit that then existed- unnamed and only vaguely defined. These were tiny ink drawings, digitally colorized. For a while I used MS Paint for TTS standees instead; but this old art pipeline has been resurrected for the new printable standees.

No unit depicted here survived without modifications. Many weapon variants of vehicles swapped hulls or armaments. ERA, which was once liberally plastered on every heavy Federal vehicle, became the calling card of the Tusker-GM. Some details were different: the Tuskers (then simply "MBT") were pike-nosed, like IS-2s.

The one and only lupar ever drawn at this stage of the game. Even now the features of the chasseur were basically there, although they wore more of a jumpsuit rolled up at the ankles. I never drew a Santi or Rygo for this stage of the game; I wasn't even sure what they'd look like or what they'd be good at. The lupar seemed obvious as an adversary faction to the Federals because they were already very different: I could create opposites, and then play off of those laterally for other factions.

An abortive trace-over of the Soviet rifle team token from MF83. This was the foundation of the standee artstyle I use now (although it obviously became more hyperdeformed to fit into more square allotted spaces). Halfway through I already gave up on it: it was clear that at the scale of the game (32x32 hex boards- those are some pretty small hexes on a normal table) these details would be totally illegible.

What really killed this incarnation of the game was detail. Simply put, Firelock is about the fantasy: you play it, as opposed to, say, Team Yankee or A Fistful of TOWs, because you want to coordinate platoon or company-scale attacks by werewolves, cowboy motostrelki, man-machines or chivalric gunships instead of generic historical lists.

The game had to tie into the lore and art: you had to feel like your troops were really special. But in this chesslike, MF83-esque version, your troops were microscopic tokens on a 32x32 hex board, and the difference between chasseurs and states-grenadiers boiled down to one having +1 HP and an extra move hex. That felt lame; it was dodging what I felt like was the game's greatest strength. Also, in a game about real armies, you can simplistically represent units and their mechanics, since the real thing will always exist as a detailed reference. In a fantasy game, you have to do a better job of representing and communicating what a unit is and what it does.

Reducing the number of hexes (and units) to increase their sizes made the game dumber and less interesting: tactics revolved around massed formations of many units, infantry in particular being essentially a geometry game where you tried to maximize the number of your own units in contact with an individual enemy. Ultimately I decided that basing the game on hexes to begin with, with these tokens and chits, was a terrible idea. Making each unit more important by increasing its size, detail, and most importantly its mechanical complexity (the ability to freely move about on the table, use complex terrain, fight in close combat, etc.) immediately improved play.

There's a timeline where I ended up committing to finishing this ancient version of the game. I think I would have wrapped it up within a year and quietly moved onto other vocational projects. It would have been simple, watertight, and relatively uninteresting. Better by far is the path it's on now.

Not all of it is gone. A lot of the unit balance and scale assumptions are preserved: the infantry-vehicle-rotorcraft interplay derives from it, as does the basic strengths and weaknesses of each faction.