I want to share the progress report for Project Burner from the month of March, 2022. Project Burner is an open source, print and play, science fiction tabletop game. I am the lead developer, but the wider community is always encouraged to participate in content creation or constructive criticism. My goal is to make a robust system of mechanics to be the foundation for the table top game, with enough content on eventual release to whet the appetite of the audience. After release additional content may be developed and distributed. This month saw the development of four core systems for the game, Movement & the Action System, Combat Abilities, Health Systems, and the Armor System.
Movement and the Action System
The game is based on a grid, which right now is being designed with one by one inch squares, just because they are a convenient unit compared to one centimeter or one meter squares. Characters are allowed to move a number of cardinally adjacent tiles, equal or less than their speed. This is considered a movement action, which is one type of standard action. Other standard actions include most abilities, and some items. Other items are classed as free actions, alongside some abilities. The last class of actions are interrupt actions, which must be prepared during a character's turn, but may then be used at any time when the actions conditions are fulfilled. A player has access to two standard actions, one free action, and the ability to ready one interrupt action during each of their turns.
Combat Abilities
Actions the player can take are based on cards they play from their hand. Most often this is in the form of a combat abilities. Each ability is designed to have a degree of utility so that an early game ability will remain useful throughout the entirety of the game. Most combat abilities deal damage to enemy characters, but some have additional effects, such as applying status conditions or Damage over Time effects. Positive status conditions are Buffs, while negative status conditions are Debuffs. The player also has access to healing abilities to keep the party health up, which flows into the next to systems, those being the health systems.
Health Systems
To avoid being killed by a single powerful attack, the players and even some particularly tenacious monsters have health segmented into two pools with a hard threshold separating them. The first pool of health is shield integrity, which represents how much damage the energy shield can still absorb. Damaging moves deplete the shield, and when it has zero shield integrity, it becomes critical. At this point the shield could fail upon taking any amount of further damage. This is the hard threshold, since any damage which would reduce the shield integrity to zero or lower, instead reduces it to zero, and causes the critical shield integrity status effect. Each time damage is taken a dice roll determines if the shield fails, and when it does, physical health begins to deplete. When physical health reaches zero, the player is then met by another Threshold, the Death's Door status effect which prevents the first instance of damage which would bring the player to zero or lower physical health. At this point any point of damage may be lethal, with a dice roll determining whether the player dies. Thankfully damage can be greatly reduced with the next system.
Armor System
Project Burner employs a simple armor system which reduces incoming damage by subtracting the characters armor value from the initial damage value. The remaining damage, it it is a positive number, is then applied to the character, first to the energy shield if it is online, then to physical health if the shield has been lost. There is counter-play to heavily armored targets, in the form of weapons and abilities that ignore armor, certain abilities which scale with the enemies armor, or Damage over Time effects, which are not reduced by armor value. This is done both for balance reasons, and to encourage dynamic problem solving when coming up against different kinds of enemies.
On the artistic Front, a few pieces of content art have been developed as featured above, but more excitingly, I have the preliminary design for small paper devices which can be used to keep track of damage over time effects. These damage wheels or spinners cut down on bookkeeping and can allow for characters to be afflicted by several DoTs simultaneously. The three Main DoTs the game features will be ACID, (Electrical) SHOCK, and FIRE. With the FIRE icon being featured in the example image below.
As far as other artistic developments, I have the rough draft for what the card layout will be, trying to elegantly communicate all the necessary information while still looking organized, and more importantly readable. The image has been scaled down quite a bit to fit into a blog post, so the resolution and image quality is not representative of the actual card templates. Mostly this is to showcase the layout, as well as the preliminary color palate for the different types of cards.
For a more detailed account of the Project Burner development process, I have been making posts in two other communities. Videos about the development process have been posted in the DND and Tabletop Community, and other art assets and general information have been posted in the dedicated Project Burner Community.
Here are also the links for the development videos which have been uploaded to 3speak:
Action System
Abilities
Health Systems
Armor Systems