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A jam submission

TechnicalsView project page

A Game About Mechs
Submitted by loadbearingsnitch — 1 hour, 20 minutes before the deadline
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Technicals's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Does the game seem fun to play?#154.2224.222
Did it make good use of the Havoc Engine?#154.1114.111
Overall#154.0374.037
Did it build on the Havoc Engine and add interesting stuff?#173.7783.778

Ranked from 9 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Jam Host(+1)

#1 Industrial Sabotage Fan is my favourite piece of art for this jam. An icon. The Raid generation tables are brief but meaty, just ideal. This is a rare game that feels good for printing at the library, it's very efficiently laid out, but if there's one thing I would wish for: if you were willing to spread it out a bit with some more art (from field manuals or otherwise) I think it could be an especially pleasant reading experience. 

Thank you for making something with the Havoc Engine!

- Jim

Submitted(+1)

Seems like a great game to just pick up and play with zero preparation. I'm going to add to the chorus and say the tables are awesome (I hope I roll cheesemonger!) I like the tonal variation, both fictionally and mechanically, provided by the contrast between human scale and mech scale. You do a great job of concisely communicating your vision of what a play session looks like. The verbs on your equipment are very concrete and straightforward, which I think is the right choice here. And your adversaries have so much character in a small package. Really cool!

Submitted(+1)

I really like the Partisan/Mech roll tables. The #1 industrial sabotage fan doodle is great. I was working up a system for rolling up random demons for a different game jam, and I feel like it'll be heavily inspired by this system. I have some questions from my first read:

  1. Is the objective system similar to the base Havoc Engine, where you can choose a bunch of different places to allocate your successes and narrate what you're doing based on those, or if you pick an action and you can roll toward it and allocate successes to that one objective only
  2. When you repair your mech, the way I read it is the first success goes to the roll itself and then every success after that adds 1 point of steel back? And then once you've done that, you can't do it again until the next mission? 
  3. What is Flesh? I see that when you advance in your optional rules, you gain 1 flesh, but I'm not sure what it does. 

I really like how you built the random table for objectives & complications and then added the difficulty level mechanic on top. My theoretical first raid in this system is:

  1. I'm approaching via the Perimeter Wall
  2. I need to destroy a Data Center
  3. I need to Sabotage a factory
  4. If I can steal supplies while I'm at it, it will help the resistance effort
  5. The Enemy is on High Alert

Other random pieces of feedback in no particular order:

  • I think expanding the partisan skill system would be cool. I'm immediately picturing something where each player rolls 2-3 times (or maybe rolls 2 and picks 1). If they end up with a duplicate, maybe they can choose to reroll or add another die each time they use that skill. That will allow for some more variability and let them add their bonuses a little more often. 
  • In conjunction with the point above, I think adding more skills would offer a little bit more variety. I see a reference for rolling to restore a lost wound, but the best skill I see would be repair, which doesn't feel right to me.  
  • On the note above, I see the reference to restoring a wound, but I don't see any other discussion on it. I do see how you fix the mech though, so it feels like maybe that could be added to be more clear in the Player Stats section. 
  • Your coordination pot feels like a neat mechanic and helps to reinforce the theme of acts of resistance inspiring further acts of resistance. 
  • You seem to refer to the Partisan skills with different language in different spots. My understanding is that a player declares an action, if a specific skill applies, they get a +1d to the roll. However there are instances where you refer to specific actions or checks, where I think you mean skills. The Steal Suppplies Objective refers to rolling more than five successes on Scavenge Checks, when I think it means roll more than 5 successes while using your Scrounging  skill. I think cleaning that up a little bit would help learn the system more quickly. 

Great submission!

Developer(+1)

Thanks for all the feedback! I definitely rushed a bit at the end to get it in by the deadline and clarity suffered a good deal in places. To answer your questions:

1. The first one, I intended players to have the freedom to allocated their successes as they like and narrate around that as in the base engine, but I don't make that explicit anywhere so I may add some text to that effect.

2. Yes, your interpretation of the repair mechanic is completely correct.

3. Another symptom of my shoddy editing, Flesh was the original name for wounds but changed it to be more on theme. Looks like I missed it in the advancement section, thanks for catching that!

I see your point on the skills system and character variety. I think my initial design instincts were towards minimalism in character mechanics, but as this isn't really a game where your character can suddenly die and you need to be able to whip a new one up as fast as possible, there's not much to lose by adding a bit more depth there.

Also I can't really take credit for the Coordination mechanic, that's pretty much entirely ripped from Havoc Brigade with only slight modification to tailor it to the context of this game. 

I'll definitely need to take another pass at this down the line and you've given me some great notes to work on, appreciate it!

Submitted(+1)

Reread it today - really like the heath robinson approach to mechs etc and the whole thing is full of energy - looking forward to playing it.

Submitted(+1)

Enjoyed reading through this one a lot. The random tables for mech generation were very fun and evocative, reinforcing the themes AND providing a fun mechanical layer. I immediately want to steal them for a hypothetical higher-crunch version I will now fantasise about writing for six months without doing anything. Also WTYP AND Blood Work recs? This guy knows ball.

Developer

Steal away! A higher-crunch version of that system sounds cool and I'd love to see what you come up with!