Pointless. Madcat sprite from Megamek.

You might know your side charts, but flipping between them every roll is harder than you think…

Last week was finals, this week: A small game to challenge your knowledge of the front/rear hit location charts. That is all for now.

Last week was finals and moving. So, this week: a prototype of Hinges, a puzzle game from my 2D game design class.

Megamek

I’ve played with Megamek a little from time to time and I have to give props to the group for the exceptional depth of features their digital multi-player version of Battletech supports. Not only do they cover all standard pre-Total Warfare rules for ‘mechs, vehicles, and infantry from all eras it also supports a host of advanced rules.

Unfortunately, actually using the program is a little less than pleasant. Battletech has a lot of ins and outs and organizing it all on a screen let alone making it Usable is no small task. As a designer/developer I’m obliged to actually contribute in place of complaining. However, the feature set is so expansive that I’ve been just as tempted to explore interface/interaction ideas in Flash with my own super-duper stripped down prototype. Imagine my surprise when I came across the in-development, Flash based, Battletech-Live.

To my dismay I found the feature set the lone developer is undertaking to actually outstretch Megamek. Beyond that, his development priorities seem to focus on meta-game content, which in my experience is just as time consuming as actual game-play development. The Megamek campaign project MegamekNet already supports a lot of campaign content that doesn’t exist inside of Megamek proper. An advantage of a Flash Battletech would be on focusing on the game play proper, or at least a specific feature set. Seeing as how this is the developer’s attempt number two to get this project going, Battletech-Live seems to have a “second-system effect” fragrance.

Despite my cynicism I am really excited to see two of my favorite two worlds (Flash and Battletech) collide. I’m looking forward to seeing some really interesting things come from Battletech-Live even while I have doubts about the project’s scope. On top of that I’ve also been inspired to get back to work on my own pet projects.

Battletech-Live Development Blog