October Surprise (i updated)

I forgot to do a recap post for last month, though it wasn’t an especially productive one. I got a mostly finished Tabletop Sim version of Critical Heaven put together for testing, then proceeded to not do much testing. I had a few requests to use a hex map, which I honestly do like parts of but hope that the turning restriction doesn’t trip the pace of the game up. I’ve yet to put skills to the Tactics Cards, but the individual girls’ skills are there to test and once I’m satisfied with that I’ll slap that last layer of complexity on top of it all and hope it doesn’t break.

My goal is basically to keep the game fast paced and simple, but ideally with enough meat there for people to have fun with team compositions and deck builds. As with Irrgarten (god, remember that? I should finish that too), I’m doing the tabletop approach so I can put something out there while I struggle to absorb rudimentary coding lessons. That and I like the idea of a mecha musume tactics game with ‘feelies’ and I swear I don’t mean that in a bad way. (Ideally it would be cool to have miniatures, even/especially customizable ones for people to personalize squadrons with.) I plan on adding some more static pages to the site as more game stuff is presentable, so keep an eye out for that.

To recap, Critical Heaven is a short-session strategy battle game featuring Sprites, cute and powerful beings attached to AirFrames who battle for air superiority and claim to the land and resources below it. It’s inspired by the art trends of humanizing machines and programs as well as some of the weird, nichey tactical RPGs I’ve enjoyed. (Yggdra Union and Rondo of Swords were particularly big influences in how to work ‘action’ and ‘flow’ into a turn based battle.)

Since my posting’s gotten so erratic as to distrupt the monthly recap format, I’m just going to batch upload some of my recent works, stopping short of the Slayers Artober I’m participating in since that should be enough images to be a thing in its own right.